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 recast 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.” The critic tacitly assumed that his was the correct way to see sunsets. 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 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 and others (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 a diverse collection of high‐quality implements at hand. 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 this book. We are not seeking or advocating the one best way. Rather, we consolidate major schools of organizational thought and research into a comprehensive framework encompassing four 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, psychology, political science, and anthropology. Thousands of managers and scores of organizations 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 2021. She worries about her company's flagging performance and wonders if her own job might soon disappear. She spots the gray cover of [Re]Creating the Organization You Really Want: Leadership and Organization Design for Sustainable Excellence.2 Flipping through the table of contents, she notes topics like “Compelling Directive,” “Focused Strategy,” and “Comprehensive Scorecard.” She is drawn to phrases such as “Leaders today face many challenges that require the design or redesign of organizational structures, systems, and processes to achieve and sustain high performance.” (p. 35). “This stuff may be good,” the executive tells herself, “but it seems a little dry.”
Next, she finds Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success.3 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. (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.4 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” (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 Organization.5 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 as leaders, giving them top effort, cult‐like loyalty, and a track record of success” (p. 4). “Fascinating,” she concludes, “but maybe a little too primitive and nebulous for modern organizations.”
In
