Hunter Gatherer 21C
Parkinson’s Law
The name of C. Northcote Parkinson is attached to one of the most quoted observations in modern organisational life:
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
First published in The Economist in 1955 and later developed in Parkinson’s Law, the insight was presented with mock-scientific seriousness and dry humour. Yet beneath the satire lay a sharp diagnosis of institutional behaviour: give a task a week and it will take a week; give it a day, and it may well be finished in hours. The work does not necessarily grow because it must; it grows because humans, and especially organisations, expand to occupy the space available.
Parkinson’s deeper target was bureaucracy. Drawing on his expertise as a naval historian of empire, he observed that administrative bodies tend to grow regardless of the amount of real work to be done. Officials create subordinates, not rivals. Committees multiply. PowerPoints (he said documents, of course) circulate. In one of his most famous examples, he noted that the British Admiralty increased in size even as the number of ships declined. The machinery expands even as the mission contracts.
From this flowed his related principles. One is the Law of Triviality, often known as “bikeshedding.” A committee tasked with approving plans for a nuclear reactor may spend mere minutes on the complex engineering because few feel qualified to comment, but debate at great length the cost of a staff bike shed. (These of course were the days when many staff would arrive by bike!). Trivial matters attract disproportionate attention precisely because they are accessible. The small crowds out the significant.
Another observation, sometimes called the Law of Delay, suggests that postponement is often a disguised form of refusal. To delay a decision is to hope the issue will dissolve or be resolved elsewhere. In organisational life, delay becomes both shield and strategy.
Taken together, these laws describe systems that inflate, distract, and defer. They are less about time management than about structural self-preservation. Institutions, left unchecked, grow for their own sake. Meetings lengthen. Processes multiply. Energy shifts from purpose to maintenance.
It’s Monday. You have been warned!
