Don’t Be Attacked By A Distractingly Trivial Duck
If you’re like me, you’ve at one time or another found yourself three layers deep in a hole of an argument that you not only don’t remember the start of, but don’t actually care about. Whether it’s how the toilet paper hangs, how to eat a slice of pizza, or what pattern to mow the lawn with, trivial arguments are one of those features of life that seem universal. We have all found ourselves down that well and can’t stop digging because we have somehow convinced ourselves that there is a right way to stack the clean dishes and we’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. Good news: there is a pretty simple explanation for this phenomenon. Bad news: it is being used against us.
In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson developed Parkinson’s Law Of Triviality. Parkinson was looking to provide commentary on management deliberation so the actual law uses a lot of “inversely proportional” type language but the gist is pretty simple. The more complicated an issue is, the less likely an individual is to understand it, meaning they won’t offer input and hope someone else in the group understands. As soon as a small, easy to understand, trivial issue comes up, everyone has an opinion.
Parkinson uses a town’s finance committee as a model. The Committee meets to approve the building plans for a nuclear plant near their town. Because of the complexity of the plant, nobody has much input to offer so the plans are approved in a few minutes assuming everyone up to that point knew what they were doing.
When it comes time to approve a bike shed for the employees, everyone has an opinion because they can all understand the concept. Everything form the roofing material to the color is debated and approval of the bike shed takes hours. (The law has since come to be known as bike-shedding.) It’s important to point out that it’s not just the simplistic nature of the concept that encourages others to contribute, but also the desire to have your voice heard. Participants want to feel that they have value so if they skip the complicated issue, they will more likely pounce on the trivial. Once the contribution is made, bigger issues are easier to ignore.
The makers of “Battle Chess,” a computer game from the late ‘80s, used this trivial tendency to their advantage when designing their pieces. Knowing the producers always made them fix something, the designers added a duck to the queen piece. It was a simple addition that had nothing to do with the game and would attract anyone’s attention as an obvious point of correction. The producers reviewed the product and the only correction offered was to remove the duck. The duck was a simple and trivial element that made the producers feel valued, and let the rest of the game skate by without comment.
Therein lays the potential danger. Imagine if it wasn’t a chess game but something bigger that was using a trivial element as a smoke screen. Of course, we all want to feel as if we are contributing and participating in the world around us. The problem is, there’s a lot of complicated issues out there and even more people shouting their viewpoint at us and claiming we’re the worst people if we don’t agree. It’s safer to focus on which NFL team to follow than dive into the enormity of climate change. If we are going to intellectually participate in the decisions that shape this world though, we can’t be distracted by the trivial. We can’t be distracted by the quacks, caws, or tweets of any animal.
