Quote from Wiktionary:
The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson’s Law of Triviality. Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively.
It was popularized in the Berkeley Software Distribution community by Poul-Henning Kamp[1] and has spread from there to the software industry at large.
Bikeshedding - en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding
A lot of problems can be reduced with simple meeting process and moderation:
You can still get bikeshedding even when doing all that, ultimately you need to have a culture where it's ok to say "hey everyone, we're getting away from the agenda - let's get back to the main decision for today, (restate the big question)".
I do the following:
So than we have a conversation map. If we digress now we can always come back a the topic at hand since it was defined.
There should be a moderator. It helps. Oh and maybe speaking times like 5 minutes for a normal proposition.
You can say something like “those are details we can talk about later” so it's not like you're dismissing the ideas themselves. Another thing is reminding people “we need to talk about this at a higher level for a second” to try to pull back to the original course of conversation.
I've heard a lot of people stop meetings mid-conversation and announce "We're getting into the weeds" or "I don't want to get into the weeds".
It lets people know the topic is going off the original train, and is being hijacked to a less relevant course. Just announce it in a non-accusatory way, and ideally people will gravitate back to the point.
If someone pushes for something more off-topic but still mildly relevant, they're usually given command of collecting more details later, either at the end of the meeting or through Slack/email/etc. It's just important to stress the importance of tackling the core issues before getting into more cosmetic issues.
Tanner Chrishop
Aspiring web developer
You need an idea meritocracy like Ray Dalio. ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_wh…
Feelings will be hurt.