The Garbage Can Model, Explained | Foundations of Leadership

UPI Study › Courses › Foundations of Leadership › Free lessons › Lesson 7.7 Free with a free account

The Garbage Can Model

Foundations of Leadership · Chapter 7: Decision-Making ModuleSection 7.7 · lesson 44 of 9010 min · free with a free account

← The Administrative ModelNext lesson: Quantitative Analysis →

Earn 3 college credits for Foundations of LeadershipRecommended for credit by NCCRS · Business 205 · self-paced · one payment, lifetime access
Enroll in Foundations of Leadership · $250 →Download the syllabus (PDF)

In this lesson

What happens when solutions arrive before problems, and attendance decides the outcome.

  • Recognise the three features of an organised anarchy
  • Name the four streams and their separate dynamics
  • Distinguish resolution, oversight and flight
  • Judge when this lens is the wrong one

Free study notes

Get this lesson's notes by email

The key points and 4 practice questions with answers, in your inbox. One email, free.

One email. Unsubscribe in one click.

Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (1,401 words). Read along, or search it.

Decision-Making Module

The Garbage Can Model

Of all the descriptive models of decision-making, none is as provocatively named as this one. The garbage can model. Its claim is that in certain organisations, decisions do not come from matching problems to solutions. Instead, four things flow through the organisation more or less independently. Problems. Solutions. Participants. And choice opportunities. A decision occurs when those four happen to come together. By chance, or by circumstance, at a particular moment in a particular forum. The forum is the garbage can of the title. A meeting, a committee, a budget cycle. Problems and solutions get dumped into it, and decisions come out. The model is jarring on first encounter. It also captures something the rational and administrative models simply miss.

Organised Anarchies

Three Features That Break the Other Models

Cohen, March, and Olsen published the model in nineteen seventy-two. They built it to describe one particular kind of organisation, which they called an organised anarchy. It has three defining features. The first is problematic preferences. Goals are unclear, contested, or outright contradictory. Participants discover what they want by acting, rather than by deliberating in advance. The second is unclear technology. The means by which inputs are transformed into outputs are imperfectly understood. Even by the people operating the system. The third is fluid participation. The people involved in any given decision change from one occasion to the next. Depending on availability, attention, and political interest. Universities are the canonical example, on all three counts. The mission is ambiguous, nobody fully understands how teaching produces learning, and the cast shifts continuously.

The Diagnosis

Knowing Which Kind of Organisation You Are In

It is worth being careful about the scope of the claim. This is not an assertion that all organisations work this way. It is a claim about a specific category of organisations. Ones for which the rational and administrative models give a misleading picture. Take a stable industrial firm with well-defined products and clear hierarchies. Stable participation, too. There, the garbage can model is the wrong lens. Now take a research university, a federal regulator, or a film production company. There, the rational model is the wrong lens. Many government agencies, professional partnerships, and start-ups sit in the second group. So the diagnosis comes before the model. And choosing wrongly does not produce a slightly worse analysis. It produces a confident analysis of a completely different organisation.

The Image

Four Streams, One Container

The model's central image is of four largely independent streams. Problems are concerns and dissatisfactions that participants want resolved. Funding shortfalls, regulatory complaints, performance gaps, personal grievances. Solutions are answers in search of questions. Technologies, programmes, structures, ideologies that someone is enthusiastic about. And is looking for a place to apply. Participants are the people whose attention and energy at a given moment determine what gets considered. And choice opportunities are occasions on which the organisation is expected to produce a decision. A budget meeting. A hiring committee. A board review. The forum is the container. What comes out of it depends on what happened to be dumped in.

The Streams

What Is Actually Flowing

It helps to hold the four streams side by side with concrete examples. In the problem stream, falling enrolment, a budget shortfall, a staff complaint. In the solution stream, a new piece of software, a restructuring proposal, somebody's pet project. In the participant stream, whichever committee members and sponsors happened to attend. And in the choice opportunity stream, the budget cycle, the board meeting, the hiring committee. The row worth reading twice is the solutions row. Solutions here are answers in search of questions. That inverts the ordering every other model in this chapter assumes. In the rational model, a problem calls a solution into being. Here, a solution waits around for a problem it can plausibly attach itself to.

