How Decisions Get Made, Part I: Organized Anarchies and the Garbage Can Process

Two weeks ago Google announced to the shock and horror of many faithful users the imminent demise of Google Reader. Google! went the cry. Why would you do this? What are you thinking?

You’ve probably discovered this from working in organizations, with them, or just interacting with them at any level: Organizational decisionmaking can be crazymaking, and often in a very different way from individual decision making. There are similarities, such as the frustration of why?! which can be as powerful when stonewalled by an organization as when someone dumps you cold with no rhyme, reason, or explanation. But groups, by nature of being groups, inherently have different decisionmaking processes than individual actors. Understanding a few of those may not explain the choices organizations make, but it can help us understand how they get to them.

There are many decisionmaking processes we could explore in this series, so today let’s look at one: the garbage can process. This takes us away from the Google example — you’ll see why in a minute — but chances are it will help you understand a frustrating client better, or even see some decision making processes in your own company that are leading to less than ideal outcomes.

The way an organization makes decisions depends on a number of things, such as how the organization is structured and who the members are. For example, more traditional top down hierarchical organizations have a chain of command, and there are  organizations known organized anarchies. Organized anarchies and their decision making processes comes from work by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen.

An organized anarchy is an organization made up of political alliances that have various, often competing goals, interests, and values. These goals may be ambiguous and there may be many of them from each group, so there’s no clear path to issue resolution. You’ll find this in organizations that don’t have a clear “technology” or a defined “product” but are more of a professional service, like a law firm, a non-profit, a consultancy, or perhaps even publishing. Procedures and decisions are based on historical precedence, experience, organizational routine, trial and error. People in these organizations participate in decision making in different ways and to different degrees, depending on the concern at hand and how much it matters to them, rather than as a matter of hierarchy. So, some issues will matter to some of the people some of the time. Not all issues matter to everyone all of the time, and that means getting something to change can be difficult, because it’s easier to rely on the same old, same old.

In these sorts of organizations, decisions get made in Cohen, March, and Olsen call the garbage can process. This is shorthand for “decisions as accidents”. Rather than approach decision making from a more linear, rational approach — as rational as decision making can be, at any rate, with a clearly defined set of issues, a set of invested stakeholders, and a method of determining solutions — the garbage can model has everything all jumbled up. So many problems! So many unrelated questions! So many solutions just waiting to be the answer to a problem!

Ah, see? In the garbage can process, standard operating procedures (SOPs) are often offered up as solutions to problems, reinforcing the existing procedure. Or, someone comes up with a solution first and then roots around in the can to see if they can find a problem to apply it to. There are also a lot of post-hoc narratives to explain the decision making process after the fact. It may make the decision look rational and coherent, but is simply a rationalization of why a solution-in-search-of-a-problem was the right answer.

Any of this sound familiar, fellow designers? Obviously, changing an organizational culture is difficult and sometimes more work than you want to take on. This is especially true as a consultant. But there are ways to work around the garbage can and improve the decision making process, which we’ll examine about in future posts.

As an outsider, there’s no way to ever know how an organization came to a particular decision. It’s sometimes difficult to know as an insider, depending on your access to information or on the ways in which the decision was made. It’s tempting to think we all, whether as individuals or as organizational actors, make rational decisions with a full range of information. But a lot of the time, we’re making decisions based on the situations in which we’re embedded. And while we like to think we’re optimizing — carefully considering each possibility and bit of data until we reach the ideal solution — we’re satisficing — heaving a big huge sigh of relief as soon as we find a solution that will work pretty well as soon as we come across is.

And who knows — perhaps a decision making process we explore in the coming weeks will help explain the Google Reader decision.