[Timberwolf]

With our teams, the most useful thing we found was simply self-awareness that we were bikeshedding. So you need people to be prepared to stand up and say, "hang on, is this really important or are we just bikeshedding here?"

When we started doing this, we found that the bikeshed discussion would often be a consequence of too many people who didn't really have a stake in the outcome being involved in the decision. It didn't really matter to them which option was chosen, but they felt they had to take a position and/or provide lots of input. So our next step once we'd identified something as a bikeshed would be to say, "okay, who actually needs to make this decision" and defer the decision until those people could form a splinter group and come up with an answer.

The combination of a smaller group and a bit of time to digest the opinions coming out of the initial bikeshed discussion usually meant that this was more productive. Often it came up with a better end solution than any of the ones proposed during the bikeshed.

[taco_emoji]

Careful, though... then you might start a meta-argument about whether or not the topic is really important or not. "If we just paint the bikeshed the right color, customers will flock to us!"