Hi Reader,
You’ve probably been in a meeting like this: The team has a couple significant issues it needs to work through. A strategic decision that has been lingering. A significant tension between two departments that's causing an important project to stall. Yet somehow, 25 minutes later, everyone is still talking about where to hold the annual retreat. Why does this happen? It may have less to do with poor time management than we think.
The Law of Triviality
We recently had Rebecca Hinds, author of Your Best Meeting Ever, on our Leading Together podcast. During our conversation, she introduced us to something called the Law of Triviality.
The basic idea is that groups can spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing relatively inconsequential issues while giving surprisingly little attention to the topics that matter most.
Why? Because trivial issues are easier to talk about.
Everyone can have an opinion about where to hold the retreat and there’s usually little risk in speaking up, disagreeing, or advocating strongly for your preference. The consequential, higher stake issues feel different.
The high-stakes topics on an agenda can actually receive less discussion because engaging with them feels riskier. Sometimes the trivial conversation isn’t just taking time away from the hard conversation. It may be giving us a permission structure to avoid it.
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The Conversations That Matter Ask More of Us
Think about the issues your Executive Team needs to work through the most.
It could be a strategic decision that might require the team to change direction. It could be a resource allocation conversation that may mean one department gets something another doesn’t. Or perhaps naming a cross-functional tension that you fear might strain a relationship, because questioning an initiative might feel like questioning the executive who owns it.
These conversations require something weighty from us. They require trust and team psychological safety. They require the ability to disagree without becoming defensive. They require a willingness to put the needs of the organization ahead of our own function. And sometimes, they require just plain courage.
On the other hand, debating the retreat location requires considerably less. That’s why a team can appear incredibly engaged while discussing something that barely matters and become strangely quiet when the consequential issue finally comes up.
Look at Where Your Time Actually Goes
One way to spot the Law of Triviality on your own team is to pay attention to where your meeting time actually goes. Not just what appears on the agenda, but what consumes the conversation.
What topics consistently receive more time than they deserve? What important conversations keep getting pushed to next week? What issues seem to generate lots of discussion but very little consequence? And perhaps the more uncomfortable question: Is there anything we’re discussing because it’s easier than discussing what really needs our attention?
This doesn’t mean every minute of an Executive Team Meeting needs to be spent wrestling with existential questions. You should still protect time to connect and to exchange important updates. But those agenda items shouldn’t make up the majority of the meeting.
Get to “The List”
One of the best protections against the Law of Triviality is designing your Executive Team Meeting so you actually have time for the conversations that matter.
We encourage the teams we work with to think about a portion of their weekly meeting as “The List.” These are the complex, consequential, or high-stakes issues that require the collective thinking of the Executive Team.
The goal is to get there quickly. We recommend protecting at least 45 minutes for The List.
That gives most teams enough time to meaningfully work through three or four important issues. Maybe it’s a decision that needs to be made, a cross-functional tension that needs to be resolved, an unexpected opportunity that requires the team’s perspective, or a problem that has remained stuck for too long.
And this is where the Law of Triviality becomes a useful warning.
If you’ve protected 45 minutes for your team’s most consequential work, don’t let an easy topic consume 20 of them simply because everyone has an opinion.
A Final Thought
The Law of Triviality is easy to laugh about because we’ve all experienced it. We’ve all been in meetings where an absurd amount of time was spent on something that didn’t seem to matter that much.
But underneath it is a more serious question: What’s the trade off? What are we not able to work through because the amount of time we are giving to the trivial?
Your Executive Team has limited time together. Getting to The List creates space for the work that only this team can do. But creating the space is only part of the responsibility. You also have to be willing to use it the right way.
So the next time your team finds itself ten minutes deep into a surprisingly passionate conversation about something relatively inconsequential, it might be worth asking:
What’s the harder conversation we’re not having?
-Shaun & Joe
Enjoying this newsletter?
You’ll love the conversations happening on our Leading Together Podcast and YouTube channel, where we dive deeper into how you can build a high performing leadership team
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Check Out the Latest Episode of Our Podcast
Meetings are where decisions get made, alignment takes shape, and organizational culture is built—or broken. So why do we put so little thought into designing them well?
In this episode, Shaun and Joe sit down with organizational behavior expert and Your Best Meeting Ever author Rebecca Hinds to explore why so many workplace meetings aren't working and what leaders can do differently.
Rebecca shares practical strategies for treating meetings like a product: designing them intentionally, eliminating unnecessary attendees and agenda items, creating clearer outcomes, and experimenting with new approaches rather than defaulting to the way things have always been done. The conversation also explores one-on-ones, asynchronous collaboration, meeting size, better agendas, and why sometimes the best way to fix an overloaded calendar is to start over completely.
If your calendar is packed but your team still struggles to find enough time for the work that matters most, this conversation offers a practical path toward fewer—and much better—meetings. Learn more about Rebecca and purchase her book at www.rebeccahinds.com.
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