To the Bedrock
The Garbage Can Model

Assess

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

1 of 3

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, shown as circles, are places where decisions could be made, such as meetings, reviews, and committees. Problems, shown as dots, attach to them seeking resolution. Decision makers are not drawn. In each organisational iteration, they allocate energy to the choices they can access. A choice opportunity closes when cumulative energy meets demand.

High problem pressure and tighter coordination channels produce more oversight and flight. In oversight, the choice opportunity closes while problems are elsewhere. In flight, problems leave before it closes. Resolution becomes less common. Pressure combines problem difficulty, the effort per problem, with problem arrival rate, the number of new problems per iteration.