The Human Factors of Teams: Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
In 1955, Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a British naval historian, wrote a pithy article for the Economist where he detailed his observations of the seemingly ever-expanding bureaucratic tendency to hire more people to do the same amount of work. He observed that, if given the chance, people tend to use as much space, time, or budget as they have been allocated, regardless of whether or not those resources were fully required.
Human Factors Perspective
Though originally an observation on how people tend to create needless work for each other, Parkinson’s Law has been adopted in many disciplines as a way to describe our often inability to efficiently manage our prediction of resource requirements. To think of it another way, consider the humorous Stock–Sanford corollary to Parkinson’s law which simply states:
If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.
And I would be remiss to not include my personal favorite, a common saying we hear within the Green Beret community:
There ain’t no minute like the last.
In other words, work is often elastic in its demands on time and if we never consider efficient constraints, we will inevitably waste finite resources such as time, money, and even opportunities.
In the design world, constraints are commonly applied to projects to serve as guard rails. These design constraints force deeper thought and focus, which usually leads to a more efficient and creative solution.
Team Perspective
Similar constraints can be applied to teams, only they are commonly called standards. At Horizon Performance, we have found that if a coach does not define his standards, then they will almost certainly be defined by someone else. This often leads to inefficiencies and frustration.
Defining standards is only part of the process. Standards must be constrained by time, otherwise they will not be met within a reasonable amount of time. For example, we have observed coaches who defined simple team standards such as: maintain a 3.0 GPA, keep the locker room clean, or sit in the first three rows of class. However by not setting a time constraint to those standards, coaches found a lack of compliance, often because players felt like they had a lot of time to eventually get around to meeting the standards.
So coaches, if you want to increase the efficiency of your team and prevent Parkinson’s Law from taking hold, consider defining your standards in a measurable and timely way, or as Peter Drucker said:
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
