The Decision Making Problem in Modern Organizations
Your company is burdened by a hidden force that undermines even your best strategies and talent. Despite capable teams and robust systems, decisions fail. Projects miss deadlines. Initiatives fizzle. Market opportunities vanish while you're still discussing them.
This isn't just inefficiency—it's a fundamental breakdown in organizational decision making that researchers Cohen, March, and Olsen identified in their 1972 paper "A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice." They discovered that organizations often operate as "organized anarchies" where problems, solutions, and decision makers connect through timing and opportunity rather than logic.
Fifty years later, this pattern persists in modern companies as what we at Convictional define as the "Decision Context Problem." For CEOs, understanding this evolution isn't academic—it's existential. Organizations that solve it will dominate markets. Those that don't will continue costly cycles of mis-execution, regardless of their talent or resources.
The Garbage Can Model: Understanding Organizational Choice
Organizations become "organized anarchies" when they show three characteristics: problematic preferences (ambiguous goals), unclear technology (poorly understood processes), and fluid participation (unpredictable involvement of decision makers). While no company fits this description completely, these dynamics appear in portions of nearly every organization—especially businesses that deal with complexity and uncertainty.
In the Garbage Can metaphor, decision opportunities become containers into which problems, solutions, and participants are dumped as they appear. Decision making is counterintuitively inverted. The organization becomes a collection of choices looking for problems, issues looking for decision situations, solutions looking for issues, and decision makers looking for work. This reveals patterns that persist today: important problems often remain unsolved while trivial ones get attention, important choices rarely resolve problems, and organizational structure significantly influences outcomes.
The model explains why executive teams often feel they're addressing symptoms rather than causes, why the same issues resurface repeatedly, and why execution fails despite good intentions. These dynamics exist in every organization to some degree, but become particularly problematic in environments of rapid change, technological complexity, or market uncertainty.
The Decision Context Problem: A Modern Manifestation
The Garbage Can Model directly explains what we at Convictional call the "Decision Context Problem." This problem occurs when teams lack complete business context, clear alignment with company goals, and effective decision making processes. Without addressing these fundamental issues, organizations remain trapped in chaotic decision processes regardless of how many dashboards, meetings, or process improvements they implement.
Most organizations attempt to solve these issues with more meetings, better dashboards, or refined processes. But these solutions fail because they treat symptoms rather than addressing the fundamental dynamic: the mismatch between how we think decisions should be made and how they actually occur in complex organizations. True improvement requires transforming how knowledge flows through the organization, how it connects to strategic goals, and how it informs judgment at every level.
The problem persists despite decades of management innovation. It's embedded in how organizations function, not just in how people act within them. At Convictional, we've found that addressing it requires more than behavioral change—it demands a fundamental rethinking of how information, decisions, and people interact within organizational systems.
The AI Maturity Journey: Evolving Beyond the Garbage Can
Our Organizational AI Maturity Model at Convictional offers a pathway from organized anarchy to what we term a "Judgment-Centric Organization." This journey transforms how decisions occur through five progressive levels of capability and integration.
At Level 1 (Individual Adoption), AI tools help individuals but don't change organizational dynamics. Employees use AI for personal productivity, but the fundamental structure remains unchanged and thus the problems stemming from the garbage can model persist.
Level 2 (Functional Utilization) sees departments implementing AI for specific workflows, creating functional coherence but reinforcing silos. These early stages mitigate some symptoms without addressing root causes.
The transformation begins at Level 3 (Integrated Functions), where AI connects departments and begins addressing the cross-functional context void. By Level 4 (Enterprise Intelligence), organizations restructure around intelligence and decision processes rather than functional execution. The pinnacle, Level 5 (Judgment-Centric Organization), provides a cognitive foundation where humans focus exclusively on judgment, creativity, and accountability.
Each level progressively addresses the core dysfunctions of the garbage can model. AI clarifies and communicates strategic objectives, addressing problematic preferences and ideally nudges decision makers towards a greater awareness of the problems described in the garbage can model. It makes processes transparent and assists in their execution, mitigating unclear technology. And it maintains continuity regardless of who participates, reducing the impact of fluid participation. The result is a transformation from chaotic opportunity-driven decisions to context-rich, goal-aligned judgment.
