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REFRAMING
ORGANIZATIONS
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6
th
Edition
ARTISTRY,
C H O I C E , AND
LEADERSHIP
REFRAMING
ORGANIZATIONS
L E E G. BO L M A N
TERRENCE E. DEAL
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Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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In Memory of Warren Bennis
Exemplar, Mentor, and Friend
With Appreciation for All He Gave Us
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CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
PART ONE
ix
xv
Making Sense of Organizations
1
I ntrod uctio n: The Power o f Reframin g
2
Si mpl e I deas, Co m pl ex Org ani zation s
PART TWO
The Structural Frame
1
3
25
43
3
G ettin g Organi zed
45
4
Structure a nd Restru c tu ri ng
71
5
Organ izi ng Grou ps an d Tea ms
93
PART THREE
The Human Resource Frame
113
6
P eopl e a nd Organ izati ons
115
7
I m provi ng Hu ma n R eso urce Man agemen t
135
8
I n t e r p e rs o n a l an d G r o u p D y n a m i c s
157
vii
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PART FOUR
9
The Political Frame
179
Power, Con fl ict , and Co ali t i on
1 81
10
The Manager as Politician
2 01
11
O r g a n i z a t i o n s as Po l i t i c a l A r e n a s a n d P o l i t i c a l A g e nt s
2 17
PART FIVE
The Symbolic Frame
235
12
O r gani z a t io na l S y m bol s an d C ul tu re
239
13
Cu ltu re in Acti on
2 65
14
Organization as Theater
2 79
PART SIX
Improving Leadership Practice
15
I n t e g r a t i n g Fr a m e s f o r E ff e c t i v e Pr a c t ic e
297
16
R e f r a m i n g in Ac t i o n : O p p o r t u n i t i e s a n d P e r i l s
313
17
Re framing L eadership
3 25
18
Re frami ng Chan ge in O rg ani z atio ns
3 59
19
Re fr a m i ng Et hi c s and S pi ri t
385
20
Bri ng in g I t Al l Tog ether: Cha nge and L eadershi p i n Acti on
3 99
Epilogue: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership
Appendix: The Best of Organizational Studies
Bibliography
The Authors
Name Index
Subject Index
viii
295
Contents
419
423
427
467
469
481
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PREFACE
T
his is the sixth release of a work that began in 1984 as Modern Approaches
to Understanding and Managing Organizations and became Reframing
Organizations in 1991. We’re grateful to readers around the world who have
told us that our books gave them ideas that make a difference—at work and
elsewhere in their lives.
It is again time for an update, and we’re gratified to be back by popular demand. Like
everything else, organizations and their leadership challenges continue to evolve rapidly,
and scholars are running hard to keep pace. This edition tries to capture the current
frontiers of both knowledge and art.
The four-frame model, with its view of organizations as factories, families, jungles, and
temples, remains the book’s conceptual heart. But we have incorporated new research and
revised our case examples extensively to keep up with the latest developments. We have
updated a feature we inaugurated in the third edition: “Greatest Hits in Organization
Studies.” These features offer pithy summaries of key ideas from the some of the most
influential works in the scholarly literature (as indicated by a citation analysis, described in
the Appendix at the end of the book). As a counterpoint to the scholarly works, we have also
added occasional summaries of management bestsellers. Scholarly and professional litera
ture often run on separate tracks, but the two streams together provide a fuller picture than
either alone, and we have tried to capture the best of both in our work.
Life in organizations has produced many stories and examples, and there is new
material throughout the book. At the same time, we worked zealously to minimize bloat by
tracking down and expunging every redundant sentence, marginal concept, or extraneous
example. We’ve also tried to keep it fun. Collective life is an endless source of vivid examples
as entertaining as they are instructive, and we’ve sprinkled them throughout the text.
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We apologize to anyone who finds that an old favorite fell to the cutting-room floor, but we
hope readers will find the book an even clearer and more efficient read.
As always, our primary audience is managers and leaders. We have tried to answer the
question, what do we know about organizations and leadership that is genuinely relevant
and useful to practitioners as well as scholars? We have worked to present a large, complex
body of theory, research, and practice as clearly and simply as possible. We tried to avoid
watering it down or presenting simplistic views of how to solve managerial problems. This is
not a self-help book filled with ready-made answers. Our goal is to offer not solutions but
powerful and provocative ways of thinking about opportunities and pitfalls.
We continue to focus on both management and leadership. Leading and managing are
different, but they’re equally important. The difference is nicely summarized in an aphorism
from Bennis and Nanus: “Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing.” If an
organization is overmanaged but underled, it eventually loses any sense of spirit or purpose.
A poorly managed organization with a strong, charismatic leader may soar briefly—only to
crash shortly thereafter. Malpractice can be as damaging and unethical for managers and
leaders as for physicians.
Myopic managers or overzealous leaders usually harm more than just themselves. The
challenges of today’s organizations require the objective perspective of managers as well as
the brilliant flashes of vision that wise leadership provides. We need more people in
managerial roles who can find simplicity and order amid organizational confusion and
chaos. We need versatile and flexible leaders who are artists as well as analysts, who can
reframe experience to discover new issues and possibilities. We need managers who love
their work, their organizations, and the people whose lives they affect. We need leaders who
appreciate management as a moral and ethical undertaking, and who combine hardheaded
realism with passionate commitment to larger values and purposes. We hope to encourage
and nurture such qualities and possibilities.
As in the past, we have tried to produce a clear and readable synthesis and integration of
the field’s major theoretical traditions. We concentrate mainly on organization theory’s
implications for practice. We draw on examples from every sector and around the globe.
Historically, organization studies has been divided into several intellectual camps, often
isolated from one another. Works that seek to give a comprehensive overview of organiza
tion theory and research often drown in social science jargon and abstraction and have little
to say to practitioners. Works that strive to provide specific answers and tactics often offer
advice that applies only under certain conditions. We try to find a balance between
misleading oversimplification and mind-boggling complexity.
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The bulk of work in organization studies has focused on the private or public or
nonprofit sector but not all three. We think this is a mistake. Managers need to understand
similarities and differences among all types of organizations. All three sectors increasingly
interpenetrate one another. Federal, state and local governments create policy that shapes or
intends to influence organizations of all types. When bad things happen new laws are
promulgated. Public administrators who regulate airlines, nuclear power plants, or phar
maceutical companies face the problem of “indirect management” every day. They struggle
to influence the behavior of organizations over which they have very limited authority.
Private firms need to manage relationships with multiple levels of government. The
situation is even more complicated for managers in multinational companies coping
with the subtleties of governments with very different systems and traditions. Around
the world, voluntary and nongovernment organizations partner with business and govern
ment to address major social and economic challenges. Across sectors and cultures,
managers often harbor narrow, stereotypic conceptions of one another that impede
effectiveness on all sides. We need common ground and a shared understanding that
can help strengthen organizations in every sector. The dialogue between public and private,
domestic and multinational organizations has become increasingly important. Because of
their generic application, the four frames offer an ecumenical language for the exchange.
Our work with a variety of organizations around the world has continually reinforced our
confidence that the frames are relevant everywhere. Translations of the book into many
languages, including Chinese, Dutch, French, Korean, Norwegian, Russian, Spanish,
Swedish, and Turkish, provide ample evidence that this is so. Political and symbolic issues,
for example, are universally important, even though the specifics vary greatly from one
country or culture to another.
The idea of reframing continues to be a central theme. Throughout the book, we show
how the same situation can be viewed in at least four unique ways. In Part VI, we include a
series of chapters on reframing critical organizational issues such as leadership, change, and
ethics. Two chapters are specifically devoted to reframing real-life situations.
