The reason your meetings argue about the bike shed and not the reactor
A 1957 satire about a nuclear committee named a bias that quietly eats more of your week than any real crisis does.
C. Northcote Parkinson, the same writer who gave us the law about work expanding to fill the time allotted, ran a smaller and stranger observation in the same 1957 book. He imagined a committee approving a nuclear power plant, and predicted the group would spend almost no time debating the reactor itself and enormous amounts of time debating the design of the staff bicycle shed.
The reasoning holds up under actual scrutiny. Nobody in the room fully understands the reactor, so everybody quietly defers to whoever seems to. But everybody has an opinion about a bike shed — it's cheap, it's visual, it's the kind of thing you can picture without expertise — so everybody wants to weigh in, and the discussion sprawls precisely because it's easy to have an opinion, not because the decision matters. Parkinson's version of the rule: time spent on an agenda item runs in inverse proportion to how much is actually at stake.
Software engineers, who spend an outsized share of their working lives in meetings about naming conventions and trivial formatting choices, picked up the term decades later and it became bikeshedding — the reliable pattern of a team burning an hour on the font while nodding through the actual architecture decision in ninety seconds because nobody in the room felt qualified to argue about it.
The tell is easy to spot once you're looking for it: if a meeting is running long, check whether the thing everyone's fighting over is the thing that's expensive to get wrong, or just the thing that's easy to have an opinion about.