Reframing Organizations - Audio Tidbits Podcast

Audio Tidbits Podcast

Bolman, Lee G. and Terrence E. Deal. Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership. Fourth Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008.

…organizations are filled with people who have their own 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. No single story is comprehensive enough to make an organization truly understandable or manageable.

In deciding what to do next, managers operate largely on the basis of intuition, drawing on firsthand observations, hunches, and judgment derived from experience. Too swamped to spend much time thinking, analyzing, or reading, they get most of their information in meetings, through e-mail, or over the phone.

The image of firm control and crisp precision often attributed to managers has little relevance to the messy world of complexity, conflict, and uncertainty they inhabit. They need multiple frames to survive. They need to understand that any event or process can serve several purposes and that participants are often operating from different views of reality.

The essence of reframing is examining the same situation from multiple vantage points. The effective leader changes lenses when things don’t make sense or aren’t working. …
…leadership. It is not tangible. It exists only in relationships and in the perception of the engaged parties.

Implicitly, we expect leaders to persuade or inspire rather than to coerce. We also expect leaders to produce cooperative effort and to pursue goals that transcend narrow self-interest.

Leadership is thus a subtle process of mutual influence fusing thought, feeling, and action. It produces cooperative effort in the service of purposes embraced by both leader and led. Single-frame managers are unlikely to understand and attend to the intricacies of this lively process.

Ideally, managers combine multiple frames into a comprehensive approach to leadership. Wise leaders understand their own strengths, work to expand them, and build diverse teams that can offer an organization leadership in all four modes: structural, political, human resource, and symbolic.

The desired target is never easy to reach, and almost everyone wants change as long as they don’t have to do anything differently.

Ethics ultimately must be rooted in soul: an organization’s commitment to its deeply rooted identity, beliefs, and values. Each frame offers a perspective on the ethical responsibilities of organizations and the moral authority of leaders. Every organization needs to evolve for itself a profound sense of its own ethical and spiritual core. The frames offer spiritual guidelines for the quest.

The most important responsibility of managers is not to answer every question or get every decision right. Though they cannot escape their responsibility to track budgets, motivate people, respond to political pressures, and attend to culture, they serve a deeper, more powerful, and more enduring role if they are models and catalysts for such values as excellence, caring, justice, and faith.

Both managers and leaders require high levels of personal artistry if they are to respond to today’s challenges, ambiguities, and paradoxes. They need a sense of choice and personal freedom to find new patterns and possibilities in everyday life at work. They need versatility in thinking that fosters flexibility in action. They need capacity to act inconsistently when uniformity fails, diplomatically when emotions are raw, non-rationally when reason flags, politically in the face of vocal parochial self-interests, and playfully when fixating on task and purpose backfires.

Leading requires walking a fine line between rigidity and spinelessness.

Leaders need to be deeply reflective and dramatically explicit about core values and beliefs.

Leaders fail when they take too narrow a view. Unless they can think flexibly and see organizations from multiple angles, they will be unable to deal with the full range of issues they inevitably encounter.

Multiframe thinking is challenging and often counterintuitive. To see the same organization as machine, family, jungle, and theater requires the capacity to think in different ways at the same time about the same thing.

Such leaders and managers will be playful theorists who can see organizations through a complex prism. They will be negotiators able to design resilient strategies that simultaneously shape events and adapt to changing circumstances. They will understand the importance of knowing and caring for themselves and the people with whom they work. They will be architects, catalysts, advocates, and prophets who lead with soul.