Garbage Can Model of Decision Making

Organized Anarchy

Central to the GCM are the “organized anarchies,” which are organizations overwhelmed by extreme ambiguity. This ambiguity appears within three principal areas. First, these organizations are characterized by having multiple, inconsistent, and ill-defined preferences. These organized anarchies tend to rely on a variety of ideas to operate rather than on a coherent systematic structure. They are also likely to find their goals through action rather than knowing them a priori, by choice. At the same time, according to the model, the decision makers of these organizations have a limited understanding of the processes, technology, and means being used. This causes trial-and-error-based behaviors or wandering when faced with demands for choice. Through this, decision makers gain residual experience from accidental learning and by creating practical solutions to the issues that they face. A final characteristic of these organizations is the fluid participation of its members. Decision makers capriciously allocate resources, time, and energy to the issues they face, depending on the domain of the organization they are focused on at any particular time, which, in turn, shapes the outcome of the decision-making process. Such a fluid participation adds extra uncertainty to [Page 306]the process as a whole and makes the boundaries of these organizations more volatile.

An important feature of the GCM is the idea that decisions are the result of a chance encounter of four independent streams of events that flow in and out of the organizational decision situations: the problems, the solutions, the participants, and the choice opportunities. The problems within the GCM are the issues and concerns raised by the organizational members, and the solutions are the answers looking for problems. The participants are the organizational members that intermittently pay attention to these issues according to their available time and energy. The choice opportunities are all the situations that call for a decision. According to this model, these four elements are unrelated or only loosely coupled most of the time, and they share only in that they happen to be simultaneously available at a specific point in time. As with a garbage can, problems and solutions are thrown in and become connected with each other by chance, making the decision-making process more a function of random encounters than a rational process. This model emphasizes the fact that solutions, problems, and participants are not connected to each other rationally but arbitrarily, by their mere fortuitous simultaneous occurrence. The consequences that arise from such a particular decision-making process are that in general it is seen as a fuzzy, chaotic process that lacks a clear beginning and end, being the synthesis of a random confluence of disparate streams of events. According to this model, solutions might even be posed when there is no clear problem present, and choices might be made without any problems being solved, and some critical problems within the organizations may persist without being solved.

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