Garbage Can Projects Have to Be Transparent

Sometimes I remember snippets of my excellent and slightly eclectic education - a jumble of science, business and language. One of my favourite subjects was Organization and Decision Making and particularly the Garbage Can (or Dust Bin as I would like to call it) theory of decision making. In short it separates the various flows of decision making: Problems, Solutions, Participants, and Opportunities and at the decision making point you just take what happens to be in the "bin" at that point in time and make the best possible decision.

I think that I like the chaos of the theory. For me this is much closer to what reality looks like than many of the more structured theories about decision making. Possibly, this tells more about me than about decision making in general.

I could easily use it as an analogy for projects. This is why it's so important that the flow of problems, solutions and opportunities are as transparent as possible to the participants. So that we all have the same content in our garbage cans when it's time to make decisions in the project. That way, the decision making will be easy and the targets and goals evident to all stakeholders.

More about the garbage can theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_can_model