Kept ready, costed, and staffed, a worked-out proposal comes out when a reorganization, a new chief executive, or a reset budget opens a decision it can attach to.
An example
For two years, the quality director at a frozen-foods manufacturer kept a plan in a folder: merge the four plant laboratories into one central lab, cut testing time from three days to one, and save about $900,000 a year. Twice it had gone nowhere, because no one wanted to fight the plant managers over it. Each quarter she updated the costs and the vendor quotes, and kept two lab supervisors briefed. Then the company hired a chief executive from a dairy cooperative, who announced in her second week that she wanted a plan to cut food safety holds in half. The quality director sent the lab plan within forty-eight hours, rewritten to lead with hold times. It was the only fully costed proposal on the table, and it became the first item in the new chief executive's hundred-day plan.
Why it works
Organizations do not solve problems in neat order. Problems, solutions, and moments of decision drift past one another, and whatever solution is ready when a decision opens tends to attach to it. A new leader, a reorganization, or a reset budget creates that opening, and a finished proposal looks better and easier to adopt than anything still being drafted. It depends on the proposal being current when the moment comes, on its fitting the new problem honestly, and on the sponsor noticing the opening fast.
The thinking behind it
James G. March Cohen, March, and Olsen's A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice (1972) describes organizations in which problems, solutions, the people taking part, and choice opportunities flow as largely separate streams, so a decision happens when they meet, and solutions circulate looking for issues to which they might be the answer. A costed proposal kept current is such a solution. When a choice opportunity opens, the one that is ready is the one that attaches.
Johan P. Olsen The garbage can model, from A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice, stresses fluid participation: who takes part in a decision changes, and timing matters a great deal. A new chief executive, a reorganization, or a reset budget changes who takes part and opens a new choice opportunity. A proposal that lost under the old cast can win under the new one if it is ready on the day.
When it fits
Ideas that lost or never got a hearing, but still have real value, belong here, especially in organizations where leaders, structures, and budgets change every few years. You need the discipline to keep a plan current without being asked, people who stay briefed on it, and the judgment to tell an opening it fits from one it does not.
How to use it well
Keep the plan alive. Update its costs, vendors, and data each quarter, so that it is usable within days.
- Keep one or two of the people who would run it briefed and willing.
- Watch for openings: a new executive, a reorganization, a missed target, a budget reset.
- When one comes, rewrite the case around the problem the new decision addresses, if the plan truly solves it.
- Send it early, before others have time to produce alternatives.
Resist forcing it onto openings it does not fit. One bad attachment costs you the next one.
What it costs and where it backfires
Maintaining a plan nobody asked for takes time and can make you look fixated on one idea. Reframe it to fit every new problem and people will notice and discount it. The fit has to be real, so present the proposal as solving what it actually solves. Overstating what it fixes, to ride a new leader's priority, misleads that leader at the moment they know least.
When it is used on you
Test a new leader's first plan on its merits when it turns out to be an old proposal with a new cover. Ask what else could solve the problem, and give other teams a short window to bring their own proposals. If you are the new leader, ask for options before you accept the first one that arrives.