We also continue to emphasize artistry. Overemphasizing the rational and technical
side of an organization often contributes to its decline or demise. Our counterbalance
emphasizes the importance of art in both management and leadership. Artistry is neither
exact nor precise; the artist interprets experience, expressing it in forms that can be felt,
understood, and appreciated. Art fosters emotion, subtlety, and ambiguity. An artist
represents the world to give us a deeper understanding of what is and what might be.
In modern organizations, quality, commitment, and creativity are highly valued but often
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hard to find. They can be developed and encouraged by leaders or managers who embrace
the expressive side of their work.
OUTLINE OF THE BOOK
As its title implies, the first part of the book, “Making Sense of Organizations,” focuses on
sense-making and tackles a perplexing question about management: Why is it that smart
people so often do dumb things? Chapter 1, “The Power of Reframing,” explains why:
Managers often misread situations. They have not learned how to use multiple lenses to get a
better sense of what they’re up against and what they might do. Chapter 2, “Simple Ideas,
Complex Organizations,” uses well-known cases (such as 9/11) to show how managers’
everyday thinking and theories can lead to catastrophe. We explain basic factors that make
organizational life complicated, ambiguous, and unpredictable; discuss common fallacies in
managerial thinking; and spell out criteria for more effective approaches to diagnosis and
action.
Part II, “The Structural Frame,” explores the key role that social architecture plays in the
functioning of organizations. Chapter 3, “Getting Organized,” describes basic issues that
managers must consider in designing structure to fit an organization’s strategies, tasks, and
context. It demonstrates why organizations—from Amazon to McDonald’s to Harvard
University—need different structures in order to be effective in their unique environments.
Chapter 4, “Structure and Restructuring,” explains major structural pathologies and pitfalls.
It presents guidelines for aligning structures to situations, along with cases illustrating
successful structural change. Chapter 5, “Organizing Groups and Teams,” shows that
structure is a key to high-performing teams.
Part III, “The Human Resource Frame,” explores the properties of both people and
organizations, and what happens when the two intersect. Chapter 6, “People and Organi
zations,” focuses on the relationship between organizations and human nature. It shows
how managers’ practices and assumptions about people can lead either to alienation and
hostility or to commitment and high motivation. It contrasts two strategies for achieving
effectiveness: “lean and mean,” or investing in people. Chapter 7, “Improving Human
Resource Management,” is an overview of practices that build a more motivated and
committed workforce—including participative management, job enrichment, self-manag
ing workgroups, management of diversity, and organization development. Chapter 8,
“Interpersonal and Group Dynamics,” presents an example of interpersonal conflict to
illustrate how managers can enhance or undermine relationships. It also discusses emo
tional intelligence and how group members can increase their effectiveness by attending to
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group process, including informal norms and roles, interpersonal conflict, leadership, and
decision making.
Part IV, “The Political Frame,” views organizations as arenas. Individuals and groups
compete to achieve their parochial interests in a world of conflicting viewpoints, scarce
resources, and struggles for power. Chapter 9, “Power, Conflict, and Coalition,” analyzes the
tragic loss of the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger, illustrating the influence of
political dynamics in decision making. It shows how scarcity and diversity lead to conflict,
bargaining, and games of power; the chapter also distinguishes constructive and destructive
political dynamics. Chapter 10, “The Manager as Politician,” uses leadership examples from
a nonprofit organization in India and a software development effort at Microsoft to
illustrate basic skills of the constructive politician: diagnosing political realities, setting
agendas, building networks, negotiating, and making choices that are both effective and
ethical. Chapter 11, “Organizations as Political Arenas and Political Agents,” highlights
organizations as both arenas for political contests and political actors influencing broader
social, political, and economic trends. Case examples such as Walmart and Ross Johnson
explore political dynamics both inside and outside organizations.
Part V explores the symbolic frame. Chapter 12, “Organizational Symbols and Culture,”
spells out basic symbolic elements in organizations: myths, heroes, metaphors, stories,
humor, play, rituals, and ceremonies. It defines organizational culture and shows its central
role in shaping performance. The power of symbol and culture is illustrated in cases as
diverse as the U.S. Congress, Nordstrom department stores, the U.S. Air Force, Zappos, and
a unique horse race in Italy. Chapter 13, “Culture in Action,” uses the case of a computer
development team to show what leaders and group members can do collectively to build a
culture that bonds people in pursuit of a shared mission. Initiation rituals, specialized
language, group stories, humor and play, and ceremonies all combine to transform diverse
individuals into a cohesive team with purpose, spirit, and soul. Chapter 14, “Organization as
Theater,” draws on dramaturgical and institutional theory to reveal how organizational
structures, activities, and events serve as secular dramas, expressing our fears and joys,
arousing our emotions, and kindling our spirit. It also shows how organizational structures
and processes—such as planning, evaluation, and decision making—are often more
important for what they express than for what they accomplish.
Part VI, “Improving Leadership Practice,” focuses on the implications of the frames for
central issues in managerial practice, including leadership, change, and ethics. Chapter 15,
“Integrating Frames for Effective Practice,” shows how managers can blend the frames to
improve their effectiveness. It looks at organizations as multiple realities and gives guide
lines for aligning frames with situations. Chapter 16, “Reframing in Action,” presents four
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scenarios, or scripts, derived from the frames. It applies the scenarios to the harrowing
experience of a young manager whose first day in a new job turns out to be far more
challenging than she expected. The discussion illustrates how leaders can expand their
options and enhance their effectiveness by considering alternative approaches. Chapter 17,
“Reframing Leadership,” discusses limitations in traditional views of leadership and
proposes a more comprehensive view of how leadership works in organizations. It
summarizes and critiques current knowledge on the characteristics of leaders, including
the relationship of leadership to culture and gender. It shows how frames generate
distinctive images of effective leaders as architects, servants, advocates, and prophets.
Chapter 18, “Reframing Change in Organizations,” describes four fundamental issues
that arise in any change effort: individual needs, structural alignment, political conflict, and
existential loss. It uses cases of successful and unsuccessful change to document key
strategies, such as training, realigning, creating arenas, and using symbol and ceremony.
Chapter 19, “Reframing Ethics and Spirit,” discusses four ethical mandates that emerge
from the frames: excellence, caring, justice, and faith. It argues that leaders can build more
ethical organizations through gifts of authorship, love, power, and significance. Chapter 20,
“Bringing It All Together,” is an integrative treatment of the reframing process. It takes a
troubled school administrator through a weekend of reflection on critical difficulties he
faces. The chapter shows how reframing can help managers move from feeling confused
and stuck to discovering a renewed sense of clarity and confidence. The Epilogue describes
strategies and characteristics needed in future leaders. It explains why they will need an
artistic combination of conceptual flexibility and commitment to core values. Efforts to
prepare future leaders have to focus as much on spiritual as on intellectual development.
Lee G. Bolman
Brookline, Massachusetts
Terrence E. Deal
San Luis Obispo, California
July 2017
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
e noted in our first edition, “Book writing often feels like a lonely
process, even when an odd couple is doing the writing.” This odd
couple keeps getting older (ancient, to be more precise) and—some would
say—even odder and grumpier. It seems like only yesterday we were young,
vibrant new authors, but that was 40 years ago. To our amazement, we’re still
at it and have remained close friends. The best thing about teaching and book
writing is that you learn so much from your readers and students, and we have
been blessed to have so many of both.
W
Students at Stanford, Harvard, Vanderbilt, the University of Missouri–Kansas City, the
University of La Verne, and the University of Southern California have given us invaluable
criticism, challenge, and support over the years. We’re grateful to the many readers who
have responded to our open invitation to write and ask questions or share comments. They
have helped us write a better book. (The invitation is still open—our contact information is
in “The Authors.”) We wish we could personally thank all of the leaders and managers who
helped us learn in seminars, workshops, and consultations. Their knowledge and wisdom
are the foundation and touchstone for our work.
