From garbage can to compost heap
My friend Mo is big on theory. Design theory, product management theory, organisational theory – you name it. He loves a framework that helps explain a working situation. He introduced me to Lean UX sometime around 2015, then to the theory of constraints, and onward to a handful of others I’ve half-forgotten. One concept he told me about – probably over a mixed grill somewhere on the Kingsland Road – was the garbage can model. The model describes a theory of decision-making in complex, unaligned organisations using the unglamorous image of a bin into which problems, solutions, and participants get thrown independently, mixing chaotically until a decision happens by collision rather than intention. I come back to it every so often, partly because the name is so good, and partly because it explains so much about where I work. It isn’t a perfect fit for the NHS, but it is instructive.
The Federated Data Platform (FDP) has been in the news a lot lately. Tito Castillo recently wrote an excellent article about it, and while there is a lot to say about supplier selection and national standards, the thing that really jumped out at me wasn’t the FDP story itself, but rather his use of the garbage can model as a framing device and what it reveals about the experience of being a designer in a large public institution. His description of the model:
In a loosely ordered system, the streams move independently. Problems exist without solutions. Solutions circulate looking for problems to attach to. People move in and out of decision-making arenas. And moments of decision arise on their own schedule, driven by budgets, deadlines, or political events.
A decision happens when these streams converge. A funding window opens at the same time that a vendor is promoting a platform, stakeholders are available to approve it, and a recognised problem can be linked to the proposal. The resulting decision is real, but its coherence is coincidental rather than planned. Everyone involved may have acted reasonably within their own context. The system as a whole produces an outcome that nobody quite intended.
If you are a designer, trained to define problems before solutions get explored, the situation described above looks like madness. In a garbage can system, solutions are already circulating before problems are properly defined, and the moments when decisions get made often happen too quickly or too indirectly for careful problem framing to intervene. You can do all the right things – research, analysis, a well crafted problem statement – and still watch a decision get made without fully accounting for accumulated evidence.
The drive to define a problem that teams can work toward solving becomes a never-ending, snake-eating-its-own-tail battle against all of the other streams that aren’t oriented that way. The very nature of the system makes this true. Without reorganising everything, it is hard to see how that changes. Castillo provides a description of how this plays out in practice in the health system (not just with the FDP):
National bodies set direction, but delivery depends on local adoption. Suppliers shape the architecture through product design choices that may not reflect national intent. People move in and out of specific decisions, contributing views that make sense locally but do not add up to a coherent whole.
It is hard not to see this as a form of organised anarchy – a contradiction in terms and another foundational element of the garbage can model. From wikipedia:
Organised anarchies can be characterised by a sense of chaos and dynamism. Problems and solutions are loosely coupled. Proposed solutions change during bargaining. All participants involved do not get the chance to fully participate, and have limitations on their time and energy. Many things happen at once, all competing with each other for attention. Amongst the confusion, participants try to make sense of their role in the organisation.
In a garbage can system, decisions get shaped by whomever happened to be present. Part of the job in this environment is being in the right rooms at the right moments. Not because you’re playing politics, but because if design methods and mindsets are present when the streams collide, the outcome will (hopefully) reflect that. If the lenses brought to bear on a particular problem reflect technology and suppliers and policy, but not users, you have a problem. So showing up and staying in the conversation is itself a design activity.
The NHS is changing. It is always changing. I’ve been here for three and a half years and this is my second org-wide merger. Lots of people are leaving, and with good reason. I wish them all well, and I’m sad many of them are going, but I didn’t take voluntary redundancy and I hope to stay on to try to see some of our work through. Part of that is straightforward: this is the most meaningful work I can put my time into. Part of why I want to stay is probably less flattering: when the streams align and something actually lands, the feeling is disproportionate to the outcome, and I suspect intermittent reinforcement is part of what keeps me pressing the lever, like a pigeon whose brain has been moulded through operant conditioning.
Within the App programme, I have influence over what we work on and how we do it. I contribute to shaping our priorities and the approach taken to the work. What’s harder are the service design problems that require the wider system to change in order to produce a better result for users. I can name them. I can make a case for them. But I can’t force the system to respond. No one team can. The processes and tools that need to change are beyond our reach. I am almost certainly not in the right rooms.
The native replatforming work is a good example of what work looks like when we can reach all of the levers. The team can research, design, and build things. The scope is bounded and the quality bar is ours to set. When moments of decision arrive, there’s something coherent already in place. A codebase. A design language. A team with a working practice. The streams have something to find and adhere to.
Keeping the right problems alive is hard. In the garbage can model, resolution – where a problem and a solution genuinely meet and get worked through – is the rarest way decisions get made. Most happen through oversight, where a decision is made so quickly that problems don’t get a chance to attach to it, or flight, where problems simply detach and drift away because the moment has passed. The main risk isn’t that a problem gets solved badly – it’s that it gets outpaced or abandoned. Plans don’t get completed because there’s a new plan to supplant them. To stay relevant you need to maintain and resurface and reattach the problem to the other streams. That is less glamorous than designing a new interface but it is arguably the more important skill in this kind of environment.
In practice, this work doesn’t look like much from the outside. You run research that no one asked for to investigate a hunch. You articulate a problem that isn’t part of one of the big plans to surface what you’ve learned. You document the work so that it outlasts you. You turn up to basically every meeting there is, even if it doesn’t obviously concern you, because the participant stream determines what mindsets direct the decision-making. None of that is control. Done consistently though, it builds influence to keep the problems you care about alive and in the conversation for a little bit longer.
While the garbage can model mostly fits, the work might be better described by a different image. A garbage can implies waste, destruction, an ending, a lack of care. The work of keeping problems alive by working within a complex ecosystem lends itself to gardening as the obvious replacement, but perhaps that is too genteel. Better still might the image of a compost heap: it is messy and a little terrifying, it confounds easy analysis, it has a certain life of its own and over time, if you keep turning it and adding to it, it becomes generative. When the conditions and season are right, there’s something there to meet the moment.
Patience and persistence, yes. But not just waiting. Tending.