Law of Triviality

The law of triviality is an argument set out by the naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson in 1957, holding that people within an organization tend to give disproportionate time and attention to trivial matters while comparatively complex or important matters go undiscussed. Parkinson illustrated the point with a fictional committee reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant that spent most of its meeting debating the material for an on site bicycle shed while barely engaging with the far more complex reactor design itself. The example gave rise to the terms bicycle shed effect and bikeshedding, which entered common use in software engineering after Danish developer Poul-Henning Kamp popularized them within the Berkeley Software Distribution community in 1999, and the law of triviality is now applied broadly across organizational and group decision making contexts beyond its original example. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/