Organizations devote lengthy discussions to trivial questions while waving through complex decisions in express proceedings. This phenomenon, which C. Northcote Parkinson described in 1957 as the "Law of Triviality," seems absurd at first glance.
It is precisely the important that is dealt with quickly, precisely the incidental that is discussed at length. The classic answer is: organizations are irrational. But this answer is too simple.
The reason lies deeper: organizations can only discuss where the subject is comprehensible to all involved. With a trivial problem like the construction of bicycle shelters, everyone has an opinion. With a highly complex problem like a multi-million-euro reactor, hardly anyone understands what is actually at stake.
This is not a failure or a sign of irrationality. It is a consequence of how organizations must function: they must make decisions even when they do not understand everything. But they also need to demonstrate somewhere that they are functional – that discourse still takes place within them.
Committees Discuss What They Can Understand
Committees do not discuss what is objectively important. They discuss what their members can already have an opinion about.
When it comes to the bicycle shelter, all committee members can join in. The subject is comprehensible to everyone – material, color, location, cost. Everyone has a view, everyone can argue. The discourse has fixed anchor points.
With the decision about a multi-million-euro reactor, this common ground is entirely absent. The complexity is so great that most committee members do not even know which questions are relevant. They have no opinion because they cannot grasp the subject.
This is not a failure of the members but a structural condition: organizations can only communicate where the subject is manageable for their members. This means complex subjects must be simplified.
However, complex systems cannot be fully captured by simple models. The attempt to treat them as if they were transparent and controllable leads to an illusion of control. Where a subject cannot be reduced to a manageable level, the organization resorts to other mechanisms.
Organizations Construct the Pressure They Experience
Complex decisions get made even when the committee cannot truly discuss them. The committee approves a proposal, trusts the experts, follows a recommendation. From the outside, it looks like a deliberate decision – in reality, the committee has placed the decision in a black box and thereby relieved itself.
Yet this phrasing is misleading, for it implies a deliberate agent, a strategic deception. More precisely, the organization observes itself and describes itself as compelled to act. The compulsion does not arise in an objective reality "out there" – the organization constructs it itself.
This construction has multiple dimensions. The temporal dimension: the organization constructs time pressure, an urgency. It distinguishes between "must decide now" and "can still wait" – and this distinction is its own achievement.
At the same time, it constructs its own knowledge boundary: "We cannot know more than we know now." This boundary too is an observational achievement – after all, it could observe differently, invest more time, bring in further expertise.
Here a contradiction becomes apparent: the compulsion is real for the organization and at the same time constructed by the organization. The organization experiences itself as compelled to act – and this experienced compulsion is precisely what makes the decision possible in the first place. Without this self-description, the organization would be incapable of action.
This is rational given the conditions. The organization must act even when it does not know what it is doing. Standstill would be worse than a blind waving-through.
But this mechanism has its price: the organization may incur existential risk without being able to fully grasp it at the moment of decision. And it loses something else – the ability to demonstrate discourse.
An organization that only waves things through would experience itself as dysfunctional. It needs spaces in which it becomes visible that discussion is still taking place. And it finds exactly these spaces – with trivial topics.
Trivial Discussions Prove the Organization Still Works
Bikeshedding is not a waste of time but a demonstration that discourse still functions in the organization. While the reactor question is waved through, the discussion about the bicycle shelter runs its course. The details multiply: materials, colors, location, budget. Committee members can argue, develop positions, play out conflicts.
Internally, it shows: "Here things are discussed thoroughly. Here details matter. Here opinions are heard." Precisely because trivial questions are communicable, they can provide this proof. They become the place where the organization demonstrates its capacity for discourse – and thereby reassures itself that it is still functional.
But this demonstration also has a downside: it conceals something. While the organization talks about bicycle shelters, it becomes invisible that for complex decisions, it is not even capable of discussing.
Structural Patterns Become Strategically Usable
This structural mechanism is not merely an emergent outcome – it also becomes strategically usable, though without requiring a conspiracy. Organizational members observe what gets discussed at length and what does not.
