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)
We create our own psychic prisons and then lock ourselves in and toss 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 capabilities 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).
Year after year, management miscues cause once highly successful companies to skid into bankruptcy. In 2019, a year of economic expansion and a rising stock market, more than 50 major companies went bankrupt. Among the best known were Pacific Gas and Electric (the California utility giant, which has filed for bankruptcy twice in this century) and Purdue Pharma (brought down by lawsuits over its pushing hundreds of thousands of users into opioid addiction). (The pandemic of 2020 brought a new wave of bankruptcies, but not all of them were necessarily the fault of management.)
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, sustained effort to improve organizations, despite our limited ability to understand them. Legions of managers report to work each day hoping to create a better future. Authors and consultants spin out a torrent of promising new ideas and erstwhile solutions. Policymakers develop a bale of laws and regulations to guide or shove organizations on the right path.
The most widespread 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 carry the day.
When managers find problems too hard to solve, they hire consultants. The number and variety of advice givers keep growing exponentially. Most of these modern shamans have a specialty: strategy, technology, quality, finance, marketing, mergers, human resource management, executive search, outplacement, coaching, organization development, planning, 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, confident consultants continue to make little dent in persistent problems plaguing organizations. To compensate, they may blame the clients for failing to implement their profound insights. McKinsey & Co., “the high priest of high‐level consulting” (Byrne, 2002, 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. 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 responds with legislation, policies, and regulations. Constituents badger elected officials to “do something” about a variety of ills: pollution, dangerous products, hazardous working conditions, discrimination, 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. A sizable body of research records a continuing saga of perverse ways in which the execution undermines even good solutions (Bardach, 1977; Elmore, 1978; Freudenberg and Gramling, 1994; Gottfried and Conchas, 2016; Grindle, 2017; 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 the 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 carried out 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 models flourish in companies, such as Valve (the nonhierarchical video game powerhouse that shuns job titles and organization charts), Wegman's (the mission‐driven supermarket chain that consistently ranks among America's best places to work), Google (the global search giant), Airbnb (a new concept of lodging), and Novo‐Nordisk (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 but a few.1 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 (see, e.g., Cornelissen and Werner, 2014; Foss and Weber, 2015; Gray, Purdy, and Ansari, 2015; Hahn, Preuss, Pinkse, and Figge, 2014; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014; Seidel, Hannigan, and Phillips, 2020). 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
