The garbage can
A vital tool for surviving the world of news
Whether you are Prime Minister trying to maintain modest order while you do what you need to do, a Journalist baffled and wanting the vision to write with, or a baffled reader hoping to make sense of your world over a large mug of coffee, the challenge is the same: First you wonder if what you are seeing and hearing is remotely true, then having satisfied yourself, you need to understand what really happened and why. Enter the garbage can.
Garbage can theory
Garbage can theory also known as the Garbage can Model of decision making was written about in 1972 by Michael D. Cohen, James G. March, and Johan P. Olsen, professors of management at Cornell University. Don’t let that put you off, it’s a common-sense idea your grandmother would have appreciated.
Today, I’m going to show you how this same theory affects almost every area where a societal or organisational hierarchy exists and within it people make decisions presumably within the framework of ,or for the benefit of that society or organisation.
What they did isn’t what they said they did. What they did isn’t what they were accused of. What they did makes no sense. It’s not what one might expect. Why did they do that? I don’t understand. Ever found yourself baffled by what you were told or what you read?
It may well be that the garbage can model is in action.
The garbage can isn’t just a management theory, it’s about human behaviour.
The simple explanation is this: Unlike the imagined scenario whereby the organisation, say a big company, has rules and goals and principles and has a current strategy for achieving goals, then managers bear in mind the agreed goals, and use the agreed strategies to go after these goals, you have a much more realistic scenario that is familiar to everyone who ever tried to change a company in any way, here it is:
The organisation has lots of people who for one reason or another have a solution that they’d like to execute. It might for example be that their brother owns a CRM company and they’d like their brother to implement a new CRM ( popular in politics) , it could be anything. Each of these dozens of executives have a similar solution they want to execute and they attend every meeting and gathering looking for a problem they can solve with their solution.
Given recent history of far right thugs causing trouble, that’s a perfect example. The thing they’re good at is organising a gang of thugs to riot, they finally found a problem they could address with their favourite solution, a refugee crisis. That’s it.
You’ve probably already worked out that there’s no promise to actually solve anything, its simply an opportunity to roll out the solution. It could just as easily be a PR campaign to be executed by the CEOs son who owns a PR firm or a new website from the lady that the CTO fancies like crazy, the list can get very long, very fast.
The Garbage can metaphor refers to the idea that a problem someone introduces in a meeting ,or any such forum acts like a garbage can in that attracts all these possible solutions, though often not great matches to the actual need,
As a CTO, I stumbled upon this a lot. Until you taught the organisation to identify its most important problems, justify solving them and prioritise them, instead of a progressive program of change, you got series of random projects created via the Garbage can method and spent a lot of money for little or no return or even substantial cost.
How the Garbage can could help you to understand news.
News is a random thing. Each day, the TV, Newssheet, or Social Platform presents the world with a new collection of garbage cans and seeks only that they are filled. Nice grammar may sometimes be a requirement, but truth or common-sense are rarely a real goal, but rather a decoration. In other words, it must not be probably dishonest, nor should it be true, but upsetting to someone powerful, otherwise anything whatsoever will pretty much do.
Here’s the simple rule for exploring news with the Garbage Can Model.
1. Assume everything is either a lie or mispresented.
2. Read it and picture it at face value.
3. Assess what others make of it, is it popular or not, believed or not?
4. Look up the author, what do you know, or can find out that tells you what the author gains from this story?
5. Eliminate every story where the author has a goal and accept the best of what’s left as the most likely truth.
Example 1, Telegram, the undercurrent:
Today, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France and potentially faces 20 years in prison. Durov is the founder and owner of Telegram. So why is France arresting the CEO of a tech firm, even if he is Russian born?
Well on investigation, it turns out that hackers stole lots of embarrassing information from Israel and now they are publishing that embarrassing information daily on Telegram. Netanyahu asked Durov to suppress this information or delete it and Durov said no on principle.
Netanyahu has a problem to be solved.
France has an opportunity to solve Netanyahu’s problem.
What is France getting for this? We don’t know yet, but were digging
What is Macron getting for this? As above.
Well it appears that the offences levelled at Durov by France’s OFMIN, include fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, and organised crime, according to the AFP news agency, which quoted officials speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Franco-Russian billionaire is also accused of failing to take action against the harmful use of Telegram.
We don’t know the final answer other than Israel seems to hold unbreakable power over the USA and UK so why not France? Certainly, as a NATO member, France is under pressure to support NATO and hence Israel.
That’s probably not quite the full answer, but it’s a long way from the initial assumption and very close to the truth, at worst. In terms of International news, this is as good as it tends to get. When you feel very confident that’s when you should worry.
Example 2, the noise versus the plot.
We have 100m displaced people on earth. 36 million of these are fleeing war or strife either internal or caused by outsiders such as NATO, Saudi Arabia, or the US and most of the remainder are displaced primarily by freak weather, climate change, famine or a combination. This is expected to grow as climate change becomes a much bigger problem.
As a result of the arrival in Europe of vast numbers of migrants and refugees, there is now a weekly expo of thuggish “far-right” groups on the streets attacking coloured people and anyone who can be identified as an immigrant. The interesting part of this is that it’s mostly not focused on the recent refugees, or even economic migrants, but on long-established communities of Asians in UK and Islamic communities. So what’s really going on here?
Well it’s not that difficult once you appreciate the garbage can.
There are groups, partly made up of layabouts and misfits wanting opportunities to protest and carry out violence under any guise, both to loot shops and businesses and pick pockets and also to earn money posting hate online as influencers being paid by those with a vested interest.
The Islamic protests are well known to have their roots in Israel and the US, where wars against Islamic nations are current and in planning and the opportunity to generate public support for these moves is convenient.
There’s a group with a solution called protest. They want an excuse to protest their own poor situation economically and to earn money from it.
Theres a group with a problem, i.e. they want to generate hatred against foreigners, coloured people and therefore Islamic groups in that order by way of a weaponised campaign of fake news and trolling.
The truth is entirely lost as the solution group delivers their product to the problem group. None of it has any connection to the reality of life.
Now that you understand how to look for the problem and the solution, you are better equipped to dig deeper and discover a more likely explanation for news that just makes no sense, or makes too much sense.
Conclusion
Lies, usually, but not always look too obvious or as others have put it, make too much sense. A wise reader will carry around a hefty portion of suspicion. You may have graduated a long time ago, or stopped short of that, or you may simply have little motivation to seek truth. Even if you don’t publish stuff and need a reputation, much less to cover your back, you probably feel you are entitled to at least know the truth or have a suspicion that confidently puts you ahead of the gang.
You might even be a senior manager, or CEO trying to make sense of the awful decisions this team of managers seem to have made year after year and scratching your head to figure out how you can identify the problem and design a solution. If you are in any of these situations, look for the fake problems, garbage can solutions and then the truth.
You may not always get it spot on, who does, but you will up your game very substantially. A final additional tip: The truth usually fits into a hierarchy of truth that sits together comfortably. No matter how convincing, if it has to stand alone without a bigger picture, its deeply suspicious. This is why business consultants start at a Macro level and drill down to the problems to eliminate all the garbage can candidates and sellers.