They notice: trivial questions generate discourse. Complex questions are decided quickly – or they are not brought before the committee at all. This leads to adaptation: whoever wants to push through complex topics presents them in a way that makes them undiscussable.
The techniques are familiar: one conceals a large, complex decision among many small, trivial ones. One constructs time pressure – "This must be decided quickly." One presents only the surface aspects, not the complex implications.
The crucial point: these actors act from their own rationality. They do not experience themselves as manipulators but as rational agents. They have professionally well-founded reasons for their approach. The "rational reasons" they can cite do not conceal the pattern – they are the necessary form in which the pattern can play out.
The Pattern Works Only Because It Conceals Itself
If an actor were to recognize "I am exploiting a systemic logic," the legitimacy of their action would collapse. They could no longer say: "This is professionally urgent," but would have to say: "I am constructing urgency in order to prevent discourse."
This is why the invisibility of the pattern is functional – for the organization and for the actors. The conditions incite the behavior, and the actors cannot but experience themselves as free and rational.
This form of making-invisible is not a deception but a condition of possibility. Complete visibility would lead to incapacity for action. Whoever sees through the pattern while carrying it out becomes entangled in a dilemma: I feel I am exploiting the system, and I am compelled by the system to do so in order to push through my correct opinion.
Consulting Shifts the Concealment Without Resolving It
When the pattern does become visible – for instance through crises or external observers – consulting takes place. Consulting means providing descriptions for the actors that they cannot produce themselves. The organization is confronted with the fact that it systematically renders complexity invisible.
Yet consulting cannot resolve the contradiction, only shift it. The organization must decide: will the invisibility be maintained through a new explanation arising from the actors' own rationality? Or will it be replaced by another form of concealment?
Three mechanisms emerge in practice. Methodization: the organization introduces professional procedures – decision templates, impact assessments, structured escalation processes. The concealment shifts: one can no longer observe "we wave through complex things" but only "we follow our methodology."
The construction of time pressure becomes methodically legitimized – "according to the process, this is a Level 3 decision that must be made within 48 hours." The pattern reproduces itself in formal guise.
Formalization: clear responsibilities, decision-making authority, and governance structures are defined. The new concealment legitimizes through formal position what was previously informal power. Actors can now say: "I am using my formal authority," not: "I am exploiting a systemic logic." The structure sanctions what previously had to be concealed.
New narratives: the organization establishes new self-descriptions – "We are agile now," "We decide based on data," "We have a culture of learning from mistakes." The concealment in this case occurs through reinterpretation.
People no longer discuss bikeshedding patterns but "how we live our agility." The old phenomenon continues, but under the new description it is no longer visible as a problem. Quick decisions are now "agile responsiveness," lengthy discussions about trivia are "thorough stakeholder engagement."
The question is always: what follow-up problems does the solution to the now-visible problem entail?
Bikeshedding Reveals Organizational Rationality, Not Irrationality
Historian and political scientist C. Northcote Parkinson's (1957) observation does not reveal organizational irrationality. It reveals the rationality of an organization that must deal with irresolvable problems.
The organization can discuss trivial questions and thereby demonstrate discursive capacity. It can quickly delegate complex questions and thereby preserve capacity for action. It must reduce complex subjects to manageable dimensions in order to make them decidable at all.
And it must make itself invisible in the process – make invisible the fact that, in its most important decisions, it cannot fully know what it is doing.
Bikeshedding is functional and necessary. The organization needs spaces where it can demonstrate discursive capacity, and mechanisms by which it can remain capable of decision despite not-knowing.
But this functionality has a price. Existential risks accumulate without the organization noticing in the course of action. The construction of urgency enables action – and simultaneously prevents the risk of that action from becoming visible.
The question for organizations is therefore not: How do we combat bikeshedding? The pattern cannot be resolved, only shifted. The question is: How can we maintain our necessary functionality while dealing more consciously with the risks we build up in the process?
This is not a question that can be answered definitively. It is the permanent task that organizations must live with: finding a navigable path between the necessity of deciding and the impossibility of fully knowing what is being decided. Bikeshedding is not the problem – it is a symptom of the fact that organizations must cope with this impossibility every day.