Allison's Three Models of Decision-Making
An organization’s decision can reflect rational choice, standard procedure, or bargaining among insiders with conflicting incentives. The political model often makes an apparently irrational outcome legible: the institution is not one mind choosing, but several players producing a compromise.
The Cuban Missile Crisis can be told as a superpower calmly selecting its best move. Graham Allison’s more unsettling reading is that the outcome emerged through politics: people inside the machinery of government were pursuing different vested interests.
E1Three answers to “Why did they do that?”
The rational-choice model treats the organization as a single actor comparing options. The process model looks instead at routines: what the institution does is constrained by its established procedures. The political model replaces the imaginary single decision-maker with multiple players, each carrying distinct incentives and influence. The final decision may therefore be neither anyone’s preferred answer nor the abstract optimum; it can be the residue of bargaining among people with enough power to shape the result.
E1Politics is not a universal solvent
A strange decision does not by itself prove hidden bargaining. It may genuinely be a reasoned choice, or simply the output of an established routine. The three models are competing lenses, not permission to explain every institutional failure as intrigue.
E1Reconstruct the players, not just the policy
When an organizational decision looks inexplicable, write down three explanations: the objective it could rationally serve, the routine that could have produced it, and the internal players who gained or avoided loss. Then look for evidence that distinguishes those accounts before deciding which story to believe.
Episodes that teach this
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CEOs Just Pretend They Know Everything - Future IQ
· explained at 11:59
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"Graham Allison... wrote a paper analyzing the Cuban missile crisis... model three which is the real model which is that politics... everybody has their own vested interest."