We want to thank all the colleagues and readers in the United States and around the
world who have offered valuable comments and suggestions, but the list is very long and our
memories keep getting shorter. Bob Marx, of the University of Massachusetts, deserves
special mention as a charter member of the frames family. Bob’s interest in the frames,
creativity in developing teaching designs, and eye for video material have aided our thinking
and teaching immensely. Conversations with Dick Scott and John Meyer of Stanford
University have helped us explore the nuances of institutional theory. Ellen Harris, of
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Harvard and Outward Bound, provided many thoughtful comments on the manuscript.
Susan Griggs, of the University of Denver, offered a provocative critique of our handling of
issues related to gender and leadership. Elena Granell de Aldaz, of the Institute for
Advanced Study of Management in Caracas, collaborated with us on developing a
Spanish-language adaptation of Reframing Organizations as well as on a more recent
project that studied frame orientations among managers in Venezuela. We are proud to
consider her a valued colleague and wonderful friend. Azarm Ghareman, a clinical
psychologist, deepened our understanding of Carl Jung’s view of the important role
symbols play in human experience. Captain Gary Deal, USN, at the Eisenhower School,
National Defense Institute, teaches leadership and the frames to high-ranking officers from
all branches of the military and government services. Dr. Peter Minich, a transplant
surgeon, now brings the world of leadership to physicians. Major Kevin Reed, of the United
States Air Force, and Jan and Ron Haynes, of FzioMed, all provided valuable case material.
Richard and Sharon Pescatore have been a valuable source for insights into HewlettPackard. The irrepressible Charlie Alfano and co-owner Audrey of Alfano Motorcars (San
Luis Obispo) have provided us a glimpse of key ingredients for success in a sales
organization (the Alfanos also own a dealership in Phoenix). Angela Schmiede of Menlo
College has broadened our views of the ways the frames can contribute to undergraduate
education.
A number of friends and colleagues at the Organizational Behavior Teaching Confer
ence have given us many helpful ideas and suggestions. We apologize for any omissions, but
we want to thank Anke Arnaud, Carole K. Barnett, Max Elden, Kent Fairfield, Cindi
Fukami, Olivier Hermanus, Jim Hodge, Earlene Holland, Scott Johnson, Mark Kriger,
Hyoungbae Lee, Larry Levine, Mark Maier, Magid Mazen, Thomas P. Nydegger, Dave
O’Connell, Lynda St. Clair, Mabel Tinjacá, Susan Twombly, and Pat Villeneuve. We can
only wish to have succeeded in implementing all the wonderful ideas we received from these
and other colleagues.
Lee is grateful to all his Bloch School colleagues and particularly to Nancy Day, Pam
Dobies, Dave Donnelly, Doranne Hudson, Jae Jung, Tusha Kimber, Sandra Kruse-Smith,
Rong Ma, Brent Never, Roger Pick, Stephen Pruitt, Laura Rees, David Renz, Marilyn Taylor,
and Bob Waris. Terry’s colleagues Carl Cohn, Stu Gothald, and Gib Hentschke, of the
University of Southern California, have offered both intellectual stimulation and moral
support. Sharon Conley, Professor at the University of Santa Barbara, is a constant source of
ideas and feedback. Her work keeps us attuned closely to the world of education. Terry’s
recent (2013) team-teaching venture with President Devorah Lieberman and Professor Jack
Meek of the University of La Verne showed what’s possible when conventional boundaries
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are trespassed in a class of aspiring undergraduate leaders. This experience led to the
founding of the Terrence E. Deal Leadership Institute.
Others to whom our debt is particularly clear are the late Chris Argyris, Sam Bacharach,
Cliff Baden, Margaret Benefiel, Estella Bensimon, Bud Bilanich, Bob Birnbaum, Barbara
Bunker, Tom Burks, Ellen Castro, Carlos Cortés, Linton Deck, Patrick Faverty, Dave Fuller,
Jim Honan, Tom Johnson, Bob Kegan, James March, Grady McGonagill, Judy McLaughlin,
John Meyer, Kevin Nichols, Harrison Owen, Regina Pacheco, Donna Redman, Peggy
Redman, Michael Sales, Joan Vydra, Karl Weick, Jilie Wheeler, Roy Williams, and Joe
Zolner. Thanks again to Dave Brown, Phil Mirvis, Barry Oshry, Tim Hall, Bill Kahn, and
Todd Jick of the Brookline Circle, now in its fourth decade of searching for joy and meaning
in those lives devoted to the study of organizations.
Outside the United States, we are grateful to Poul Erik Mouritzen in Denmark; Rolf
Kaelin, Cüno Pumpin, and Peter Weisman in Switzerland; Ilpo Linko in Finland; Tom Case
in Brazil; Einar Plyhn and Haakon Gran in Norway; Peter Normark and Dag Bjorkegren in
Sweden; Ching-Shiun Chung in Taiwan; Helen Gluzdakova and Anastasia Vitkovskaya in
Russia; and H.R.H. Prince Philipp von und zu Lichtenstein.
Closer to home, Lee also owes more than he can say to the recently retired Bruce Kay,
whose genial and unflappable approach to work, coupled with high levels of organization
and follow-through, had a wonderfully positive impact while he took on the challenge of
bringing a modicum of order and sanity to Lee’s professional functioning. We also continue
to be grateful for the enduring support and friendship of Linda Corey, our long-time
resident representative at Harvard, and Homa Aminmadani, a delightful character and
irreplaceable assistant, who now splits her time between Nashville and Teheran.
The couples of the Edna Ranch Vintners Guild—the Pecatores, Donners, Hayneses,
Alfanos, and Andersons—link efforts with Terry in exploring the ups, downs, and mysteries
of the art and science of wine making. Three professional winemakers, Romeo “Meo” Zuech
of Piedra Creek Winery, Brett Escalera of Consilience and TresAnelli, and Bob Shiebelhut of
Tolosa offer advice that applies to leadership as well as winemaking. Meo reminds us,
“Never overmanage your grapes,” and Brett prefaces answers to all questions with “It all
depends.”
We’re delighted to be well into the fourth decade of our partnership with Jossey-Bass
and Wiley. We’re grateful to the many friends who have helped us over the years, including
Bill Henry, Steve Piersanti, Lynn Luckow, Bill Hicks, Debra Hunter, Cedric Crocker, Byron
Schneider, Kathe Sweeney, and many others. In recent years, Jeanenne Ray has been a
wonderful editor and friend. Jenny Ng and Lauren Freestone of Wiley have done vital and
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much-appreciated work backstage in helping to get all the pieces of this edition together and
keep the process moving forward.
Lee’s six children—Edward, Shelley, Lori, Scott, Christopher, and Bradley—and three
grandchildren—James, Jazmyne, and Foster—all continue to enrich his life and contribute
to his growth. Terry’s daughter Janie, a chef, has a rare talent of almost magically
transforming simple ingredients into fine cuisine. Special mention also goes to Terry’s
deceased parents, Bob and Dorothy Deal. Both lived long enough to be pleasantly surprised
that their oft-wayward son could write a book. Equal mention is due to Lee’s parents, Eldred
and Florence Bolman.
We again dedicate this book to our wives, who have more than earned all the credit and
appreciation that we can give them. Joan Gallos, Lee’s spouse and closest colleague,
combines intellectual challenge and critique with support and love. She has been an active
collaborator in developing our ideas, and her teaching manual for previous editions has
been a frame-breaking model for the genre. Her contributions have become so integrated
into our own thinking that we are no longer able to thank her for all the ways that the book
has gained from her wisdom and insights.
Sandy Deal’s psychological training enables her to approach the field of organizations
with a distinctive and illuminating slant. Her successful practice produces examples that
have helped us make some even stronger connections to the concepts of clinical psychology.
