Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman

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Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman


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everyone agreed the new proposal was, at best, crazy.

      “What do we do?” someone asked.

      “Why don't we just tell him it won't work?” said one hopeful soul.

      “He's already gone public! You want to tell him his new baby is ugly?”

      “Not me. Besides, I've heard, he already thinks a lot of us are deadwood. If we tell him it's no good, he'll just think we're defensive.”

      “Well, we can't go ahead with it. It'll never work and we'd be throwing away money.”

      “That's true,” said Demarco thoughtfully. “But what if we tell him we're conducting a study of how to implement his plan?”

      Demarco's innovative suggestion produced smiles around the room and received overwhelming approval. The group informed a delighted Osborne that they were moving ahead on the “implementation study” and expected excellent results. They got a substantial budget to support their “research.” They did not mention their real purpose––to buy time and find a way to minimize the damage without alienating the boss.

      Over time, the group assembled a lengthy technical report, filled with graphs, tables, and nearly impenetrable administrative jargon. The report offered two options. Option A, Osborne's original plan, was presented as technically challenging and well beyond anything Amtran could afford. Option B, billed as a “modest descaling” of the original plan, was projected as a more cost‐effective alternative.

      When Osborne pressed the group on the huge dollar disparity between the two proposals, he received a barrage of complicated cost‐benefit projections and inscrutable technical terms. Hidden in a dense fog was the reality that even Option B offered few benefits at a very high price. Osborne argued and pressed for more information. But given the apparent facts, he agreed to proceed with Option B. The “Osborne plan” was announced with fanfare and widely heralded as another instance of Paul Osborne's talent for revitalizing ailing bureaucracies. Osborne had moved on to work his management magic on another organization by the time the plan came online, leaving his successor to defend the underwhelming results.

      Helen Demarco came away with deep feelings of frustration and failure. The Osborne plan, in her view, was a wasteful mistake, and she had knowingly participated in a charade. But she rationalized to herself that she had no other choice. Osborne was adamant. It would have been career suicide to try to stop him.

      Like Helen Demarco, Wuhan officials and VW engineers had other options but couldn't see them. Paul Osborne and Martin Winterkorn both thought they were providing bold leadership to vault their organizations forward. They were tripped up in part by human fallibility but also by how hard it can be to know what's really going on in any organization. Managerial wisdom and artistry require a well‐honed understanding of four key characteristics of organizations.

      First, organizations are complex. The behavior of the people who populate them is notoriously hard to predict. Large organizations in particular sport a bewildering array of people, departments, technologies, strategies, and goals. Moreover, organizations are open systems dealing with a changing, challenging, and erratic environment. Things can get even messier across multiple organizations. The 9/11 disaster and the 2021 invasion of the U.S. Capitol resulted from a chain of events that involved several separate autonomous systems. Almost anything can affect everything else in collective activity, generating causal knots that are hard to untangle. After an exhaustive investigation, our picture of 9/11 is woven from sundry evidence, conflicting testimony, and conjecture. Historians and scientists will spend years trying to untangle who should have done what to minimize global damage from the pandemic of 2020.

      Second, organizations are surprising. What you expect is often not what you get. Paul Osborne saw his plan as a bold leap forward; Helen and her group deemed it an expensive albatross. In their view, Osborne was going to make matters worse by trying to improve them. He might have achieved better results by spending more time with his family and letting his organization take care of itself. Martin Winterkorn was stunned when the hidden cheating blew up in his face, costing him his job and hitting VW with devastating financial and reputational damage.

      Third, organizations are deceptive. They camouflage mistakes and surprises. Helen Demarco and her colleagues disguised obfuscation as technical analysis. After 9/11, America's homeland defense organizations tried to conceal their confusion and lack of preparedness for fear of revealing strategic weaknesses. Volkswagen engineers developed software whose only purpose was to cheat on emissions tests, hoping that no one would ever see through their deception. Officials in Wuhan, China, tried to cover up the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak for a few critical weeks with devastating consequences for the world.

      It is tempting to blame deceit on individual weakness. Yet Helen Demarco disliked fraud and regretted cheating—she simply believed it was her best option. Sophisticated managers know that what happened to Paul Osborne happens all the time. When a quality initiative fails or a promising product tanks, subordinates often clam up or cover up. They fear that the boss will not listen or will kill the messenger. A friend in a senior position in a large government agency put it simply: “Communications in organizations are rarely candid, open, or timely.”

      Fourth, organizations are ambiguous. Complexity, unpredictability, and deception generate rampant ambiguity, a dense fog that shrouds what happens from day to day. It is hard to get the facts and even harder to know what they mean or what to do about them. Helen Demarco never knew how Paul Osborne really felt, how receptive he was to other points of view, or how open he was to compromise. She and her peers piled on more mystery by conspiring to keep him in the dark.

      Ambiguity has many sources. Sometimes available information is incomplete or vague. That was a huge problem for decision makers in the early days of the Covid‐19 pandemic. Little was known about a novel virus that attacked people in complex and puzzling ways. Emergency room doctors around the world struggled to understand what they were dealing with and what to do about it.