Bikeshedding
en.wiktionary.org
en.wiktionary.org
EDIT: I think the US equivalent might be "under the bleachers"?
I don't think starting from the more important issues is always the answer. Assuming that: * the time for discussion is finite * discussions and meetings expand to fill the time they have (meetings expand to fill the time they have)
It follows to me that in many situations it IS good to start with the easy stuff, like the bike shed, to get it out of the way, and then spend the longer period of time all the way to the end on the more significant subject.
But what can one do to prevent investing too much time on the bikeshed? Timeboxing? And what happens if your box is over but no decision is made?
I found it more efficient to first make people familiar with the phenomena and when it happens in a meeting just tell them so. Surprising how well it works on most people.
If you've got an hour-long meeting and 30 minutes in you're talking about the color of a button, reestablish the goal of the meeting — "hey, we're halfway through this meeting and we're still stuck on the button color — maybe we should make a decision now or move on"
I've found that a lot of bikeshedding ends up being uninformed opinions/bias. If there's no evidence one way or the other it always seems more efficient to just pick one path and do it. Flip a coin, do an A/B test.
I worked with a PM who wanted to cut bikeshedding a while back. When some executive vociferously argued that we should do things B way, the PM just asked him to document why it's important in an email and then told him we'd do it.
A week later an email went out with the executive's strongly worded argument why B is important at the top. At the bottom is "we A/B tested, there is no statistically significant difference between A and B. Guess $executive was wrong."
After a few go-rounds of this, bikeshedding was significantly reduced.
Bikeshedding is easy and fun! But having an email go out to everyone a week later proving statistically that you were wrong is less fun.
When we started doing this, we found that the bikeshed discussion would often be a consequence of too many people who didn't really have a stake in the outcome being involved in the decision. It didn't really matter to them which option was chosen, but they felt they had to take a position and/or provide lots of input. So our next step once we'd identified something as a bikeshed would be to say, "okay, who actually needs to make this decision" and defer the decision until those people could form a splinter group and come up with an answer.
The combination of a smaller group and a bit of time to digest the opinions coming out of the initial bikeshed discussion usually meant that this was more productive. Often it came up with a better end solution than any of the ones proposed during the bikeshed.
Only when you have a disagreement about something's relative importance does that not work.
My best suggestion is to either ask "is [answering that question] the primary goal for this meeting?" or remind people how much time is left in the scheduled meeting vs how much material needs review.
Someone has to play the assertive, no nonsense authority. Meetings are ripe for sidebar conversations. It only gets worse with more people, people from different offices/sections/projects, closeness of participants, etc. Whoever is running the meeting needs to ensure that the agenda is the foremost priority. Keep the agenda conversation going while squelching pointless conversation.
Keep a list of tabled topics. Not all sidebar conversation is bad. There are tangentially related topics that need to be addressed as well, but they may not take precedent over what is on the agenda. Those topics can also be written on the board to circle back to if time permits. This has the added bonus of growing the agenda while keeping the time allotted constant.
Understand why people argue and what is needed to make both parties happy. For the longest time, I didn't realize that I was arguing poorly. I knew what my point was and what I wanted to get across. I would listen to their reasons for arguing their side, but I never got to their core beliefs. Sometimes you have to outright ask what will it take to make them change their mind.
An underhanded trick that can be used (but not every time) is to give them a sense of urgency: Thanks for attending this meeting. I know we have a lot to cover, but I have to leave in 45 minutes. If we focus, I know we can hit all of these topics. If certain topics are limping along, give a time check: We need to make a decision. I only have 25 minutes with 3 more topics to go.
This is one of the most critical roles a good manager can play. I've seen a team cut its meeting hours per week in half because the new manager did this well.
When planning for investments in a corporation, major stakeholders who are clueless about important technologies (e.g. which hardware and software platform to choose) spend their time on discussing where the paper clips in office storage room should be procured, because that is a thing that they can understand, and they can show how they care about even the smallest detail.
Probably depends on the crowd. I mentioned this before during a local Python meetup (a few years ago) and I got the same reaction with your "streetlight" metaphor.
It also deals with another matter as a metaphor. It's about doing what's easier but without effect, over what's effective but difficult.
Bikeshedding is about wasting time on non-important decisions.
So there's only slight overlap between the two concepts. The "talk about furniture arrangements while there is a hole on the roof" parent mentions is more apt -- but you can also bikeshed without any more pressing matter present.
The version I've heard is: "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" :)
-Thoreau
My favorite piece is probably 'Plans and Plants', already summarized here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=610761
But first, should we use TAB or SPACEs in the talk page?
Quote: "(If you don't like the way we painted this bikeshed, try bikeshedding.io, or the minimalist shed.bike. Or set up your own? That's the spirit!)"