garbage cans and decision making

I first read about the garbage can model of decision making in a graduate course at the U of Kentucky. As Cheney et al. describe this approach, decision making in organizations involves "collections of: solutions looking for problems; issues and feelings seeking to be aired; and decision makers looking for decisions to make" (p. 60).

Rather than decisions occurring in a logical, linear fashion, decisions are much more haphazard and driven by all sorts of forces that aren't apparent. Once a decision is made, then a narrative is developed to explain it. For example, the recent decisions to bail out AIG insurance, Freddie Mac, and Fanny Mae have far-reaching implications. Rumors abounded for weeks and months that the federal government would rescue these institutions. The garbage can model suggests that the decisions were made and then those involved worked to develop a rationale for those decisions, what the authors of the text (and others) call "retrospective sense making" (p. 60). In this way, the decisions were legitimized after the fact rather than following a systematic process to reach a conclusion.