The concept of incrementalism has been widely cited over the past three decades, yet it has not served as the basis for a cumulatively developing line of empirical and theoretical inquiry. As a result, the highly promising incrementalist framework has contributed surprisingly little to improving our understanding of how decision-making processes can better adapt to humans' cognitive limitations. One indicator of the lack of progress is that policy scholars have never made a sustained attempt to explain how practitioners can become better incrementalists. To see whether the concept's original formulation may be obscuring the way to further progress, we summarize and appraise four enduring criticisms of inerementalism: its alleged lack of goal orientation, conservatism, limited range of applicability, and negative stance toward analysis. While questioning the validity of the critics' claims, we nevertheless propose a way to reframe the incrementalist endeavor, with the intention of stimulating both its critics and defenders to get on with the task of learning more about how individuals, organizations, and societies "can proceed relatively intelligently despite the fact that humans rarely have a good understanding of complex social problems and policy options.The concept of incrementalism, developed by Charles E. Lindblom, has been one of the most widely cited ideas in the policy sciences. In the three decades since its inception, however, the concept has not served as the basis for a cumulatively developing line of empirical and theoretical researchJ Curiously, it has failed to stimulate scholars either 'to articulate other strategies that avoid the impossible aspiration to synopsis [or] to give a more precise formulation to disjointed incrementalism as one such strategy' (Lindblom, 1979: 525). Nor is it clear that incrementalist ideas have been very helpful to practitioners.The fame achieved by incrementalism suggests that the concept captures important elements in political and organizational life; but its deeper implications apparently have not been understood well enough for other scholars to actively work with it. We conjecture that the unfulfilled promise of incrementalism could be due in part to the way the concept was originally framed, and that it may be possible to refocus the concept to make it more generative for future research on policy making.Toward that end, this paper briefly summarizes the main facets of the concept of incrementalism, reviews the primary criticisms advanced against the decision strategy, and appraises the validity of the criticisms, z We find that the criticisms of incrementalism by and large are invalid. But because the misunderstandings are widespread and enduring, and because the failure to develop this line of scholarship is so striking, we suggest that it makes sense to