She is one of the most gifted diagnosticians in the field, as well as a delightful partner whose
love and support over the long run have made all the difference. She is a rare combination of
courage and caring, intimacy and independence, responsibility and playfulness.
To Joan and Sandy, thanks again. As the years accumulate (rapidly), we love you even
more.
Lee G. Bolman
Brookline, Massachusetts
Terrence E. Deal
San Luis Obispo, California
July 2017
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PART ONE
Making Sense of
Organizations
Sit no longer at your dusty window
I urge you to break the gaze
from your oh so cherished glass
—Gian Torrano Jacobs
Journeys through the Windows of Perception
Reprinted by permission of the poet, Gian Torrano Jacobs.
Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, Sixth Edition. Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal.
2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by Jossey-Bass.
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chapter
1
Introduction
The Power of Reframing
B
y the second decade of the twenty-first century, the German carmaker
Volkswagen and the U.S. bank Wells Fargo were among the world’s
largest, most successful, and most admired firms. Then both trashed their
own brand by following the same script. It’s a drama in three acts:
Act I: Set daunting standards for employees to improve performance.
Act II: Look the other way when employees cheat because they think it’s the
only way to meet the targets.
Act III: When the cheating leads to a media firestorm and public outrage, blame
the workers and paint top managers as blameless.
In Wells Fargo’s case, the bank fired more than 5,000 lower-level employees but offered
an exit bonus of $125 million to the executive who oversaw them (Sorkin, 2016).
Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn was known as an eagle-eyed micromanager
but pleaded ignorance when his company admitted in 2015 that it had been cheating for
years on emissions tests of its “clean” diesels. He was quickly replaced by Matthias
Müller, who claimed that he didn’t know anything about VW’s cheating either. Müller
also explained why VW wasn’t exactly guilty: “It was a technical problem. We had not
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Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, Sixth Edition. Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal.
2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by Jossey-Bass.
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the interpretation of the American law . . . We didn’t lie. We didn’t understand the
question first” (Smith and Parloff, 2016). Apparently VW was smart enough to design
clever software to fudge emissions tests but not smart enough to know that cheating
might be illegal.
The smokescreen worked for years—VW sold a lot of diesels to consumers who
wanted just what Volkswagen claimed to offer, a car at the sweet spot of low emissions,
high performance, and great fuel economy. The cheating apparently began around 2008,
seven years before it became public, when Volkswagen engineers realized they could not
make good on the company’s public, clean-diesel promises (Ewing, 2015). Bob Lutz, an
industry insider, described VW’s management system as “a reign of terror and a culture
where performance was driven by fear and intimidation” (Lutz, 2015). VW engineers
faced a tough choice. Should they tell the truth and lose their jobs now or cheat and
maybe lose their jobs later? The engineers chose option B. The story did not end happily.
In January, 2017, VW pleaded guilty to cheating on emissions tests and agreed to pay a
fine of $4.3 billion. In the same week, six VW executives were indicted for conspiring to
defraud the United States.1 In Spring of 2017, VW’s legal troubles appeared to be
winding down in the United States, at a total cost of more than $20 billion, but were still
ramping up in Germany, where authorities had launched criminal investigations
(Ewing, 2017).
The story at Wells Fargo was similar. For years, it had successfully billed itself as the
friendly, community bank. It ran warm and fuzzy ads around themes of working together
and caring about people. The ads did not mention that in 2010 a federal judge ruled that the
bank had cheated customers by deliberately manipulating customer transactions to increase
overdraft fees (Randall, 2010), nor that in August, 2016, the bank agreed to pay a $4.1
million penalty for cheating student borrowers. But no amount of advertising would have
helped in September, 2016, when the news broke that employees in Wells Fargo branches,
under pressure from their bosses to sell more “solutions,” had opened some two million
accounts that customers didn’t want and usually didn’t know about, at least not until they
received an unexpected credit card in the mail or got hit with fees on an account they didn’t
know they had.
None of it should have been news to Wells Fargo’s leadership. Back in 2005,
employees began to call the firm’s human resources department and ethics hotline to
report that some of their coworkers were cheating (Cowley, 2016). The bank sometimes
solved that problem by firing the whistleblowers. Take the case of a branch manager in
Arizona. While covering for a colleague at another branch, he found that employees were
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opening accounts for fake businesses. He called HR, which told him to call the ethics
hotline. Ethics asked him for specific data to support the allegations. He pulled data from
the system and reported it. A month later, he was fired for improperly looking up account
information.
In 2013, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about phony accounts in some local
branches. Wells Fargo’s solution was not to lower the flame under the pot but to try and
screw down the lid even tighter. They kept up the intense push for cross-selling but sent
employees to ethics seminars where they were instructed not to open accounts customers
didn’t want. CEO John Stumpf achieved plausible deniability by proclaiming that he
didn’t want “want anyone ever offering a product to someone when they don’t know what
the benefit is, or the customer doesn’t understand it, or doesn’t want it, or doesn’t need it”
(Sorkin, 2016, p. B1). But despite his public assurances, the incentives up and down the
line still rewarded sales rather than ethical squeamishness. Many employees felt they were
in a bind: they’d been told not to cheat, but that was the best way to keep their jobs
(Corkery and Cowley, 2016). Like the VW engineers, many decided to cheat now and
hope that later never came.
Maybe leaders at Volkswagen and Wells Fargo knew about the cheating and hoped it
would never come to light. Maybe they were just out of touch. Either way, they were
clueless—failing to see that their companies were headed for costly public-relations
nightmares. But they are far from alone. Cluelessness is a pervasive affliction for leaders,
even the best and brightest. Often it leads to personal and institutional disaster. But,
sometimes there are second chances.
Consider Steve Jobs. He had to fail before he could succeed. Fail he did. He was fired
from Apple Computer, the company he founded, and then spent 11 years “in the
wilderness” (Schlender, 2004). During this time of reflection he discovered capacities as
a leader—and human being—that set the stage for his triumphant second act at Apple.
He failed initially for the same reason that countless managers stumble: like the
executives at VW and Wells Fargo, Jobs was operating on a limited understanding of
leadership and organizations. He was always a brilliant and charismatic product
visionary. That enabled him to take Apple from startup to major computer vendor,
but didn’t equip him to lead Apple to its next phase. Being fired was painful, but Jobs
later concluded that it was the best thing that ever happened to him. “It freed me to enter
one of the most creative periods of my life. I’m pretty sure none of this would have
happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess
the patient needed it.”
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During his period of self-reflection, Jobs kept busy. He focused on Pixar, a computer
graphics company he bought for $10 million, and on NeXT, a new computer company that
he founded. One succeeded and the other didn’t, but he learned from both. Pixar became so
successful it made Jobs a billionaire. NeXT never made money, but it developed technology
that proved vital when Jobs was recalled from the wilderness to save Apple from a death
spiral.
His experiences at NeXT and Pixar provided two vital lessons. One was the importance
of aligning an organization with its strategy and mission. He understood more clearly that
he needed a great company to build great products. Lesson two was about people. Jobs had
always understood the importance of talent, but now he had a better appreciation for the
importance of relationships and teamwork.
Jobs’s basic character did not change during his wilderness years. The Steve Jobs who
returned to Apple in 1997 was much like the human paradox fired 12 years earlier—
demanding and charismatic, charming and infuriating, erratic and focused, opinionated
and curious. The difference was in how he interpreted what was going on around him and
how he led. To his long-time gifts as a magician and warrior, he had added newfound
capacities as an organizational architect and team builder.
Shortly after his return, he radically simplified Apple’s product line, built a loyal and
talented leadership team, and turned his old company into a hit-making machine as
reliable as Pixar. The iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad made Jobs the world’s most admired
chief executive, and Apple passed ExxonMobil to become the world’s most valuable
company. His success in building an organization and a leadership team was validated as
Apple’s business results continued to impress after his death in October 2011. Like many
other executives, Steve Jobs seemed to have it all until he lost it—but most never get it
back.
