03 · The Garbage Can Model

Assess

Answer twelve questions about how decisions actually work where you are. The model will classify your organisation and show you what kind of organised anarchy you are operating in.

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01 · Problem pressure

Your organisation’s goals shift often enough that work started under one priority gets abandoned for another.
Disagree
Agree
If you asked three colleagues how a decision typically gets made in your organisation, you would get three different answers.
Disagree
Agree
Your organisation carries a backlog of unresolved issues that everyone knows about but no one has the mandate to close.
Disagree
Agree
Institutional memory in your organisation lives in people’s heads rather than anywhere it can be reliably accessed.
Disagree
Agree
It is difficult to point to a decision your organisation made this year that definitively closed a problem.
Disagree
Agree

Diagnosis

Positioning

GC Simulation

The Garbage Can Model

Choice opportunities (circles) are places where decisions could be made: meetings, reviews, committees. Problems (dots) seek resolution by attaching to a choice opportunity. Decision makers (invisible) allocate energy to the choices they can access each organisational iteration. When cumulative energy meets demand, a choice opportunity closes.

The model’s insight: when problem pressure is high and coordination channels are tighter, more decisions happen by oversight (the choice opportunity closes while problems are elsewhere) or flight (problems leave before the choice opportunity closes). Resolution — genuinely closing the problem — becomes less common. Here, pressure is represented by both problem difficulty (effort per problem) and problem arrival rate (how many new problems arrive each iteration).