The Judgment-Centric Organization: Beyond the Garbage Can
Imagine starting your Monday morning with the confidence that your business fully aligned to its goals and each decision maker is considering the most important decisions facing the company.
This is life in what we at Convictional call the "Judgment-Centric Organization" – where creativity and discernment are the most critical, differentiating knowledge work that happens in the company. We've designed our AI solutions to directly address the three core problems of organizational anarchy:
First, problematic preferences – the ambiguous goals that plague organizations – disappear as our AI creates alignment between strategy and execution. Every team member sees how their work connects to company objectives. No more confusion about organizational priorities. No more departmental agendas competing with corporate goals. Just crystal-clear purpose flowing through every decision. This is not to say that all goals need to be sourced from top down, though typically they are. Regardless of their origination in the organization, alignment and awareness of goals will be key.
Second, unclear technology – those poorly understood processes that frustrate your teams – becomes transparent as AI illuminates exactly how work happens across your organization. The days of "that's just how we do it" end. Everyone understands not just their part but the entire system. Knowledge that once existed only in your veterans' heads becomes accessible to everyone. Processes improve continuously rather than remaining mysterious black boxes.
Third, fluid participation – the unpredictable involvement that derails decisions – stops disrupting progress as AI maintains perfect context regardless of who attends which meeting. New participants can join mid-stream without losing momentum. People who miss discussions still contribute meaningfully. The system remembers everything, learns continuously, and provides the right information to the right people at the right time.
In this environment, the fog of confusion lifts. The endless meetings vanish. Maneuvering for information advantage becomes a relic of the past.
Instead, AI handles the cognitive groundwork while you and your team focus on what humans do best – bringing wisdom, creativity, and moral clarity to the hardest questions. Decisions become transparent journeys rather than mysterious outcomes. Teams execute with confidence because they understand not just what to do, but why it matters.
The transformation feels like removing a weight you didn't realize you were carrying. When information flows freely instead of being hoarded, when context surrounds every choice, when judgment rather than posturing determines influence – the entire experience of leadership, and the production of value for your customers becomes transformed.
Getting Started: First Steps for CEOs
To begin moving your organization beyond the garbage can model:
- Diagnose your current state – Identify where garbage can dynamics appear in your organization. Look for recurring problems that never get resolved, important initiatives that languish while trivial matters receive attention, and decisions disconnected from strategic priorities.
- Map your information flows – Understand how problems, solutions, and decision makers connect. Who has access to what information? How do frontline insights reach strategic decision makers? What patterns exist in which problems get solved and which don't?
- Build knowledge infrastructure – Create the foundation for AI maturity. This includes both technology systems and governance models for capturing, sharing, and applying information. Move from process-based to context-based decision frameworks.
- Lead cultural change – Model transparency and judgment-focused leadership. Show comfort with uncertainty, reward intellectual honesty over false confidence, and celebrate quality of thinking over output quantity. At Convictional, we've observed this transformation begins with leadership’s mindset and cascades throughout the organization.
Leading Through the Transition
The journey from organized anarchy to judgment-centric organization won't happen overnight. It requires sustained leadership commitment to both technological and cultural transformation. Yet the competitive advantage for those who make this transition is immense. Organizations that solve the Decision Context Problem will execute more effectively, adapt more quickly, and deliver more value than those still operating in the garbage can.
For CEOs, the choice is clear: lead this evolution or be left behind. The future belongs to organizations where decisions are made with complete context, clear alignment, and consistent decision effectiveness—not by the chaotic coincidence of problems, solutions, and participants meeting in the organizational garbage can. Those who recognize this reality and act on it will create the next generation of market leaders, regardless of industry or size.
The garbage can model may be a fixture of organizational life today, but it need not define our future. Through intentional evolution toward aligned AI maturity and a judgment-centered organization, we can transform how decisions are made and unlock unprecedented levels of organizational performance. At Convictional, this is the future we're building.