Martin Winterkorn had seemed to be on track to make Volkswagen the world’s biggest
car company, and Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf was one of America’s most admired
bankers. But both became so cocooned in imperfect worldviews that they misread their
circumstances and couldn’t see other options. That’s what it means to be clueless. You don’t
know what’s going on, but you think you do, and you don’t see better choices. So you do
more of what you know, even though it’s not working. You hope in vain that steady on
course will get you where you want to go.
How do leaders become clueless? That is what we explore next. Then we introduce
reframing—the conceptual core of the book and our basic prescription for sizing things up.
Reframing requires an ability to think about situations from more than one angle, which lets
you develop alternative diagnoses and strategies. We introduce four distinct frames—
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structural, human resource, political, and symbolic—each logical and powerful in capturing
a detailed snapshot. Together, they help to paint a more comprehensive picture of what’s
going on and what to do.
VIRTUES AND DRAWBACKS OF ORGANIZED ACTIVITY
There was little need for professional managers when individuals mostly managed their own
affairs, drawing goods and services from family farms and small local businesses. Since the
dawn of the industrial revolution some 200 years ago, explosive technological and social
changes have produced a world that is far more interconnected, frantic, and complicated.
Humans struggle to avoid drowning in complexity that continually threatens to pull them in
over their heads (Kegan, 1998). Forms of management and organization effective a few years
ago are now obsolete. Sérieyx (1993) calls it the organizational big bang: “The information
revolution, the globalization of economies, the proliferation of events that undermine all our
certainties, the collapse of the grand ideologies, the arrival of the CNN society which
transforms us into an immense, planetary village—all these shocks have overturned the
rules of the game and suddenly turned yesterday’s organizations into antiques” (pp. 14–15).
Benner and Tushman (2015) argue that the twenty-first century is making managers’
challenges ever more vexing:
The paradoxical challenges facing organizations have become more numerous
and strategic (Besharov & Smith, 2014; Smith & Lewis, 2011). Beyond the
innovation challenges of exploration and exploitation, organizations are now
challenged to be local and global (e.g., Marquis & Battilana, 2009), doing well
and doing good (e.g., Battilana & Lee, 2014; Margolis & Walsh, 2003), social
and commercial (e.g., Battilana & Dorado, 2010), artistic or scientific and
profitable (e.g., Glynn, 2000), high commitment and high performance
(e.g., Beer & Eisenstadt, 2009), and profitable and sustainable (e.g., Eccles,
Ioannou, & Serafeim, 2014; Henderson, Gulati, & Tushman, 2015; Jay, 2013).
These contradictions are more prevalent, persistent, and consequential.
Further, these contradictions can be sustained and managed, but not resolved
(Smith, 2014).
The demands on managers’ wisdom, imagination and agility have never been greater,
and the impact of organizations on people’s well-being and happiness has never been more
consequential. The proliferation of complex organizations has made most human activities
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more formalized than they once were. We grow up in families and then start our own. We
work for business, government, or nonprofits. We learn in schools and universities. We
worship in churches, mosques, and synagogues. We play sports in teams, franchises, and
leagues. We join clubs and associations. Many of us will grow old and die in hospitals or
nursing homes. We build these enterprises because of what they can do for us. They offer
goods, entertainment, social services, health care, and almost everything else that we use or
consume.
All too often, however, we experience a darker side of these enterprises. Organizations
can frustrate and exploit people. Too often, products are flawed, families are dysfunctional,
students fail to learn, patients get worse, and policies backfire. Work often has so little
meaning that jobs offer nothing beyond a paycheck. If we believe mission statements and
public pronouncements, almost every organization these days aims to nurture its employees
and delight its customers. But many miss the mark. Schools are blamed for “mis-educating,”
universities are said to close more minds than they open, and government is criticized for
corruption, red tape, and rigidity.
The private sector has its own problems. Manufacturers recall faulty cars or inflammable
cellphones. Producers of food and pharmaceuticals make people sick with tainted products.
Software companies deliver bugs and “vaporware.” Industrial accidents dump chemicals,
oil, toxic gas, and radioactive materials into the air and water. Too often, corporate greed,
incompetence, and insensitivity create havoc for communities and individuals. The bottom
line: We seem hard-pressed to manage organizations so that their virtues exceed their vices.
The big question: Why?
Management’s Track Record
Year after year, the best and brightest managers maneuver or meander their way to the apex
of enterprises great and small. Then they do really dumb things. How do bright people turn
out so dim? One theory is that they’re too smart for their own good. Feinberg and Tarrant
(1995) label it the “self-destructive intelligence syndrome.” They argue that smart people act
stupid because of personality flaws—things like pride, arrogance, and an unconscious desire
to fail. It’s true that psychological flaws have been apparent in brilliant, self-destructive
individuals such as Adolf Hitler, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. But on the whole, the best
and brightest have no more psychological problems than everyone else. The primary source
of cluelessness is not personality or IQ but a failure to make sense of complex situations. If
we misread a situation, we’ll do the wrong thing. But if we don’t know we’re seeing things
inaccurately, we won’t understand why we’re not getting the results we want. So we insist
we’re right even when we’re off track.
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Vaughan (1995), in trying to unravel the causes of the 1986 disaster that destroyed the
Challenger space shuttle and its crew, underscored how hard it is for people to surrender
their entrenched conceptions of reality:
They puzzle over contradictory evidence, but usually succeed in pushing it
aside—until they come across a piece of evidence too fascinating to ignore, too
clear to misperceive, too painful to deny, which makes vivid still other signals
they do not want to see, forcing them to alter and surrender the world-view they
have so meticulously constructed (p. 235).
So when we don’t know what to do, we do more of what we know. We construct our own
psychic prisons and then lock ourselves in and throw away the key. This helps explain a
number of unsettling reports from the managerial front lines:
• Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1994) estimate that the skills of one half to three quarters of
American managers are inadequate for the demands of their jobs. Gallup (2015) puts the
number even higher, estimating that more than 80 percent of American managers lack
the talent they need. But most probably don’t realize it: Kruger and Dunning (1999)
found that the less competent people are, the more they overestimate their performance,
partly because they don’t know good performance when they see it.
• About half of the high-profile senior executives that companies hire fail within two years,
according to a 2006 study (Burns and Kiley, 2007).
• The annual value of corporate mergers has grown more than a hundredfold since 1980,
yet evidence suggests that 70 to 90 percent “are unsuccessful in producing any business
benefit as regards shareholder value” (KPMG, 2000; Christensen, Alton, Rising, and
Waldeck, 2011). Mergers typically benefit shareholders of the acquired firm but hurt
almost everyone else—customers, employees, and, ironically, the buyers who initiated
the deal (King et al., 2004). Stockholders in the acquiring firm typically suffer a 10
percent loss on their investment (Agrawal, Jaffe, and Mandelker, 1992), while consumers
feel that they’re paying more and getting less. Despite this dismal record, the vast
majority of the managers who engineered mergers insisted they were successful (KPMG,
2000; Graffin, Haleblian, and Kiley, 2016).
• Year after year, management miscues cause once highly successful companies to skid
into bankruptcy. In just the first quarter of 2015, for example, 26 companies went under,
including six with claimed assets of more than $1 billion. (Among the biggest were the
casino giant, Caesars Entertainment, and the venerable electronics retailer, RadioShack.)
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Small wonder that so many organizational veterans nod in assent to Scott Adams’s
admittedly unscientific “Dilbert principle”: “the most ineffective workers are systematically
moved to the place where they can do the least damage—management” (1996, p. 14).
