The Best Explanation I’ve Ever Found for How Universities Work—And How to Harness It

Why the Garbage Can Model Offers the Best Lens for Understanding University Decision-Making—and How to Use It to Drive Meaningful Change

"Don't fight forces; use them." — R. Buckminster Fuller

Leading change in higher education often feels like chasing decisions made by chance, not strategy.

You know what I mean.

A new initiative languishes in task force purgatory for months; then, one day—out of nowhere and for no rhyme or reason at all—it’s approved after a single meeting. Or that idea you championed a few years ago—you know, the really good one that got tossed around for months and was eventually dismissed. That idea resurfaces a year later by someone new to your team. “Why didn’t we think of this years ago,” everyone asks as you shrug your head in disbelief.

You've watched the same patterns unfold year after year.

Honestly, you can’t help but laugh at how random decision-making in universities can be sometimes. You can’t help but wonder—how do we ever get anything done around here?!? I’ve asked myself that question for years.

Now I will say, none of this is unique to higher education. In fact, these kinds of seemingly random, nonlinear patterns happen all the time, especially in social sector organizations—government, nonprofits, etc.

Here in New Hampshire, where I live, a town council had been debating a downtown revitalization project for years. Then, one day, a city planner from another state approached the council with a proposal to build a trendy new downtown restaurant. At the same time, a community group had mobilized to address the growing number of empty storefronts downtown. Magically, the town council approved an even bigger, more ambitious project, finding the funds and garnering unanimous buy-in overnight. Apparently, the pieces were there all along. It just took the right combination of variables to come together at the right time for a decision to solidify.

The Lesson

Change rarely results from carefully laid plans. It happens because ideas, problems, concerns, and solutions serendipitously intersect.

Random, I know, but it happens all the time. It’s actually a very well-documented phenomenon.

Read This Paper—It Will Change Your Life

The phenomenon is at the heart of a 1972 paper by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen, A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice. Their research revealed that many organizations—particularly universities but also government agencies and non-profits—don’t make decisions through orderly, rational processes. Instead, decision-making is more like rummaging through garbage cans, where ideas, challenges, people, opportunities, experiences, concepts, fears—you name it—are constantly being tossed in, examined, moved around, thrown back out, and sometimes brought back in.

Decisions happen when the right combination of elements collide unexpectedly at the right time.

The garbage can model is the best explanation I’ve ever encountered for how universities actually work. And, more importantly, it provides a practical guide for how to drive change within that complexity.

The Garbage Can Model: Making Sense of the Chaos

Cohen, March, and Olsen described this process more broadly as "organized anarchy.”

I’ve been told they actually debated whether “organized” was too generous a term but that they couldn’t think of what else to call their new theory.

Anyway, organized anarchies are defined by three characteristics:

• Problematic Preferences: Goals are often ambiguous or contested. Mission matters, but so do market opportunities. Money matters too, unless—well, it just suddenly doesn’t anymore for some reason. Who knows!?! It all depends on who’s in the room at what time and how they interpret the pressures of the moment.

• Unclear Technology: Processes and operations are not well understood by the people making decisions. Decision-making bodies exist, sure, but the path from idea to implementation is opaque and never clear-cut.

• Fluid Participation: People cycle in and out of decision-making roles. Turnover is usually high. People rotate on and off committees, transition to new jobs, or, for whatever reason, just move on.

This is why that proposal you had years ago gathered dust only to suddenly gain momentum when a newly motivated team member spoke up, or why that downtown revitalization project suddenly took hold.

Understanding this pattern doesn't just explain the chaos around us in higher education—it offers a strategy for working within it.

The garbage can model doesn’t promise clarity, nor is it comforting, I know. It’s actually a pretty unsettling realization when you sit with it long enough. But it does provide a lens for navigating and even leveraging uncertainty if you think about it in the right ways.

From Garbage to Innovation: Five Strategies That Might Just Work

Once I realized that higher education just works this way, I stopped fighting these forces and started using them.

