

Parkinson's Law of Triviality - ultimatedelman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality

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Cogito
My favourite bit, which I had not seen before today, is on the 'duck
technique'. From Wikipedia:

The duck technique in corporate programming is an applied example of
Parkinson's law of triviality: a programmer expects their corporate office to
insist on a change to something (anything at all) on every presentation to
show that they're participating, so a programmer adds an element they expect
corporate to remove on purpose. Quoted from Jeff Atwood's blog, Coding
Horror:[1]

 _This started as a piece of corporate lore at Interplay Entertainment. It was
well known that producers (a game industry position roughly equivalent to
project manager) had to make a change to everything that was done. The
assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn 't, they
weren't adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this
tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for
the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the
queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations,
had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that
it never overlapped the "actual" animation.

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the
queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were
done, he turned to the artist and said, "That looks great. Just one thing: get
rid of the duck."_

[1] [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-
jar...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jargon.html)

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acd
The main Parkinson's law is the adage which states that "work expands so as to
fill the time available for its completion".

That is why we should not have a Mega state.It's just a bunch of state paid
administrative people inventing new work for themselves and new rules for us.

If we are unlucky this Mega state will put new rules from corporate lobbying
groups which is not in the general interest of the public/voters.

~~~
objclxt
...except life is rarely that simple. For example, nearly all countries where
the state delivers healthcare centrally have far lower costs than countries
such as the US, where healthcare is delivered privately. This seems to fly in
the face of your thesis.

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hunvreus
Consulting for large organizations, this is a huge aspect of successfully
managing your relationship with your clients. The duck technique can work, but
moving fast enough to prevent your client from finding trivial things to argue
about is probably a more honest and efficient way to go at it.

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ims
On a related note, Poul-Henning Kamp's 1999 "bikeshed" e-mail to the FreeBSD
list (with his take on Parkinson's Law) is still a good read:
[http://bikeshed.com/](http://bikeshed.com/)

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mikro2nd
Corollary: "Why the Secretary of any organisation is the most powerful person
there."

Think about it. Who sets the agenda? Who prioritises/orders the agenda? Who
writes the minutes?

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the_watcher
I just watched Charlie Wilson's War last night in memory of Philip Seymour
Hoffman. Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrakotos convinced Congress to authorize
$500 million to arm the mujahadeen. Rep. Wilson couldn't get his subcommittee
with an unlimited budget to authorize $1 million for school reconstruction
after the Soviets left. Seems like a pretty good example.

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jbscpa
Parkinson was an optimist.

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mathattack
I've seen this in action at some large telecom companies. Beat the smallest
issues to death, and never get to the bigger ones. I assumed that this was a
way to avoid the bigger issues, as opposed to fixating on that which is easier
understood. I think I was wrong. :-)

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the_cat_kittles
Good example of that on HN: Todo Lists

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mrtriangle
This basically describes the business end of the company I work for.