Strategies for Improving Organizations
We have certainly made a noble effort to improve organizations despite our limited ability
to understand them. Legions of managers report to work each day with hope for a better
future in mind. Authors and consultants spin out a torrent of new answers and promising
solutions. Policymakers develop laws and regulations to guide or shove organizations on the
right path.
The most universal improvement strategy is upgrading management talent. Modern
mythology promises that organizations will work splendidly if well managed. Managers are
supposed to see the big picture and look out for their organization’s overall well-being. They
have not always been equal to the task, even when armed with the full array of modern tools
and techniques. They go forth with this rational arsenal to try to tame our wild and primitive
workplaces. Yet in the end, irrational forces too often prevail.
When managers find problems too hard to solve, they hire consultants. The number and
variety of advice givers keeps growing. Most have a specialty: strategy, technology, quality,
finance, marketing, mergers, human resource management, executive search, outplacement,
coaching, organization development, and many more. For every managerial challenge, there
is a consultant willing to offer assistance—at a price.
For all their sage advice and remarkable fees, consultants often make little dent in
persistent problems plaguing organizations, though they may blame the clients for failing to
implement their profound insights. McKinsey & Co., “the high priest of high-level
consulting” (Byrne, 2002a, p. 66), worked so closely with Enron that its managing partner
(Rajat Gupta, who eventually went to jail for insider trading) sent his chief lawyer to
Houston after Enron’s collapse to see if his firm might be in legal trouble.2 The lawyer
reported that McKinsey was safe, and a relieved Gupta insisted bravely, “We stand by all the
work we did. Beyond that, we can only empathize with the trouble they are going through.
It’s a sad thing to see” (p. 68).
When managers and consultants fail, government recurrently responds with legislation,
policies, and regulations. Constituents badger elected officials to “do something” about a
variety of ills: pollution, dangerous products, hazardous working conditions, discrimina
tion, and low performing schools, to name a few. Governing bodies respond by making
“policy.” But policymakers don’t always understand the problem well enough to get the
solution right, and a sizable body of research records a continuing saga of perverse ways in
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which the implementation process undermines even good solutions (Bardach, 1977;
Elmore, 1978; Freudenberg and Gramling, 1994; Gottfried and Conchas, 2016; Peters,
1999; Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973). Policymakers, for example, have been trying for
decades to reform U.S. public schools. Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent. The
result? About as successful as America’s switch to the metric system. In the 1950s Congress
passed legislation mandating adoption of metric standards and measures. More than six
decades later, if you know what a hectare is or can visualize the size of a 300-gram package of
crackers, you’re ahead of most Americans. Legislators did not factor into their solution what
it would take to get their decision implemented against longstanding custom and tradition.
In short, the difficulties surrounding improvement strategies are well documented.
Exemplary intentions produce more costs than benefits. Problems outlast solutions. Still,
there are reasons for optimism. Organizations have changed about as much in recent
decades as in the preceding century. To survive, they had to. Revolutionary changes in
technology, the rise of the global economy, and shortened product life cycles have spawned a
flurry of efforts to design faster, more flexible organizational forms. New organizational
models flourish in companies such as Pret à Manger (the socially conscious U.K. sandwich
shops), Google (the global search giant), Airbnb (a new concept of lodging) and NovoNordisk (a Danish pharmaceutical company that includes environmental and social metrics
in its bottom line). The dispersed collection of enthusiasts and volunteers who provide
content for Wikipedia and the far-flung network of software engineers who have developed
the Linux operating system provide dramatic examples of possibilities in the digital world.
But despite such successes, failures are still too common. The nagging question: How can
leaders and managers improve the odds for themselves as well for their organizations?
FRAMING
Goran Carstedt, the talented executive who led the turnaround of Volvo’s French division in
the 1980s, got to the heart of a challenge managers face every day: “The world simply can’t
be made sense of, facts can’t be organized, unless you have a mental model to begin with.
That theory does not have to be the right one, because you can alter it along the way as
information comes in. But you can’t begin to learn without some concept that gives you
expectations or hypotheses” (Hampden-Turner, 1992, p. 167). Such mental models have
many labels—maps, mind-sets, schema, paradigms, heuristics, and cognitive lenses, to name
a few.3 Following the work of Goffman, Dewey, and others, we have chosen the label frames,
a term that has received increasing attention in organizational research as scholars give
greater attention to how managers make sense of a complicated and turbulent world
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(see, e.g., Foss and Webber, 2016; Gray, Purdy, and Ansari, 2015; Cornelissen and Werner,
2014; Hahn et al., 2014; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014). In describing frames, we
deliberately mix metaphors, referring to them as windows, maps, tools, lenses, orientations,
prisms, and perspectives, because all these images capture part of the idea we want to
convey.
A frame is a mental model—a set of ideas and assumptions—that you carry in your head
to help you understand and negotiate a particular “territory.” A good frame makes it easier
to know what you are up against and, ultimately, what you can do about it. Frames are vital
because organizations don’t come with computerized navigation systems to guide you turn
by-turn to your destination. Instead, managers need to develop and carry accurate maps in
their heads.
Such maps make it possible to register and assemble key bits of perceptual data into a
coherent pattern—an image of what’s happening. When it works fluidly, the process takes
the form of “rapid cognition,” the process that Gladwell (2005) examines in his best seller
Blink. He describes it as a gift that makes it possible to read “deeply into the narrowest slivers
of experience. In basketball, the player who can take in and comprehend all that is
happening in the moment is said to have ‘court sense’” (p. 44). The military stresses
situational awareness to describe the same capacity.
Dane and Pratt (2007) describe four key characteristics of this intuitive “blink” process:
• It is nonconscious—you can do it without thinking about it and without knowing how
you did it.
• It is very fast—the process often occurs almost instantly.
• It is holistic—you see a coherent, meaningful pattern.
• It results in “affective judgments”—thought and feeling work together so you feel
confident that you know what is going on and what needs to be done.
The essence of this process is matching situational cues with a well-learned mental
framework—a “deeply held, nonconscious category or pattern” (Dane and Pratt, 2007,
p. 37). This is the key skill that Simon and Chase (1973) found in chess masters—they could
instantly recognize more than 50,000 configurations of a chessboard. This ability enables
grand masters to play 25 lesser opponents simultaneously, beating all of them while
spending only seconds on each move.
The same process of rapid cognition is at work in the diagnostic categories physicians
rely on to evaluate patients’ symptoms. The Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” requires
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physicians to be confident that they know what they’re up against before prescribing a
remedy. Their skilled judgment draws on a repertoire of categories and clues, honed by
training and experience. But sometimes they get it wrong. One source of error is anchoring:
doctors, like leaders, sometimes lock on to the first answer that seems right, even if a few
messy facts don’t quite fit. “Your mind plays tricks on you because you see only the
landmarks you expect to see and neglect those that should tell you that in fact you’re still at
sea” (Groopman, 2007, p. 65).
That problem tripped up leaders at Volkswagen, Wells Fargo, and countless other
organizations. Organizations are at least as complex as the human body, and the diagnostic
categories less well defined. That means that the quality of your judgments depends on the
information you have at hand, your mental maps, and how well you 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. 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 home 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 key quality among successful executives was 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. When managers’
options are limited they make mistakes but too often fail to understand the source. Take a
simple example: “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
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once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in five minutes” (Seelig, 2015, p.
19). Asking the right question enhances the ability 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, DC, 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 frame 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 redefined 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.” 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
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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
et al. (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 at hand a diverse collection of high-quality implements. 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 writing this book. We are not
searching for or advocating the one best way. Rather, we consolidate major schools of
organizational thought and research into a comprehensive framework encompassing four
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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, psychol
ogy, political science, and anthropology. Thousands of managers and scores of organiza
tions have helped us sift through social science research to identify ideas that work in
practice. We have sorted insights from both research and practice into four major frames—
structural, human resource, political, and symbolic (Bolman and Deal, 1984). Each is used
by academics and practitioners alike and can be found, usually independently, on the
shelves of libraries and bookstores.
