First law of worker entropy
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Conference Call Anatomy™
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The JC’s first law of worker entropy (also known as the “meeting paradox”):
- (i) The probability of a meeting starting on time can never be 100%;
- (ii) As the number of scheduled participants increases, that probability tends to zero.
- (iii) The more participants there are the more retarded the starting time (and content) of the meeting will be.
This is true of any meeting containing more than one person. (A single-person meeting, of course, ought not, in a sensible mind, count, at least since Otto Büchstein asserted its incoherence through his maxim “convenimus ergo es”).
This is because the distribution of arrival times to the meeting is asymmetrically distributed at or past the scheduled start time. No one[1] arrives early, some people arrive late), and experienced meeting participants know of this asymmetric distribution and therefore time their own arrival to the expected functional starting time of they meeting, which in turn further retards that average start time.
See also
References
- ↑ Outside the German speaking countries: Peculiar cultural factors (particularly späteankunftschande and früheankunftfreude are at work here which can skew the calculation, but do not displace the general thrust of the theory.