Parkinson’s law
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The design of organisations and products
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“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.
“For this real or imagined overwork, there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies. He may resign; he may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B; he may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D. There is probably no instance, however, in history, of A choosing any but the third alternative.”
— C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law, 1942
Has the information revolution falsified Parkinson’s law? If not yet, then will it? Or has it supercharged it? Would a thought leader, of failing one of those, a chatbot mind getting in touch to let us know?
In the meantime, Otto Büchstein has his own ideas. The JC’s eighteenth law of worker entropy, also known as Büchstein’s special theory of Parkinson’s Law, states that:
“work does not expand to fit the time available, but the amount of money available.”
Since, as Benjamin Franklin told us, “time is money” this is no more than a restatement of Parkinson’s law: there is a steady relationship —“commercialogical constant” — between the amount of money at stake and the amount of money agents will be able to extract, risk-free, from the principals by convincing them they can help ensure its safe conveyance.
Parkinson’s law of triviality
Parkinson’s law of triviality, also called the “bikeshed effect” states that we spend disproportionate time on trivial matters compared with important issues because we are more comfortable discussing simple, familiar topics with some, but manageable complexity rather than tackling complex or critical ones which may be beyond our abilities.
Say our personal threshold for handling complexity and risk is at level “X”. If we are presented with two tasks, one which is significantly more complicated and risky than X — in Parkinson's example, designing a nuclear power station — and one that is significantly below it — designing a bike shed for nuclear power station workers — we will tend to reduce the complexity of the complicated task towards X, because we don’t really have any choice, but we will also tend to increase the complexity of the simple task towards our threshold. We will, in other words, act like commercial lawyers.
JC has an arcade-game metaphor for this: Qix.
We spend as much might spend hours debating the color and functionality of of a bike shed, while galloping through the budget for a nuclear power plant. It highlights a common inefficiency in decision-making processes, where minor, accessible topics overshadow major, significant ones.