Happy Friday,

I'm just old enough now that some things I learned early in my career younger people may not know about. This week's email is about one of those topics and it is called bikeshedding.

The story goes that a committee was reviewing plans for a nuclear power plant and spent a disproportionate amount of time on trivial issues like the color of the bike shed outside. Instead of focusing on the more important issue like the nuclear plant, they were derailed by triviality.

It turns out that this is called Parkinson's Law of Triviality.

You've seen this play out plenty in your career when any discussion is supposed to be about one topic but instead gets stuck on something small that leaves you screaming inside, "Who cares!?"

Now I want to put a slight twist on this issue. The law is about how people focus on what is trivial and easy to grasp. Complex and challenging issues are the ones avoided.

What might happen if you, as a leader pay attention to the moments of bikeshedding as a way to understand general group competency? Undoubtedly some topics will be hard no matter what, but it is my observation that there are a great many more that are routine enough to be trivial, yet are constantly avoided.

One example I see all the time is around product outcomes. People will avoid discussing this in favor of features, colors, words to display, and fonts to use. Yet, without a handle on the outcomes desired from the product, the trivia doesn't mean much.

I look at this as a signal that the practice of working with product outcomes is complicated or hard for the group, and that is where my attention should be. That means my effort moves to bringing product outcomes to the forefront of conversations and redirecting all conversations back to it by saying things like, "If there isn't a font that will nudge us to our outcome, you have my permission to pick."

Statements like this work well to stop a lot of bikeshedding while simultaneously delegating away trivia.

I'm in the process of writing an article that takes a look at this topic from a deeper level and what you can do as a leader to avoid getting trapped building bike sheds, but you'll have to wait a bit longer.

Sincerely,

Ryan