This refers to the observation that people in organisations pay more attention to unimportant issues than towards issues that really matter. This happens because people generally know a lot about simple things and very little about complex matters. The law of triviality is attributed to British naval historian and management scholar Cyril Northcote Parkinson. As an example, Parkinson pointed to the disproportionate amount of time that a committee spent on the question of the colour in which to paint the bike-shed as compared to the little time it spent deciding on the matter of setting up an atomic power plant.