Organized Anarchy

Organized anarchy is a model of organizational decision-making in which preferences are unclear, technology is poorly understood, and participation is fluid and unpredictable. Developed by Michael Cohen, James March, and Karl Weick, the framework describes organizations — universities, hospitals, government agencies — that do not behave as rational actors pursuing known objectives through reliable means. Instead, they operate as garbage cans into which problems, solutions, participants, and choice opportunities are dumped and combined more or less randomly.

In organized anarchies, a solution may search for a problem, a decision may be made before anyone recognizes what issue it addresses, and the same policy may be adopted and abandoned multiple times without anyone noticing the contradiction. This is not organizational dysfunction in the conventional sense. It is a structural feature of organizations that operate under conditions of ambiguity so pervasive that rational decision-making is impossible.

The framework challenges the reform impulse that assumes organizational problems can be solved by installing better decision procedures. If the organization is a garbage can, better procedures merely redistribute the garbage without reducing the anarchy. What changes outcomes is not procedure but timing — the contingent matching of problems and solutions that happens when the right people are present at the right moment.

The garbage can model is often read as satire. It is not. It is a precise description of how organizations actually function when goals are contested, expertise is uncertain, and power is distributed. The organizations that acknowledge their anarchy survive better than those that pretend to be rational.