Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman
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that the FBI didn't do very well with the information it did have. Key signals were never “documented by the bureau or placed in any system from which they could be retrieved by agents investigating terrorist threats” (Seper, 2005, p. 1).
Structural barriers between the FBI and the CIA were exacerbated by the enmity between the two agencies' patron saints, J. Edgar Hoover and “Wild Bill” Donovan. When Hoover first became FBI director in the 1920s, he reported to Donovan, who didn't trust him and tried unsuccessfully to get him fired. When World War II broke out, Hoover lobbied to get the FBI identified as the nation's worldwide intelligence agency. He fumed when President Franklin D. Roosevelt instead created a new agency and made Donovan its director. As often happens, cooperation between two units was chronically hampered by a rocky personal relationship between two top dogs who never liked one another.
Politically, the relationship between the FBI and CIA was born in turf conflict because of Roosevelt's decision to give responsibility for foreign intelligence to Donovan instead of to Hoover. The friction persisted over the decades as both agencies vied for turf and funding from Congress and the White House.
Symbolically, different histories and missions led to very distinct cultures. The FBI, which built its image with the dramatic capture or killing of notorious gang leaders, bank robbers, and foreign agents, liked to generate headlines by pouncing on suspects quickly and publicly. The CIA preferred to work in the shadows, believing that patience and secrecy were vital to its task of collecting intelligence and rooting out foreign spies.
Senior U.S. officials have known for years that tension between the FBI and CIA damages U.S. security. But most initiatives to improve the relationship have been partial and ephemeral, falling well short of addressing the full range of issues. Ten years after 9/11, Graff (2012) concluded that, “Problems persist and will probably never be fully overcome.”
Multi‐Frame Thinking
The overview of the four‐frame model in Exhibit 1.2 shows that each of the frames has its own image of reality. You may be drawn to some and put off by others. One perspective may seem straightforward, while another seems puzzling or alien. But learning to apply all four deepens your appreciation and understanding of organizations. When Galileo devised the first telescope, he found that each lens he added contributed to a more accurate image of the heavens. Successful managers take advantage of the same truth. Like physicians, they reframe, consciously or intuitively, until they understand the situation at hand. They use more than one lens to develop a diagnosis of what they are up against and how to move forward.
Exhibit 1.2. Overview of the Four‐Frame Model.
| Frame | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structural | Human Resource | Political | Symbolic | |
| Metaphor for organization | Factory or machine | Family | Jungle | Carnival, temple, theater |
| Supporting disciplines | Sociology, management science, economics | Psychology | Political science | Anthropology, dramaturgy, institutional theory |
| Central concepts | Roles, goals, strategies, policies, technology, environment | Needs, skills, relationships | Power, conflict, competition, politics | Culture, myth, meaning, metaphor, ritual, ceremony, stories, heroes |
| Image of leadership | Social architecture | Empowerment | Advocacy and political savvy | Inspiration |
| Basic leadership challenge | Attune structure to task, technology, environment | Align organizational and human needs | Develop agenda and power base | Create faith, belief, beauty, meaning |
This claim about the advantages of multiple perspectives has stimulated a growing body of research. Dunford and Palmer (1995) discovered that management courses teaching multiple frames had significant positive effects over both the short and long term—in fact, 98 percent of their respondents rated reframing as helpful or very helpful, and about 90 percent felt it gave them a competitive advantage. Other studies have shown that the ability to use multiple frames is associated with greater effectiveness for managers and leaders (Bensimon, 1989, 1990; Birnbaum, 1992; Bolman and Deal, 1991, 1992a, 1992b; Heimovics, Herman, and Jurkiewicz Coughlin, 1993, 1995; Wimpelberg, 1987). Similarly, Pitt and Tepper (2012) found that double‐majoring helped college students develop both creative and integrative thinking. As one student put it, “I'm never stuck in one frame of mind because I'm always switching back and forth between the two” (p. 40). Multi‐frame thinking requires moving beyond narrow, mechanical approaches for understanding organizations. We cannot count the number of times managers have told us that they handled some problem the “only way” it could be done. That was United Airline's initial defense in April, 2017, when video of a bloodied doctor being dragged off a plane went viral. United's CEO wrote that “our agents were left with no choice” because the 69‐year‐old physician had refused to give up his seat. After a few days in public relations hell, United announced that the only choice was a bad one, and they would never do it again. It may be comforting to think that failure was unavoidable and we did all we could. But it can be liberating to realize there is always more than one way to respond to any problem or dilemma. Those who master reframing report a liberating sense of choice and power.
Akira Kurosawa's classic film Rashomon recounts the same event through the eyes of several witnesses. Each tells a different story. Similarly, organizations are filled with people who have divergent interpretations of what is and should be happening. Each version contains glimmers of truth, but each is a product of the prejudices and blind spots of its maker. Each frame tells a different story (Gottschall, 2012), but no single story is comprehensive enough to make an organization fully understandable or manageable. Effective managers need frames to generate multiple stories, the skill to sort through the alternatives, and the wisdom to match the right story to the situation.6
Lack of imagination—Langer (1989) calls it “mindlessness”—is a major cause of the shortfall between the reach and the grasp of so many organizations—the empty chasm between noble aspirations and disappointing results. The gap is painfully acute in a world where organizations dominate so much of our lives. Taleb (2007) depicts events like the Covid‐19 pandemic or the 9/11 attacks as “black swans”—novel events that are unexpected because we have never seen them before. If every swan we've observed is white, we expect the same in the future. But fateful, make‐or‐break events are more likely to fall outside previous experience and catch us flat‐footed, as was true of the 2020 pandemic. Imagination and mindfulness offer our best chance for being ready when a black swan sails into view, and multi‐frame thinking is a powerful stimulus to the broad, creative mind‐set imagination requires.
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