The Science of “Muddling Through”

In this article, Charles Lindblom presents a compelling critique of the rational planning model. He argues that the formalized planning approach to decision making—the rational-comprehensive method—can be practiced only on very simple problems. For complex problems, it is not feasible to conduct a systematic comparison of a multitude of values. Thus, according to Lindblom, most decision makers rely on a method of “successive limited comparisons,” or “muddling through,” rather than on the rational-comprehensive method.