Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman
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approaches to management and leadership. One is a rational‐technical mind‐set emphasizing certainty and control. The other is an expressive, artistic conception encouraging flexibility, creativity, and interpretation. The first portrays managers as technicians; the second sees them as artists.
Exhibit 1.3. Expanding Managerial Thinking.
| How Managers Often Think | How Managers Might Think |
|---|---|
| Oversimplify reality (for example, blame problems on individuals' flaws and errors) | Think holistically about a full range of significant issues: people, power, structure, and symbols |
| Regardless of the problems at hand, rely on facts, logic, restructuring | Use feeling and intuition as well as logic, bargaining as well as training, celebration as well as reorganization |
| Cling to certainty, rationality, and control while fearing ambiguity, paradox, and “going with the flow” | Develop creativity, risk taking, and playfulness in response to life's dilemmas and paradoxes, and focus as much on finding the right question as the right answer, on finding meaning and faith amid clutter and confusion |
| Rely on the “one right answer” and the “one best way” | Show passionate, unwavering commitment to principle, combined with flexibility in understanding and responding to events |
Artists interpret experience and express it in forms that can be felt, understood, and appreciated by others. Art embraces emotion, subtlety, ambiguity. An artist reframes the world so others can see new possibilities. Modern organizations often rely too much on engineering and too little on art in searching for quality, commitment, and creativity. Art is not a replacement for engineering but an enhancement and a powerful partner. Artistic leaders and managers help us look and probe beyond today's reality to new forms that release untapped individual energies and improve collective performance. The leader as artist relies on abstract images as well as memos, poetry as well as policy, reflection as well as command, and reframing as well as refitting.
CONCLUSION
As organizations have become pervasive and dominant, they have also become harder to understand and manage. The result is that managers are often nearly as clueless as their subordinates (the Dilberts of the world) think they are. The consequences of myopic management and leadership show up every day, sometimes in small and subtle ways, sometimes in large and blatant catastrophes. Think of the enormous differences in levels of suffering and death between the relatively few countries that contained the Covid‐19 pandemic effectively, and the many that did not. Our basic premise is that a primary cause of managerial failure is faulty thinking rooted in inadequate ideas and truncated possibilities. Managers and those who try to help them too often rely on narrow models that capture only part of organizational life.
Learning multiple perspectives, or frames, is a defense against thrashing around without a clue about what you are doing or why. Frames serve multiple functions. They are sources of new questions, filters for sorting essence from trivia, maps that aid navigation, and tools for solving problems and getting things done. This book is organized around four frames rooted in both managerial wisdom and social science knowledge. The structural approach focuses on the architecture of organization—the design of units and subunits, rules and roles, goals and policies. The human resource lens emphasizes understanding people—their strengths and foibles, reason and emotion, desires and fears. The political view sees organizations as competitive arenas of scarce resources, competing interests, and struggles for power and advantage. Finally, the symbolic frame focuses on issues of meaning and faith. It puts ritual, ceremony, story, play, and culture at the heart of organizational life.
Each of the frames is powerful and coherent. Collectively, they make it possible to reframe, looking at the same thing from multiple lenses or points of view. When the world seems hopelessly confusing and nothing is working, reframing is a powerful tool for gaining clarity, regaining balance, generating new questions, and finding options that actually make a difference.
Notes
1 1. Among the possible ways of talking about frames are schemata or schema theory (Fiedler, 1982; Fiske and Dyer, 1985; Lord and Foti, 1986), representations (Frensch and Sternberg, 1991; Lesgold and Lajoie, 1991; Voss, Wolfe, Lawrence, and Engle, 1991), cognitive maps (Weick and Bougon, 1986), paradigms (Gregory, 1983; Kuhn, 1970), social categorizations (Cronshaw, 1987), implicit theories (Brief and Downey, 1983), mental models (Senge, 1990), definitions of the situation, and root metaphors.
2 2. J. R. Latham, [Re]Create the Organization You Really Want!: Leadership and Organization Design for Sustainable Excellence (Colorado Springs, CO: Organization Design Studio, Ltd., 2016).
3 3. Ken Blanchard and Colleen Barrett, Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2010), p. 7.
4 4. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don't (New York: Harper Business, 2010), p. 5.
5 5. Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer‐Wright, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization (New York: Harper, 2011), p. 4.
6 6. A number of scholars (including Allison, 1971; Bergquist, 1992; Birnbaum, 1988; Elmore, 1978; Morgan, 1986; Perrow, 1986; Quinn, 1988; Quinn, Faerman, Thompson, and McGrath, 1996; and Scott, 1981) have made similar arguments for multi‐frame approaches to groups and social collectives.
Chapter 2 Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations
The alarm system was ready. Scarred by the SARS epidemic that erupted in 2002, China had created an infectious disease reporting system that officials said was world‐class: fast, thorough and, just as important, immune from meddling. Hospitals could input patients' details into a computer and instantly notify government health authorities in Beijing, where officers are trained to spot and smother contagious outbreaks before they spread.It didn't work.
(Myers, 2020)
On December 30, 2019, Dr. Ai Fen, the director of an intensive care unit in Wuhan, China, broke into a cold sweat as she stared at one phrase in a lab report: “SARS coronavirus” (Kuo, 2020). SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), an often‐deadly disease, had appeared in China in late 2002. It spread rapidly after it was first identified, but SARS patients showed symptoms before they became infectious. That allowed officials in China and elsewhere to limit it to only 8,000 cases worldwide. The United States saw fewer than 30 cases and no deaths. The new coronavirus turned out to be much more dangerous.
The emerging evidence that frightened Dr. Ai came from one of a few dozen patients with new and puzzling respiratory symptoms who were starting to appear in Wuhan. Many became very sick, and some died. Dr. Ai copied the alarming report to a colleague and within hours the news was spreading through Wuhan medical circles. It should also have been entered into China's “fail‐safe” reporting system. Only a few weeks earlier, the deputy director of the provincial center for disease control had given a pep talk urging local officials to make the area number one in China in the quality of its infectious disease reporting (Myers, 2020).
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