rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_bdb8a12f-668c-5711-807f-16a80cc22dae">Exhibit 1.2.
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, economics | Psychology | Political science | Anthropology, dramaturgy, institutional theory |
| Central concepts | Roles, goals, strategies, policies, technology, environment | Needs, skills, relationships | Power, conflict, competition, politics | Culture, myth, meaning, metaphor, ritual, ceremony, stories, heroes |
| Image of leadership | Social architecture | Empowerment | Advocacy and political savvy | Inspiration |
| Basic leadership challenge | Attune structure to task, technology, environment | Align organizational and human needs | Develop agenda and power base | Create faith, belief, beauty, meaning |
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 because I'm always switching back and forth between the two” (p. 40). Multi‐frame 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.
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 glimmers 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.6
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 Covid‐19 pandemic or 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 fall outside previous experience and catch us flat‐footed, as was true of the 2020 pandemic. Imagination and mindfulness offer our best chance for being ready when a black swan sails into view, and multi‐frame thinking is a powerful stimulus to the broad, creative mind‐set imagination requires.
Engineering and Art
Exhibit 1.3 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.
Exhibit 1.3. 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 and a powerful partner. 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 abstract 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
