normal accidents: garbage can theory 'garbage-can theory' (bounded rationality) describes decision-making in highly ambiguous settings "organized anarchies" irregular confluence of people, problems, solutions uncertain circumstances, and choice opportunities decision makers move from one opportunity to the other relying on chance alignment of components and organizational demands published in field of organizational behavior Cohen March and Olsen (1972) reckon network research has similar but we have studied naming a lot pending funding for 'Internet garbage can theory' in meantime we also have dilbert as mouthpiece for basic tenets actually we need more Internet garbage can science since we have not formalized a lot of our garbage yet see dave plonka's lisa talk, caida rfc1918 paper, redundant anycast traffic, etc grep for garbage in bruce sterlings's nsf keynote talk http://www.cra.org/Activities/grand.challenges/sterling.html exceptionally worth reading anyway