Four Frames: As Near as Your Local Bookstore
Imagine a harried executive browsing online or at her local bookseller on a brisk winter day
in 2017. She worries about her company’s flagging performance and wonders if her own job
might soon disappear. She spots the black cover of How to Measure Anything: Finding the
Value of “Intangibles” in Business. Flipping through the pages, she notes topics like
measuring the value of information and the need for better risk analysis. She is drawn
to phrases such as “A key step in the process is the calculation of the economic value of
information . . . [A] proven formula from the field of decision theory allows us to compute
a monetary value for a given amount of uncertainty reduction”4 (p. 35). “This stuff may be
good,” the executive tells herself, “but it seems a little too stiff and numbers-driven.”
Next, she finds Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success. Glancing inside,
she reads, “Many of our officers handwrite several thousand notes each year. Besides being
loving, we know this is meaningful to our People because we hear from them if we miss
something significant in their lives like the high school graduation of one of their kids. We
just believe in accentuating the positive and celebrating People’s successes”5 (p. 7). “Sounds
nice,” she mumbles, “but a little too touchy-feely. Let’s look for something more down to
earth.”
Continuing her search, she looks at Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t.
She reads, “You can compete and triumph in organizations of all types . . . if you
understand the principles of power and are willing to use them. Your task is to know
how to prevail in the political battles you will face”6 (p. 5). She wonders, “Does it really all
come down to politics? It seems so cynical and scheming. How about something more
uplifting?”
She spots Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organiza
tion. She ponders its message: “Tribal leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe, or,
more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture. If they are successful, the tribe recognizes them
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as leaders, giving them top effort, cult-like loyalty, and a track record of success”7 (p. 4).
“Fascinating,” she concludes, “but seems a little too primitive for modern organizations.”
In her book excursion, our worried executive has rediscovered the four perspectives at the
heart of this book. Four distinct metaphors capture the essence of each of the books she
examined: organizations as factories, families, jungles, and temples or carnivals. But she leaves
more confused than ever. Some titles seemed to register with her way of thinking. Others fell
outside her zone of comfort. Where should she go next? How can she put it all together?
Factories
The first book she stumbled across, How to Measure Anything, provides counsel on how to
think clearly and make rational decisions, extending a long tradition that treats an
organization as a factory. Drawing from sociology, economics, and management science,
the structural frame depicts a rational world and emphasizes organizational architecture,
including planning, strategy, goals, structure, technology, specialized roles, coordination,
formal relationships, metrics, and rubrics. Structures—commonly depicted by organization
charts—are designed to fit an organization’s environment and technology. Organizations
allocate responsibilities (“division of labor”). They then create rules, policies, procedures,
systems, and hierarchies to coordinate diverse activities into a unified effort. Objective
indicators measure progress. Problems arise when structure doesn’t line up well with
current circumstances or when performance sags. At that point, some form of
reorganization or redesign is needed to remedy the mismatch.
Families
Our executive next encountered Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success,
with its focus on people and relationships. The human resource perspective, rooted in
psychology, sees an organization as an extended family, made up of individuals with needs,
feelings, prejudices, skills, and limitations. From a human resource view, the key challenge is
to tailor organizations to individuals—finding ways for people to get the job done while
feeling good about themselves and their work. When basic needs for security and trust are
unfulfilled, people withdraw from an organization, join unions, go on strike, sabotage, or
quit. Psychologically healthy organizations provide adequate wages and benefits and make
sure employees have the skills, support, and resources to do their jobs.
Jungles
Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t is a contemporary application of the
political frame, rooted in the work of political scientists. This view sees organizations as
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arenas, contests, or jungles. Parochial interests compete for power and scarce resources.
Conflict is rampant because of enduring differences in needs, perspectives, and lifestyles
among contending individuals and groups. Bargaining, negotiation, coercion, and com
promise are a normal part of everyday life. Coalitions form around specific interests and
change as issues come and go. Problems arise when power is concentrated in the wrong
places or is so widely dispersed that nothing gets done. Solutions arise from political skill
and acumen—as Machiavelli suggested 500 years ago in The Prince (1961).
Temples and Carnivals
Finally, our executive encountered Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a
Thriving Organization, with its emphasis on culture, symbols, and spirit as keys to
organizational success. The symbolic lens, drawing on social and cultural anthropology,
treats organizations as temples, tribes, theaters, or carnivals. It tempers the assumptions of
rationality prominent in other frames and depicts organizations as cultures, propelled by
rituals, ceremonies, stories, heroes, history, and myths rather than by rules, policies, and
managerial authority. Organization is also theater: actors play their roles in an ongoing
drama while audiences form impressions from what they see on stage. Problems arise when
actors blow their parts, symbols lose their meaning, or ceremonies and rituals lose their
potency. We rekindle the expressive or spiritual side of organizations through the use of
symbol, myth, and magic.
The FBI and the CIA: A Four-Frame Story
A saga of two squabbling agencies illustrates how the four frames provide different views of
the same situation. Riebling (2002) documents the long history of head-butting between
America’s two major intelligence agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Central Intelligence Agency. Both are charged with combating espionage and terrorism, but
the FBI’s authority is valid primarily within the United States, while the CIA’s mandate
covers everywhere else. Structurally, the two agencies have always been disconnected. The
FBI is housed in the Department of Justice and reports to the attorney general. The CIA
reported through the director of central intelligence to the president until 2004, when
reorganization put it under a new director of national intelligence.
At a number of major junctures in American history (including the assassination of
President John F. Kennedy, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks), each
agency held pieces of a larger puzzle, but coordination snafus made it hard for anyone to see
all the pieces, much less put them together. After 9/11, both agencies came under heavy
criticism, and each blamed the other for lapses. The FBI complained that the CIA had failed
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to tell them that two of the terrorists had entered the United States and had been living in
California since 2000 (Seper, 2005). But an internal Justice Department investigation also
concluded 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.
Multiframe Thinking
The overview of the four-frame model in Exhibit 1.1 shows that each of the frames has its
own image of reality. You may be drawn to some and put off by others. Some perspectives
may seem clear and straightforward, while others seem puzzling. But learning to apply all
four deepens your appreciation and understanding of organizations. Galileo discovered this
when he devised the first telescope. 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.
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Exhibit 1.1.
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
Psychology
Political
science
Anthropology,
dramaturgy,
institutional theory
Central
concepts
Roles, goals,
strategies,
policies,
technology,
environment
Social
architecture
Needs, skills,
relationships
Power,
conflict,
competition,
politics
Culture, myth,
meaning, metaphor,
ritual, ceremony,
stories, heroes
Empowerment
Advocacy
and political
savvy
Inspiration
Align
organizational
and human
needs
Develop
agenda and
power base
Create faith, belief,
beauty, meaning
Image of
leadership
Basic
leadership
challenge
Attune
structure to
task,
technology,
environment
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
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because I’m always switching back and forth between the two” (p. 40). Multiframe 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. Managers are imprisoned
only to the extent that their palette of ideas is impoverished.
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 a glimmer 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.8
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 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 be situations we’ve never experienced
before. Imagination or mindfulness is our best chance for being ready when a black swan
sails into view, and multiframe thinking is a powerful stimulus to the broad, creative mindset imagination requires.
Engineering and Art
Exhibit 1.2 presents two contrasting 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.
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Exhibit 1.2.
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. Many engineering schools are
currently developing design programs to stimulate creative thinking. 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 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
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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 catastrophes. Our basic premise is that a primary cause of managerial failure is
faulty thinking rooted in inadequate ideas. 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 question, 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 make a difference.
