The garbage can, revisited
Q1 2026In 1972, Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen published a paper with an unglamorous name: "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice." They were studying universities, which they called organized anarchies, and they made an observation that has aged better than most management theory. Organizations do not solve problems the way textbooks say. Problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities are four separate streams, flowing independently, and decisions happen when the streams collide inside some forum, the garbage can, more or less by timing.
A solution is not the answer to a problem. A solution is a product looking for a question. Somebody's pet initiative, a vendor's platform, a reorg someone has wanted for years. Problems drift around looking for a decision to attach to. People wander in and out of meetings with limited attention. And when a choice opportunity opens, a budget cycle, a QBR, a crisis, whatever problems and solutions happen to be nearby get coupled and called a decision.
If that sounds like an insult to your company, sit in your own quarterly planning and take notes on what attaches to what. I have watched a data-warehouse project get approved as the answer to a churn problem because both were in the room the week the budget closed. Nobody was cynical. The streams just collided.
Revenue organizations in 2026 are nearly perfect garbage cans. The solution stream has never run faster: thousands of tools, each with a deck explaining which of your problems it answers. The participant stream churns; average tenure of a sales leader is barely two years, so the people who chose last year's solutions are gone before the results land. Problems, meanwhile, are genuinely ambiguous. Is the miss a pricing problem, a market problem, a talent problem, an enablement problem? Reasonable people disagree, which under garbage-can conditions means the loudest available solution wins.
Cohen, March, and Olsen were not writing a complaint. They were writing a description, and descriptions are useful because they tell you where the leverage is. You do not fix a garbage can by demanding people be more rational. You fix it by managing the streams and the structure of the cans.
In practice that means a few unfashionable things. Keep a written problem inventory that exists independently of any solution, reviewed on its own cadence, so problems have standing whether or not a vendor is in the building. Force every proposed solution to name, in writing, which inventory problem it claims to solve and what evidence would show it worked; solutions that cannot find a problem wait. Control the choice opportunities: fewer, better-prepared decision forums with the right participants locked in, because a decision made in a hallway is a collision, not a choice. And when I run diagnosis inside a client, the first artifact I build is exactly this map: which problems are real, which solutions are orphans, and which decisions were actually timing.
The deeper point of the 1972 paper is compassionate. Organizations are not stupid, and neither are the people in them. They are anarchies with limited attention operating under ambiguity, and their decision behavior follows from that structure. Once you accept it, "broken process" mostly dissolves. Most broken processes are decision problems in disguise: the process is fine, but problems, solutions, and forums are floating past each other and colliding at random. Name that honestly, bring discipline to the streams, and the process usually starts working on its own.
Fifty-plus years later, the garbage can is still the most accurate model of how companies choose that I have seen, and I have watched a lot of companies choose. The organizations that outperform are not the ones that eliminated the anarchy. They are the ones that noticed it, and built their decisions accordingly.