Successive Approximation
Charles Lindblom
1917–2018 · United States
Charles Lindblom spent most of his career at Yale studying how policy actually gets made in democracies — as opposed to how textbooks said it should be made. The textbook model, which he called 'the rational-comprehensive method,' began with clarifying values, surveying all alternatives, predicting consequences, and selecting the optimum. Lindblom's observation, set out in 'The Science of Muddling Through' (1959), was that no real policymaker has ever worked this way and no real policymaker ever could.
What policymakers do instead is what he called 'successive limited comparisons.' They start from the current policy, consider a small number of marginal changes, evaluate the changes against a limited set of consequences, and adjust if the result is unsatisfactory. They iterate. Lindblom argued that this was not a degraded version of rational analysis — it was a different and, for complex social problems, often more reliable method. 'Muddling through,' done well, builds in error correction at every step.
His later work (Politics and Markets, 1977; Inquiry and Change, 1990) extended the argument to political economy and to the conditions under which a society can think collectively at all. Throughout, he kept the focus on the procedural question: what does it take for institutions to learn, and what habits of expertise actively prevent it?
Why it matters here
Lindblom is the patron saint of taking small steps on purpose. Civic experimentation operationalises 'muddling through' — instead of treating incremental adjustment as a confession of inadequacy, it makes the steps observable, comparable, and shareable across jurisdictions. That turns muddling from a private coping strategy into a public method.
Further reading
- 'The Science of Muddling Through' (Public Administration Review, 1959)
- 'Still Muddling, Not Yet Through' (Public Administration Review, 1979)
- Politics and Markets (1977)
- Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society (1990)