Notes
1. Tabuchi, H., Ewing, J., and Apuzzo, M. 2017. “6 Volkswagen Executives Charged as Company
Pleads Guilty in Emissions Case.” New York Times, January 12. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/
01/11/business/volkswagen-diesel-vw-settlement-charges-criminal.html?_r=0
2. Enron’s reign as history’s greatest corporate catastrophe was brief. An even bigger behemoth,
WorldCom, with assets of more than $100 billion, thundered into Chapter 11 seven months later,
in July 2002. Stock worth more than $45 a share two years earlier fell to nine cents.
3. 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.
4. Douglas W. Hubbard, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business
(New York: Wiley, 2010), p. 35.
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5. Ken Blanchard and Colleen Barrett, Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2010), p. 7.
6. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t (New York: Harper Business,
2010), p. 5.
7. Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups
to Build a Thriving Organization (New York: Harper Business, 2011), p. 4.
8. 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 multiframe approaches to groups and social
collectives.
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chapter
2
Simple Ideas, Complex
Organizations
Precisely one of the most gratifying results of intellectual
evolution is the continuous opening up of new and greater
prospects.
—Nikola Tesla1
S
eptember 11, 2001 brought a crisp and sunny late-summer morning to
America’s east coast. Perfect weather offered prospects of on-time
departures and smooth flights for airline passengers in the Boston-Washington corridor. That promise was shattered for four flights bound for California
when terrorists commandeered the aircraft. Two of the hijacked aircraft
attacked and destroyed the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center.
Another slammed into the Pentagon. The fourth was deterred from its
mission by the heroic efforts of passengers. It crashed in a vacant field,
killing all aboard. Like Pearl Harbor in December 1941, 9/11 was a day that
will live in infamy, a tragedy that changed forever America’s sense of itself and
the world.
Why did no one foresee such a catastrophe? In fact, some had. As far back as 1993,
security experts had envisioned an attempt to destroy the World Trade Center using
airplanes as weapons. Such fears were reinforced when a suicidal pilot crashed a small
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2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by Jossey-Bass.
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private plane onto the White House lawn in 1994. But the mind-set of principals in the
national security network was riveted on prior hijackings, which had almost always ended in
negotiations. The idea of a suicide mission, using commercial aircraft as missiles, was never
incorporated into homeland defense procedures.
In the end, 19 highly motivated young men armed only with box cutters were able to
outwit thousands of America’s best minds and dozens of organizations that make up the
country’s homeland defense system. Part of their success came from fanatical determination, meticulous planning, and painstaking preparation. We also find a dramatic version of
an old story: human error leading to tragedy. But even the human-error explanation is too
simple. In organizational life, there are almost always systemic causes upstream of human
failures, and the events of 9/11 are no exception.
The United States had a web of procedures and agencies aimed at detecting and
monitoring potential terrorists. Had those systems worked flawlessly, the terrorists would
not have made it onto commercial flights. But the procedures failed, as did those designed to
respond to aviation crises. Similar failures have marked many other well-publicized
disasters: nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the botched response
to Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast in 2005, and the deliberate downing of a German jet
in 2015 by a pilot who was known to suffer from severe depression. In business, the fall of
giants like Enron and WorldCom, the collapse of the global financial system, the Great
Recession of 2008–2009, and Volkswagen’s emissions cheating scandal of 2015 are among
many examples of the same pattern. Each illustrates a chain of misjudgment, error,
miscommunication, and misguided action that our best efforts fail to avert.
Events like 9/11 and Katrina make headlines, but similar errors and failures happen
every day. They rarely make front-page news, but they are familiar to most people who work
in organizations. In the remainder of this chapter, we discuss how organizational complexity intersects with fallacies of human thinking to obscure what’s really going on and lead
us astray. We describe some of the peculiarities of organizations that make them so difficult
to figure out and manage. Finally, we explore how our deeply held and well-guarded mental
models cause us to fail—and how to avoid that trap.
COMMON FALLACIES IN EXPLAINING ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEMS
Albert Einstein once said that a thing should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
When we ask students and managers to analyze cases like 9/11, they often make things
simpler than they really are. They do this by relying on one of three misleading and
oversimplified explanations.
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The first and most common is blaming people. This approach casts every failure as a
product of individual blunders. Problems result from egotism, bad attitudes, abrasive
personalities, neurotic tendencies, stupidity, or incompetence. It’s an easy way to explain
anything that goes wrong. After scandals like the ones that hit Volkswagen and Wells Fargo
Bank in 2016, the hunt is on for someone to blame, and top executives became the prime
target of reporters, investigators, and talk-show comedians.
As children, we learned it was important to assign blame for every broken toy, stained
carpet, or wounded sibling. Pinpointing the culprit is comforting. Assigning blame resolves
ambiguity, explains mystery, and makes clear what to do next: punish the guilty. Corporate
scandals often have their share of culpable individuals, who may lose their jobs or even go to
jail. But there is usually a larger story about the organizational and social context that sets
the stage for individual malfeasance. Targeting individuals while ignoring larger system
failures oversimplifies the problem and does little to prevent its recurrence.
Greatest Hits from Organization Studies
Hit Number 8: James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations
(New York: Wiley, 1958)
March and Simon’s pioneering 1958 book Organizations sought to define an emerging field by
offering a structure and language for studying organizations. It was part of the body of work that
helped Simon earn the 1978 Nobel Prize for economics.
March and Simon offered a cognitive, social-psychological view of organizational behavior,
with an emphasis on thinking, information processing, and decision making. The book begins
with a model of behavior that presents humans as continually seeking to satisfy motives based on
their aspirations. Aspirations at any given time are a function of both individuals’ history and their
environment. When aspirations are unsatisfied, people search until they find better, more
satisfying options. Organizations influence individuals primarily by managing the information and
options, or “decision premises,” that they consider.
March and Simon followed Simon’s earlier work (1947) in critiquing the economic view of
“rational man,” who maximizes utility by considering all available options and choosing the best.
Instead, they argue that both individuals and organizations have limited information and limited
capacity to process what they have. They never know all the options. Instead, they gradually alter
their aspirations as they search for alternatives. Home buyers often start with a dream house in
mind, but gradually adapt to the realities of what’s available and what they can afford. Instead of
looking for the best option—”maximizing”—individuals and organizations instead “satisfice,”
choosing the first option that seems good enough.
Organizational decision making is additionally complicated because the environment is
complex. Resources (time, attention, money, and so on) are scarce, and conflict among
individuals and groups is constant. Organizational design happens through piecemeal bargaining
(continued)
Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations
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(continued )
that holds no guarantee of optimal rationality. Organizations simplify the environment to reduce
the demands on limited information-processing and decision-making capacities. They simplify by
developing “programs”—standardized routines for performing repetitive tasks. Once a program
is in place, the incentive is to stay with it as long as the results are marginally satisfactory.
Otherwise, the organization is forced to expend time and energy to innovate. Routine tends to
drive out innovation because individuals find it easier and less taxing to stick to programmed
tasks (which are automatic, well-practiced, and more certain of success). Thus, a student facing a
term-paper deadline may find it easier to “fritter”—make tea, straighten the desk, text friends,
and browse the Web—than to struggle to write a good opening paragraph. Managers may
sacrifice quality to avoid changing a familiar routine.
March and Simon’s book falls primarily within the structural and human resource views. But
their discussions of scarce resources, power, conflict, and bargaining recognize the reality of
organizational politics. Although they do not use the term framing, March and Simon affirm its
logic as an essential component of choice. Decision making, they argue, is always based on a
simplified model of the world. Organizations develop unique vocabulary and classification
schemes, which determine what people are likely to see and respond to. Things that don’t fit an
organization’s mind-set are likely to be ignored or reframed into terms the organization can
understand.
When it is hard...
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