Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress
When it comes to socio-economic development, there are many that argue that the GCC is at least half a century behind more developed Western nations, especially given the copious ‘can’ amounts of bureaucratic baryogenesis. So seeking insight from a 50-year-old law on productivity might not be such a bad idea. (By the way, I only believe that we are a decade or so behind the west).
Cyril Northcote Parkinson (not to confused with English doctor James Parkinson, who published the first detailed description of what we now commonly call Parkinson’s disease in 1817) was a British Civil Servant who comically wrote a 1955 Economist article entitled: “Parkinson’s Law.” His very first insight is that “ work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” and that organizations (especially governments) tend to inflate the number of leadership positions.
Parkinson based his eponymous law on his careful analysis of the number of ‘executives’ employed by the British Royal Navy (called Admiralty officials). He joked that the Navy was developing “a magnificent Navy on land” by increasing the 2,000 Admiralty officials in 1914 to 3,569 in 1928; despite an overall decrease in the total number of men by 1/3 and a 2/3 in the number of ships. Parkinson would go on to show that the number of Admiralty officials kept on rising in the following decades, reaching 8,118 in 1935 and 33,788 by 1954.
According to Parkinson, the reason for this growth were two “factors”(and not in any way related to the amount of work required):
Factor I. — An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and
Factor II. — Officials make work for each other
How khaleeji.
Parkinson would go on to summarize his law in mathematical form, by solving out the following formula:
In his own words:
“ Where k is the number of staff seeking promotion through the appointment of subordinates; p represents the difference between the ages of appointment and retirement; m is the number of man-hours devoted to answering minutes within the department, and n is the number of effective units being administered. Then x will be the number of new staff required each year.”
- Cyril Northcote Parkinson
Law of Triviality
Two years later in 1957, Parkinson presented the “Law of Triviality” as a corollary of his broader “Parkinson’s law” spoof of management, stating that organizations tend to place a priority on trivial issues rather than the important ones.
Parkinson dramatized this new law with the example of a committee spending a fraction of their time deliberating on an expensive atomic reactor that no one understands with that same committee spending way too much time to deliberate a cheap bicycle shed, something that is essentially easily understood by everyone. (Speaking of sheds, can’t wait for one of New York’s most anticipated).
Parkinson’s summarized this law with the bold statement that “the time spent on any item of an agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved” i.e. the more expensive, the more complication, the less likely that the majority of people understand it, the less it is discussed compared to trivial matters.
No wonder our society loves to discuss the length of a fashionista’s skirt as opposed to economic development or infrastructure spending.
Death by Committee
Later on, in his 1958 book Parkinson’s Law: The Pursuit of Progress, Parkinson devoted an entire chapter to comitology: how committees, government cabinets, and other such bodies are created and eventually grow irrelevant (or are initially designed as such. Comitology is defined by a “coefficient of inefficiency” whereby the more members in a committee, the more useless the committee. Not exactly counterintuitive. The waste is further compounded here in the region as government committee members are given a nice “attendance bonus” (sometimes as high as the average entry employees salary) for every committee meeting they attend. No wonder there are so many committees and so many meetings.
Once again, Parkinson drew empirical evidence from historical and contemporary British government cabinets and noticed that a number of government bodies lost power as they grew:
- The first cabinet was the Council of the Crown, now the House of Lords, which grew from an unknown number to 29, to 50 before 1600, by which time it had lost much of its power
- A new body was appointed in 1257, the “Lords of the King’s Council”, numbering fewer than 10. The body grew, and then ceased to meet when it had 172 members
- The third incarnation was the Privy Council, initially also numbering fewer than 10 members, rising to 47 in 1679
- In 1715, the Privy Council lost power to the Cabinet Council with eight members, rising to 20 by 1725
- Around 1740, the Cabinet Council was superseded by an inner group, called the Cabinet, initially with five members. At the time of Parkinson’s study (the 1950s), the Cabinet was still the official governing body. Parkinson observed that, from 1939 on, there was an effort to save the Cabinet as an institution. The membership had been fluctuating from a high of 23 members in 1939, down to 18 in 1954
Rather than carving out an antiquated, static and monolithic group of bureaucrats; governments and companies alike should focus on creating a more progressive, dynamic and diverse form of performance management. Leaders should employ the latest integrated technology solutions to track performance and take the pulse of their entire workforce, or in the case of governments, their entire citizen base — a realpolitik 2.0 that would make Parkinson proud.