Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman
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make better decisions. Tourish (2019) counters that managers hoping to learn from published research will find that most of it is trivial, unreadable, and disconnected from practice.
The bottom line is that Type I intuitive and Type II reflective thinking are both powerful and vital tools for managers and leaders. Each has advantages and disadvantages compared to the other. The key is knowing how and when to use each. Leaders go astray when their knowledge and judgment are inadequate to deal with the complex and elusive problems they face. The quality of their judgments depends on the information at hand, their mental maps, and how well they have learned to use them. Good maps align with the terrain and provide enough detail to keep you on course. If you're trying to find your way around Beijing, a map of Chicago won't help much. In the same way, different circumstances require different approaches.
Even with the right map, getting around will be slow and awkward if you have to stop and study at every intersection. The ultimate goal is fluid expertise, the sort of know‐how that lets you think on the fly and navigate organizations as easily as you drive on a familiar route. You can make decisions quickly and automatically because you know at a glance where you are and what you need to do next.
There is no shortcut to developing this kind of expertise. It takes effort, time, practice, and feedback. Some of the effort has to go into learning frames and the ideas behind them. Equally important is putting the ideas to use. Experience, one often hears, is the best teacher, but that is true only if one learns from it. McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison (1988, p. 122) found that a distinguishing quality among successful executives was that they were great learners, displaying an “extraordinary tenacity in extracting something worthwhile from their experience and in seeking experiences rich in opportunities for growth.”
Reframing
Frames define the questions we ask and solutions we consider (Berger, 2014). John Dewey defined freedom as the power to choose among known alternatives. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu made a similar point 2,500 years ago: “Many options bring victory, few options bring defeat, no options at all spell disaster” (Sun, 2012). When managers don't see options, they make mistakes but often fail to understand why.
Take a simple question: “What is the sum of 5 plus 5?” The only right answer is “10.” Ask a different way, “What two numbers add up to ten?” Now the number of solutions is infinite (once you include fractions and negative numbers). The two questions differ in how they are framed. Albert Einstein once observed: “If I had a problem to solve and my whole life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty‐five minutes determining the question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in five minutes” (Seelig, 2015, p. 19).
Asking the right question helps to break frames. Why do that? A news story from the summer of 2007 illustrates. Imagine yourself among a group of friends enjoying dinner on the patio of a Washington, D.C., home. An armed, hooded intruder suddenly appears and points a gun at the head of a 14‐year‐old guest. “Give me your money,” he says, “or I'll start shooting.” If you're at that table, what do you do? You could faint. Or freeze. You could try a heroic frontal attack. You might try to run. Or you could try to break the frame and redefine the situation by asking an unexpected question. That's exactly what Cristina “Cha Cha” Rowan did.
“We were just finishing dinner,” [she] told the man. “Why don't you have a glass of wine with us?”
The intruder had a sip of their Chateau Malescot St‐Exupéry and said, “Damn, that's good wine.”
The girl's father … told the intruder to take the whole glass, and Rowan offered him the bottle.
The robber, with his hood down, took another sip and a bite of Camembert cheese. He put the gun in his sweatpants …
“I think I may have come to the wrong house,” the intruder said before apologizing. “Can I get a hug?”
Rowan … stood up and wrapped her arms around the would‐be robber. The other guests followed.
“Can we have a group hug?” the man asked. The five adults complied.
The man walked away a few moments later with a filled crystal wine glass, but nothing was stolen, and no one was hurt. Police were called to the scene and found the empty wine glass unbroken on the ground in an alley behind the house. (Hagey, 2007)
In one stroke, Cha Cha Rowan recast the situation from a robbery—“we might all be killed”—to a social occasion—“let's offer our guest some wine and include him in our party.” Like her, artistic managers frame and reframe experience fluidly, sometimes with extraordinary results. A critic once commented to Cézanne, “That doesn't look anything like a sunset.” Pondering his painting, Cézanne responded, “Then you don't see sunsets the way I do.” The critic tacitly assumed that his was the correct way to see sunsets. Like Cézanne and Rowan, leaders have to find ways of asking the right question to shift points of view when needed. This is not easy, which is why “most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed, and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame‐bound rather than reality‐bound” (Kahneman, 2011, p. 367).
Caldicott (2014) sees reframing as vital for leadership:
One distinguishing difference between leaders that succeed at driving collaboration and innovation versus those that fail is their ability to grasp complexity. This skill set involves framing difficult concepts quickly, synthesizing data in a way that drives new insight, and building teams that can generate future scenarios different from the world they see today.
A growing body of psychological research shows that reframing can improve performance across a range of tasks. Autin and Croizet (2012) gave students a difficult task on which they all struggled. Some students were taught to reframe the struggle as a normal sign of learning. That intervention increased confidence, working memory, and reading comprehension on subsequent tasks. Jamieson and others (2010) found that they could improve scores on the Graduate Record Exam by reframing anxiety as an aid to performance. The old song lyric, “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,” is powerful advice.
Like maps, frames are both windows on a terrain and tools for navigating its contours. Every tool has distinctive strengths and limitations. The right tool makes a job easier; the wrong one gets in the way. Tools thus become useful only when a situation is sized up accurately. Furthermore, one or two tools may suffice for simple jobs but not for more complex undertakings. Managers who master the hammer and expect all problems to behave like nails find life at work confusing and frustrating. The wise manager, like a skilled carpenter, wants a diverse collection of high‐quality implements at hand. Experienced managers also understand the difference between possessing a tool and knowing when and how to use it. Only experience and practice foster the skill and wisdom to take stock of a situation and use suitable tools with confidence and skill.
The Four Frames
Only in the past 100 years or so have social scientists devoted much time or attention to developing ideas about how organizations work, how they should work, or why they often fail. In the social sciences, several major schools of thought have evolved. Each has its own concepts, assumptions, and evidence espousing a particular view of how to bring social collectives under control. Each tradition claims a scientific foundation. But a theory can easily become a theology that preaches a single, parochial scripture. Modern managers must sort through a cacophony of voices and visions for help.
Sifting through competing voices is one of our goals in this book. We are not seeking or advocating the one best way. Rather, we consolidate major schools of organizational thought and research into a comprehensive framework encompassing four perspectives. Our goal is usable knowledge. We have sought ideas powerful enough to capture the subtlety and complexity of life in organizations yet simple enough to be useful. Our distillation has drawn much from the social sciences—particularly sociology, psychology, political science, and anthropology. Thousands of managers and scores