Bike-shedding: Why the most trivial decisions derail us
Last month, an aspiring entrepreneur named George called me. He’s launching a line of gluten-free marinades, and he needed help with his labeling. I asked a few questions of background – was he producing and selling the sauce yet? Not really, they just signed up for a shared use kitchen. Did they have a set recipe? Yes, but they were only making 5 containers of marinade at a time.
I thought to myself, “Labeling?? Really? With all the things that need to happen, you’re worried about a label?” Even in support of the label, he needs to design a logo and refine his recipe for mass production. And before that, he needs to test the market’s appetite for his product. Will there even be demand??
He clarified: a lawyer had suggested that he needed a label to reduce his liability. George latched on to that task with single-minded focus. He couldn’t move on to other aspects of business development until he resolved that. Hence the call to me.
As we chatted further, it became clear that he had succumbed to “the law of triviality” (also referred to as bike-shedding): the concept that an organization will devote disproportionate time to trivial matters, while neglecting the more complicated and difficult tasks.
Why is that? Two reasons:
- The trivial tasks are easy to wrap our heads around. We can easily see what needs to be done. For George, the label was a discrete task he could wrap his head around. The other aspects of launching his business had no defined boundaries, and continually evolved. It was harder to focus there.
- With the trivial tasks, most everyone understands the task, and therefore has an opinion about it. George’s lawyer didn’t necessarily know about building a food product business, but he knew about labels and liability, so he focused his energy there.
Jeff Cole, Client Services Specialist at The Carrot Project has seen this many times with the farmers he’s worked with over the last 2 decades. He shared his experience: “Getting everything ‘right’ or ‘in order’ before ‘just doing it’ is an outlook that is based in one of two things: a really bad experience in the past, or lack of self-confidence (or similar). In either case such an attitude gets in the way of success for any start-up. At some level a ‘just get it done’ attitude is required for success. Without that, endless cycles of planning become the result. I’m not say planning isn’t good, because it is. But it’s not the whole picture and it has to done in a way to allow basic risk taking to happen.
Bike shedding is a common experience in many entrepreneurs (including myself!) and it’s difficult to move past it. Here are three tips:
Recognize it. There are few things in life that require singular attention. When it comes to entrepreneurship, there are so many facets of the business to juggle. If you find yourself roadblocked by one issue, ask yourself if the law of triviality is at work.
Evaluate it. If you think you might be bike-shedding, you can ask yourself a few questions to help figure out a path forward:
- Who is driving your agenda?
- Will the choice you’re about to make still matter in a few years?
- Will it result in something irreversible?
- Are there any major issues underpinning this decision?
Like most aspiring entrepreneurs, George solicited advice from many sources. It’s easy to get caught up in chasing everyone’s suggestions. It’s important to recognize the source of the advice and aggregate all the advice into a cohesive plan that works for YOU.
It terms out there were some major issues underpinning this decision – a fear of a lawsuit. But it also revealed the other work that needed to be done in advance of the labeling it – like refining the brand and recipe.
It’s hard to see that this is a trivial issue (at least in this moment of business development) but taking some time to evaluate the situation can help to resolve it.
Timebound it.
The biggest problem with bike-shedding is that it can prevent you from working on the other aspects of your business. If you find yourself singularly focused, limit the amount of time you work on it. For George, if he wanted to spend an hour a day thinking about labeling, that’s fine (though honestly, unnecessary). But make sure you give yourself time to work on the other tasks.
Have you succumbed to bike-shedding? How did you move on? Feel free to drop me a line or comment below.
