You are a PM presenting to a group of stakeholders about a new feature that you are building trying to reduce drop off’s, you believe it’s well thought out and you want your stakeholders to give valubale feedback on it.
In this whole feature there is one place you are getting a first name and last name, everybody instead of focussing on the feature use case, one person starts instead of first name and last name, should we collect only as one field name. Every person pitches with their own inputs on this trivial matter, meeting gets over, you leave without getting any real feedback.
This is a scenario where everyone would have faced one time or another, this is called the bikshedding effect aka Parkison’s Law of triviality
A meeting is called to discuss to setup the below
- Plan for Nuclear Plant – $28 Million
- Plan for bikeshed – $1,000
The time taken for the launchpad will be 5 minutes, while the time taken for bikeshed will be an hour.
The reason for this “it’s too advanced for anyone to really dig into the details, and most of the members don’t know much about the topic in the first place. One member who does is unsure how to explain it to the others. Another member proposes a redesigned proposal, but it seems like such a huge task that the rest of the committee decline to consider it.”
But the bikeshed went longer because everyone has seen one, what roof to have, how big it should be, arguing and spending more time on discussing trivial items, while spennding less time with Nuclear plant.
Law of triviality is an observation about the human tendency to devote a great deal of time to unimportant details while crucial matters go unattended.
Now, let’s go back to our scenario, in a feature implementation there are some parts which are reversible and some are irreversible decision.
Reversible decision: To collect name as single field “Name” of “First Name and Last Name”, this is a reversible decision.
Irreversible decision: If you are building a app and you decide that you want to build a hybrid app, you cant go back to a native app.
The same way for every feature/intiatives that are going to be discussed with stakeholders it’s important to mention the reversible decisions and irreversible decisions. And clearly communicating that you want to spend this meeting to focus on the irreversible decisions to have a productive meeting.
From Jeff Bezos’ Letter to 1997 Shareholders on irreversible (Type 1) vs. reversible (Type 2) decision making:
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.
To avoid meetings about discussing trivial and getting into bikeshedding effect, call out the reversible, irreversible decisions and focus on the irreversible ones.
Read the full archived 1997 shareholder letter here and a good breakdown of Reversible and Irreversible Decisions on the FS Blog.