The Mechanism

Each Stream Runs on Its Own Clock

Each of the four streams runs on its own clock. Problems persist whether or not solutions exist for them. Solutions get developed and championed whether or not an appropriate problem has surfaced. Participants come and go on schedules and interests largely unrelated to the substance of any issue. And choice opportunities are imposed from outside, by calendars, deadlines, and institutional cycles. Look at what is absent from that list. Nothing in it is coordinated by the merits of anything. So a decision occurs when the four converge, by chance or circumstance, in one forum. Which means the decision that emerges depends on several things that are not the argument. Who happened to be present. What solutions were circulating. And what other problems were competing for attention in that room.

Three Modes

How Decisions Are Actually Reached

The model identifies three distinct modes by which decisions are reached. Resolution occurs when a problem is genuinely matched to an appropriate solution. And the decision addresses both. That is the ordinary picture of deciding. Oversight occurs when a choice is made quickly, while attention is on something else. No problem attaches to the decision at all. The decision is made, and it resolves nothing. Flight occurs when problems migrate away from a choice opportunity. As soon as a more attractive forum becomes available. That leaves the original decision empty of substantive content. Only the first of those three matches what every other model in this chapter assumes is happening.

The Finding

Most Decisions Do Not Resolve Anything

Cohen, March, and Olsen ran computer simulations of the model. The finding was genuinely unsettling. Most decisions in garbage-can organisations are made through oversight or flight. Rather than through resolution. Say that plainly. Most decisions do not solve the problems that were ostensibly their occasion. That is easy to read as an indictment. It is more useful read as a location error. Problems do get solved in these organisations. Just not at the moment of decision. They get solved later. Sometimes much later. When a different choice opportunity allows the right combination to converge. The right participants, the right solutions, and enough attention at the same time. Which is why tracking a problem, rather than a meeting, is often the better way to follow one of these organisations.

Case

A Curriculum Review That Reorganised the Calendar

A concrete case, from a large public university in Maharashtra. It began a comprehensive curriculum review in twenty nineteen. The stated problem was that graduates were not finding employment in their fields. But the review committee became the venue for several other things. An unrelated long-running dispute about teaching loads. A proposal for a new building. A complaint about library funding. And the favourite reform programme of a recently arrived dean. Over the course of fourteen months, participants on the committee changed three times. The final report recommended a reorganisation of the academic calendar. That solution had been circulating in the university for years, in search of a forum. It had only a glancing connection to the original employment problem. And the employment problem itself migrated to a separate placement committee, a year later. A decision was made. But through flight, rather than resolution.

For Managers

Shape the Architecture, Not the Argument

The model has genuinely unsettling implications for managers and reformers. The first is that a proposal's success often has more to do with timing, than with merit. Being in the right choice opportunity, at the right moment, with the right participants. That matters enormously, and it is not what most people prepare for. The second is that solutions waiting for problems are a permanent feature. So the skilled administrator learns to read that stream. Which solutions are circulating, who is championing them, and where they might surface. The third is the most actionable. Structural reforms change outcomes more reliably than direct argument about merits. Changing committee structures. The sequencing of meetings. Who is invited where. So the model suggests a distinctive managerial discipline. Shaping the architecture within which the streams flow. Rather than trying to engineer any one specific decision.

Consolidate

Policy Windows

The model's most influential extension came from political science. John Kingdon adapted it to explain how policy ideas reach national government agendas. In his version, three streams flow independently through the political system. Problems, policies, and politics. A policy window opens when those three briefly align. And in that window, a specific policy can be adopted. The Affordable Care Act in the United States fits the pattern. So does the GST reform in India, and carbon-pricing policies in several countries. In every one of those cases, the substantive policy idea existed for years or decades first. What changed at the moment of adoption was not the merit of the policy. It was the alignment of the streams. Which is why skilled policy entrepreneurs spend much of their careers waiting for windows. And making sure their preferred solution is ready the moment one opens.

About Foundations of Leadership at UPI Study

Foundations of Leadership (Business 205) is a self-paced online course of 90 video lessons in 12 chapters, from the roots of leadership theory and the trait, situational and transformational approaches to power, decision-making, communication, teams, conflict, diversity and global leadership. It carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits.

Every lesson transcript is free on pages like this one, and the videos are free with a free UPI Study account. Enrolling adds a practice quiz after each lesson, the graded work and final exam that earn the credit, lifetime access, and an official transcript on completion. UPI Study has helped over 130,000 students with college credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.