Here are five strategies that I have seen work:

1. Creating More Garbage Cans

If decisions happen when problems, solutions, and participants intersect at random, one change strategy could be simply to create more opportunities for those collisions to occur. Basically, create more venues for garbage can decision making.

Years ago, a university wanted to expand its use of digital learning technology in the classroom. They did it right. First off, they didn’t launch a formal task force or another committee. They didn’t even call when they were doing digital learning at the time. Instead, they hosted a series of “collaboration workshops”—informal gatherings on and off campus where faculty, designers, administrators, and students could gather, share ideas, and conduct small experiments. It was so informal, in fact, people rarely knew why they were there—and that was the point.

In one workshop, a faculty member mentioned struggling to engage students in large lectures. A student then expressed an interest in gaining access to short, interactive videos to watch before class. That serendipitous collision sparked a campus-wide digital “micro-learning” project that increased engagement across several courses and eventually fed into a broader initiative.

Change Insight: Create collisions. Harness serendipity. Find opportunities for open, idea-driven conversations. Try to increase the likelihood that those moments—however random—create venues for change.

2. Time Your Efforts with Organizational Patterns

Participation in university decision-making may be fluid, but it follows some familiar patterns year after year. For instance, people always tend to be more reflective at the end of the semester. What worked? What didn’t work? Everyone becomes more future-oriented, especially because that’s usually the time when budget decisions for the following year are also made.

At another university I know, faculty buy-in to online learning languished for years—but not for reasons its leadership assumed. The main issue was actually that every time moving courses online came up, it was always right during the busy start of the semester. One year, a dean figured this out so she held off until summer to talk about potential moves to online. Her timing made all the difference. Within weeks, multiple departments signed on to start developing new online courses, which happened to coincide with the quiet launch of a new division of online learning also that summer.

Change Insight: Timing is everything in higher education. Align your efforts with the natural rhythms of campus life. Try to avoid pushing major change inititives at the busiest times of year.

3. Build Informal Influence Before Formal Proposals

Formal committee structures matter, but informal relationships hold way more power. Change is all about trust. In organized anarchies, who’s in the room and what influence they have matters as much as what’s on the agenda.

In a previous role, I was part of an effort to launch a new employer engagement strategy for our university. We did it right. We didn't start by presenting detailed frameworks to large groups of people or forcing new policies on stakeholders. Instead, we started with small, informal ideation sessions. We invited others to share their ideas and experiences in meetings and then invited them to more formal working sessions. We asked for advice on shaping the new strategy. By the time the strategy was finalized, it already had grassroots support.

Change Insight: Change is social before it’s structural. Build coalitions first. Built trust above all else.

4. Embrace the Messiness of Experimentation

The garbage can model tells us that learning and decision-making in universities will always be messy. Change never follows a neat blueprint—it emerges from unpredictable intersections.

Years ago, I watched as a university set out to launch a competency-based learning initiative. Nothing went as planned. Demand was lower than expected. The technology had glitches. Adoption—at least at first—was underwhelming. But instead of declaring it a failure, the prorgam leadership treated it as a learning opportunity. They conducted focus groups with students, studied data on student performance, revisited the problem they were trying to solve, refined the platform, and adjusted marketing strategies. At the time, they had no idea where that activity would take them. Two years later, CBE became one of its most successful learning offerings.

Change Insight: Slow starts are not a failure. It’s often a sign that something new is taking shape, but that you need to slow down enough to learn and adjust.

Stop Fighting the System—Start Steering It

Universities are organized anarchies. They always have been and probably always will be. They're institutions, after all—built for continuity over change, preservation over disruption. They don’t change easily, and they certainly don’t change fast—until, well, they do for some reason.

By creating more arenas for unexpected collisions, timing efforts with academic rhythms, building informal support networks, and accepting the inherent messiness of experimentation, we can steer even the most tradition-bound institution toward meaningful change.

The garbage can model doesn’t just explain that reality; it shows us how to use it.