Konubinix' opinionated web of thoughts

Parkinson's Law of Triviality

Fleeting

Law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly or typically

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

it is not necessary to argue about every little feature based simply on the knowledge to do so.

[2021-01-27 Wed 22:25]

Atwood’s duck: A countermeasure is the “duck” technique in corporate programming: a programmer expects his or her corporate office to insist on at least one change on every presentation to show that they’re participating, regardless of the benefits of that change. Consequently, the programmer intentionally adds an element they expect corporate to remove

[2021-01-27 Wed 22:26]

The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn’t, they weren’t adding value.

[2021-01-27 Wed 22:26]

artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen’s animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the “actual” animation. Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, “That looks great. Just one thing: get rid of the duck.”

Notes linking here