Enroll now → Course details Download the syllabus All Business courses Every course with PRO →

Compare: Management and leadership courses · Foundations of Leadership vs Leadership and OB

Why take it here

Why students take Foundations of Leadership with UPI Study

What makes people follow a leaderFoundations of Leadership covers the main theories of leadership and how leaders use power, make decisions, communicate, build teams and handle conflict. It is a common course in business, management and organizational leadership degrees.
Credit at a fraction of the priceThe same 3 credits can cost $750 or more at a US college. Here it is one payment, self-paced, with lifetime access.
Finish your degree soonerTransfer credits reduce the courses you still owe, so you can graduate earlier or lighten a heavy semester.
Strengthen an applicationA completed college-level course on an official transcript shows admissions and scholarship committees you can do the work.
Study on your own scheduleNo start dates, no deadlines. Watch the lessons, practice, and take the final when you are ready.
130,000+students helped with college creditsACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.

Where the credit goes

Universities that work with NCCRS

Foundations of Leadership carries a NCCRS credit recommendation. These universities work with NCCRS; some are UPI Study's signed partners. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.

Thomas Edison State UniversityThomas Edison State UniversitySigned partnerUniversity of the PeopleUniversity of the PeopleSigned partnerCharter Oak State CollegeCharter Oak State CollegeSigned partnerStrayer UniversityStrayer UniversitySigned partnerColumbia Southern UniversityColumbia Southern UniversitySigned partnerIndiana TechIndiana TechSigned partnerPenn StatePenn StateWorks with NCCRSSouthern New Hampshire UniversitySouthern New Hampshire UniversityWorks with NCCRSSUNYSUNYWorks with NCCRS +many more cooperating universitiesFind my college →

Find my college → Not listed? Ask Athena in the corner of this page, or book a 15-minute call.

FAQ

Questions students ask us

About The Garbage Can Model

What is the garbage can model of decision making?
The garbage can model says that in some organizations decisions happen when four independent streams happen to meet: problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities. Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen published it in 1972. A meeting, committee, or budget cycle acts as the garbage can into which problems and solutions are dumped. Solutions are often answers looking for questions, waiting for a problem they can attach to.
What is an organized anarchy?
An organized anarchy is an organization with problematic preferences, unclear technology, and fluid participation, the conditions under which the garbage can model applies. Goals are unclear or contested, the way inputs become outputs is poorly understood, and the people involved in decisions keep changing. Universities are the classic example. Research universities, many government agencies, professional partnerships, and start-ups can fit the description, while a stable industrial firm with clear hierarchies usually does not.
What are resolution, oversight, and flight in the garbage can model?
They are the three ways decisions get made. Resolution happens when a problem is genuinely matched to a suitable solution. Oversight happens when a choice is made quickly while attention is elsewhere, so it resolves no problem. Flight happens when problems leave a choice opportunity for a more attractive forum, leaving the decision empty. Cohen, March, and Olsen's simulations found that most decisions in such organizations come through oversight or flight.
What is Kingdon's multiple streams model?
John Kingdon's multiple streams model adapts the garbage can model to explain how policy ideas reach government agendas. Three streams, problems, policies, and politics, flow independently, and a policy window opens when they briefly align, allowing a specific policy to be adopted. The idea has often existed for years before the window opens. Policy entrepreneurs therefore keep their preferred solution ready and wait for the moment the streams converge.

About the Foundations of Leadership course

How many college credits is Foundations of Leadership?
Foundations of Leadership (Business 205) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
How much does Foundations of Leadership cost and what is included?
$250, paid once, with lifetime access: all 90 video lessons, a practice quiz after each, the graded work and final exam, and an official transcript when you finish. Students who want several courses choose UPI Study PRO instead.
Which universities accept UPI Study credits?
UPI Study has signed partner agreements with universities such as Thomas Edison State University, University of the People and Charter Oak State College, and works with universities such as Penn State, SNHU and SUNY. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities. Use "Find my college" on this page to check yours.
How long does Foundations of Leadership take?
It is self-paced with no deadlines. The 90 lessons total about 16 hours of video; most students add reading and practice time and finish in a few weeks to a few months, on their own schedule.
How are the exams done?
Quizzes and assignments are online in the course. The final exam is taken online with proctoring; a person on the UPI Study team checks assignments, usually within two days.
How do my credits reach my college?
When the course shows 100% complete, request the official transcript from your dashboard. It is sent to the college you name, and you can send it to more than one. Check your college first with "Find my college" on this page, or ask Athena.

Ready for the full course? Earn 3 credits in Foundations of Leadership.

90 video lessons, a quiz after each one, and the graded work that earns the credit. Recommended for credit by NCCRS.

Enroll in Foundations of Leadership →Download the syllabusEvery course with PRO →
Foundations of Leadership
3 credits · NCCRSEnroll →