fight like Hell and if you don't fight like Hell, you're not going to have a country anymore” (Jacobo, 2021). The crowd apparently took him at his word and became a pugnacious mob, armed and looking for trouble. The only thing in their way was an undermanned Capitol Police Force.
The federal government has the capacity to deploy massive security forces in the District of Columbia, but it takes substantial planning and coordination. Security assets in the region are widely dispersed across the District of Columbia's metropolitan police force, the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia, and multiple federal departments, including Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security. That was a problem in the run‐up to the president's “Save America” rally:
Two days before Congress was set to formalize President‐elect Joe Biden's victory, Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund was growing increasingly worried about the size of the pro‐Trump crowds expected to stream into Washington in protest. To be on the safe side, Sund asked House and Senate security officials for permission to request that the D.C. National Guard be placed on standby in case he needed quick backup. But, Sund said, they turned him down. During the invasion, the chief “pleaded for help five more times as a scene far more dire than he had ever imagined unfolded on the historic Capitol grounds.” (Leonnig, Davis, Hermann, and Demirjian, 2021)
The Capitol police chief as well as Washington's mayor and the governors of Maryland and Virginia all ran into the same roadblock: they needed approval from the Defense Department or the president to deploy National Guard units. That approval was slow to come, despite their pleading that the situation was desperate. As we write, why that happened is lost in a fog of finger pointing. Ultimate authority lay with the president, but he chose not to use it. He was busy watching the event on television, “and the message from those around him—that he needed to call off the angry mob he had egged on just hours earlier, or lives could be lost—was one to which he was not initially receptive” (Parker, Dawsey, and Rucker, 2021).
In any event, it took three hours before the first Guard units arrived. In the meantime, four people died as thousands of rioters assaulted police officers, vandalized the historic building, and forced the vice president and members of Congress hurriedly to seek refuge. In the aftermath of another day that would live in infamy, all the major players defended their own actions and looked for someone else to blame, confirming the adage that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. One thing was clear: “Poor planning and communication among a constellation of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies hamstrung the response to the rioting” (Mazzetti, Cooper, Steinhauer, Kanno‐Youngs, and Broadwater, 2021).
So much talent and experience, yet key decision makers were at sea. They misread available information and failed to act or did the wrong thing. The technical term is cluelessness, a pervasive affliction for leaders everywhere. Being clueless simply means that you don't really know what's going on and don't see better options even if they are close at hand. So, you continue down the wrong thoroughfare, hoping in vain that it will get you where you want to go. Your efforts to make things better make them worse, which is often obvious to those around you even if not to you.
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 escaping the common and debilitating curse of being at sea without any landmarks to indicate whether you are on course. Reframing requires an ability to think about situations from more than one angle so that you can develop alternative diagnoses and strategies. We introduce four distinct lenses for sizing things up—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 rudimentary rules of the game and suddenly turned yesterday's organizations into antiques. (pp. 14–15)
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 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 frustrate and exploit people. Too many people find that work has so little meaning that jobs offer nothing beyond a paycheck. Too often, products are flawed, families are dysfunctional, students fail to learn, patients get worse, and policies backfire. A cruel irony of the Covid‐19 panic was that nursing homes meant to protect and prolong life often became death traps for their residents. 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, defective airplanes, or inflammable cell phones. Producers of food and pharmaceuticals make people sick with tainted products. Software companies deliver bugs and “vaporware.” Industrial accidents pump chemicals, oil, toxic gas, and radioactive materials into the air and water. Corporate greed, incompetence, and insensitivity wreak havoc on communities and individuals. The ill‐fated 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 often 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 like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. 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 circumstances. If we misread a situation, we'll do the wrong thing. But if we don't discern that we're seeing the wrong picture, 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. America endured a two‐month version of this drama when Donald Trump erroneously insisted that he had won an election he had lost by seven million votes.
Vaughan (1995), in trying to unravel the causes of the 1986 disaster that destroyed
