To those who say that the approach's situational analysis is not exhaustive, I'd like to point out that this is much better than the planning approach often practiced by most mayors today, which is characterized by the application of the nonrational version of Charles Lindblom's
disjointed incrementalism, or the 'muddling through' planning approach.
If those theories are vacuous, they can be subsumed collectively under the principle of
disjointed incrementalism. The myopic strategy of
disjointed incrementalism is to make relatively small reversible moves away from the status quo under the condition of low information about the consequences and costs of a decision.
What becomes clear from the case studies, however, is that 'active ageing' policies have been implemented in a rather piecemeal and sometimes haphazard manner without a clear framework, or What Sol Encel, in his study of the Australian context, refers to as "
disjointed incrementalism" rather than a strategic approach.
Sample topics include
disjointed incrementalism, punctuated equilibrium models, cost benefit analysis, queuing theory, and Confucian decision making.
The adaptive approach to decision making was later synthesized by Braybrooke and Lindblom[3] into the model of "disjointed incrementalism".
Disjointed incrementalism bears a striking resemblance to the processual approach to organizational change.
In so doing we have drawn strong parallels with the model of disjointed incrementalism with its emphasis on incremental, reconstructive, serial and remedial decision making.
Even in ordinary English, the heuristic of satisficing is simpler than the heuristics of disjointed incrementalism. A satisficing target or aspiration level serves as a stopping rule in a search for alternatives: the decision maker ends the search once he or she encounters an option that exceeds the aspiration level, instead of trying to optimize by balancing the marginal costs and benefits of further search.
In two of the most serious problems, disjointed incrementalism can cause (1) a majority of departments to recommend a series of proposals that will on average hurt each department or (2) a majority to reject a series of proposals that would on average help every department.
It is unclear, however, whether such sophistication is consistent with disjointed incrementalism.(22)
Hence the informal theory of disjointed incrementalism faces a dilemma: conditions confirming its uncontroversial claims help to disconfirm its claims about the benefits of local search; and conversely, conditions upholding the conjectures about incremental search yield unexpected results about seriality and redundancy.