Management: Parkinson’s Law

How much time does work take?

In daily business, the situation of seemingly having to little time for the completion of a work load is only too familiar. No matter how exact a certain task is planned ahead or how many variables are taken into account, in the end it always turns out in the same way: the work is almost never finished early, sometimes on time and mostly late. But why is that so? And does it really have to be like that?

Cyril Northcote Parkinson, a naval historian from England, was not convinced and decided to tackle the matter. In an effort to investigate into the phenomenon of governmental bureaucracy in the British Civil Service, he described the inevitability of its occurrence with the words: “Work expands to fill the time available.” Using this as the topic of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955, he instantly became internationally known for it.

In principle, there are two main areas of Parkinson’s Law (the name by which his findings became famous):

1.) Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion

While some people take hours for a certain task, others do it in a matter of minutes. According to Parkinson, this relates directly to the amount of time each individual grants for finishing the task in question. The more time is available, the longer it takes to complete the work.

2.) The matters most debated in a deliberative body tend to be the minor ones where everybody understands the issues

In meetings, often the most trivial topics take up most of the time. This is due to the fact that the majority of participants have an understanding and an opinion about it, which they are eager to share. Consequently, this leads to a negligence of the core issues where an animated discussion does not arise due to the general lack of knowledge and competence.


These observations were actually used by Parkinson to explain the inevitability of expanding bureaucracy in a regulated work environment – even in cases where the fundamental task to be executed does not increase or even decreases. This is due to the fact that a) every servant or employee wants to raise the number of his subordinates but not of his rivals, and b) servants or employees of one organisation are mutually creating work for each other.

In his semi-humorous way, Parkinson’s derived further laws from his investigations, all of them generally applicable to organisations and management:

Expansion means complexity,
and complexity means decay.

Policies designed to increase production increase employment; policies designed to increase employment do everything but.

Democracy equals inflation.

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

Deliberative bodies become decreasingly effective
after they pass five to eight members.

From my personal point of view, most of his observations and statements are really striking. And the more I think about Parkinson’s Laws, the more I tend to agree that still today – over half a century after their discovery – they still hold appallingly true.

And for those wanting to know more, here is a link to his first article on the subject:

Parkinson's Law



Andreas Hauser