Consensus-building is key to getting things done in any organization. You can't get your way unless you get other people to agree with you. Sunday and Monday, I had encounters with two people who separately told me great stories that illustrate how to avoid organizational deadlock by skipping meaningless arguments. They told me about dinner-tabling and bikeshedding.

Learning to dinner-table

This past weekend, I attended ConDor, a small, local science-fiction convention here in San Diego. Over lunch, we somehow got to talking about session musicians in TV commercials. My companion told me this story:

One day, a group of musicians was in a studio recording music for a TV commercial. An agency rep was in the studio. And the rep had problems with the way the drummer was playing. The rep said he wanted a "dinner table sound" from the drums.

This was a problem because nobody knew what a "dinner table sound" was. In fact, there is no such thing as a dinner table sound. The agency representative was trying to look like he knew what he was talking about when in fact he was completely ignorant.

But agency representatives are the ones writing the checks. They have to be listened to.

What should the drummer do? The drummer might have drawn the rep out, trying to figure out what the rep really meant. He might have argued with the rep, which might have descended into a shouting match.

But, instead, this drummer did the right thing. He simply gave the rep a bold thumbs up and grinned. The drummer changed his playing just a little bit -- not enough to really change the sound of the music, but enough to be different. The agency rep was happy, and the work got done.

That drummer knew that things go much more smoothly if the boss gets a dinner table sound when he asks for a dinner table sound. Even if there's no such thing.

Bikeshedding

I can't believe I didn't know this one before -- it's been around for literally 50 years. I had lunch with our columnist Cory Doctorow yesterday at ETech, and he passed the story on to me. Then I Googled the phrase "bikeshedding," and learned more.

Writer Cyril Northcote Parkinson told the story of the bike shed in his humorous business book "Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress".

Wikipedia explains:

The color of the bikeshed is a proverbial phrase referring to the apparent ease with which one can get approval for building a large and complex project (such as a billion-dollar laboratory) compared to the difficulty of reaching consensus to build something conceptually simple -- because everyone involved wants to add their own opinion.

Self-described Unix guru-at-large Poul-Henning Kamp rescued the idea from obscurity during 1999 discussion of development of FreeBSD Unix. Kamp elaborates:

Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and get approval for building a multimillion or even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless discussions.

Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so vast, so expensive, and so complicated that people cannot grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the assumption that somebody else checked all the details before it got this far....

A bike shed, on the other hand -- anyone can build one of those over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV. So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention, that he is here.

Kamp was reacting to a massive argument over how to implement sleep(1) in BSD Unix. sleep(1) is very, very simple and useful (and therefore easy to bikeshed about) -- it simply tells a program to wait for a specified time.

Ironically, the Wikipedia entry on bikeshedding has a history that shows quite a lot of fiddling -- because just as everybody knows how to build a bikeshed and is an expert on the subject, everybody knows what bikeshedding is, and is an expert on that. Wikipedia warns its editors about the dangers of bikeshedding.

What are some ways that you've managed to avoid meaningless arguments?