A board meeting day for a community group. The agenda has several important items and so a natural question is how much time will be consumed by the less important ones. As C. Northcote Parkinson noted years ago, the smaller items often gobble up time while mega-ones cruise past with barely a nod.
I often think of Parkinson. He knew organizations very well, which may explain his skepticism toward the faith of those who love big box solutions. Groups are often divided between those who favor the large, heavily centralized, and slow big box approaches and those who prefer smaller, decentralized, nimble, and more creative ones.
Personal style can throw us off - the person in the three-piece suit may be far less fond of the centralized "five-year-plan" approach than the person in the blue jeans and sandals - and rhetoric may be equally misleading. Everyone likes to think they want small, creative, and nimble approaches, even if they consistently propose the opposite.
Watch what they do, not what they say.
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