nearly as clueless as their subordinates (the Dilberts of the world) think they are. The consequences of myopic management and leadership show up every day, sometimes in small and subtle ways, sometimes in large and blatant catastrophes. Think of the enormous differences in levels of suffering and death between the relatively few countries that contained the Covid‐19 pandemic effectively, and the many that did not. Our basic premise is that a primary cause of managerial failure is faulty thinking rooted in inadequate ideas and truncated possibilities. Managers and those who try to help them too often rely on narrow models that capture only part of organizational life.
Learning multiple perspectives, or frames, is a defense against thrashing around without a clue about what you are doing or why. Frames serve multiple functions. They are sources of new questions, filters for sorting essence from trivia, maps that aid navigation, and tools for solving problems and getting things done. This book is organized around four frames rooted in both managerial wisdom and social science knowledge. The structural approach focuses on the architecture of organization—the design of units and subunits, rules and roles, goals and policies. The human resource lens emphasizes understanding people—their strengths and foibles, reason and emotion, desires and fears. The political view sees organizations as competitive arenas of scarce resources, competing interests, and struggles for power and advantage. Finally, the symbolic frame focuses on issues of meaning and faith. It puts ritual, ceremony, story, play, and culture at the heart of organizational life.
Each of the frames is powerful and coherent. Collectively, they make it possible to reframe, looking at the same thing from multiple lenses or points of view. When the world seems hopelessly confusing and nothing is working, reframing is a powerful tool for gaining clarity, regaining balance, generating new questions, and finding options that actually make a difference.
Notes
1 1. Among the possible ways of talking about frames are schemata or schema theory (Fiedler, 1982; Fiske and Dyer, 1985; Lord and Foti, 1986), representations (Frensch and Sternberg, 1991; Lesgold and Lajoie, 1991; Voss, Wolfe, Lawrence, and Engle, 1991), cognitive maps (Weick and Bougon, 1986), paradigms (Gregory, 1983; Kuhn, 1970), social categorizations (Cronshaw, 1987), implicit theories (Brief and Downey, 1983), mental models (Senge, 1990), definitions of the situation, and root metaphors.
2 2. J. R. Latham, [Re]Create the Organization You Really Want!: Leadership and Organization Design for Sustainable Excellence (Colorado Springs, CO: Organization Design Studio, Ltd., 2016).
3 3. Ken Blanchard and Colleen Barrett, Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success (Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press, 2010), p. 7.
4 4. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don't (New York: Harper Business, 2010), p. 5.
5 5. Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer‐Wright, Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization (New York: Harper, 2011), p. 4.
6 6. A number of scholars (including Allison, 1971; Bergquist, 1992; Birnbaum, 1988; Elmore, 1978; Morgan, 1986; Perrow, 1986; Quinn, 1988; Quinn, Faerman, Thompson, and McGrath, 1996; and Scott, 1981) have made similar arguments for multi‐frame approaches to groups and social collectives.
Chapter 2 Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations
The alarm system was ready. Scarred by the SARS epidemic that erupted in 2002, China had created an infectious disease reporting system that officials said was world‐class: fast, thorough and, just as important, immune from meddling. Hospitals could input patients' details into a computer and instantly notify government health authorities in Beijing, where officers are trained to spot and smother contagious outbreaks before they spread.It didn't work.
(Myers, 2020)
On December 30, 2019, Dr. Ai Fen, the director of an intensive care unit in Wuhan, China, broke into a cold sweat as she stared at one phrase in a lab report: “SARS coronavirus” (Kuo, 2020). SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), an often‐deadly disease, had appeared in China in late 2002. It spread rapidly after it was first identified, but SARS patients showed symptoms before they became infectious. That allowed officials in China and elsewhere to limit it to only 8,000 cases worldwide. The United States saw fewer than 30 cases and no deaths. The new coronavirus turned out to be much more dangerous.
The emerging evidence that frightened Dr. Ai came from one of a few dozen patients with new and puzzling respiratory symptoms who were starting to appear in Wuhan. Many became very sick, and some died. Dr. Ai copied the alarming report to a colleague and within hours the news was spreading through Wuhan medical circles. It should also have been entered into China's “fail‐safe” reporting system. Only a few weeks earlier, the deputy director of the provincial center for disease control had given a pep talk urging local officials to make the area number one in China in the quality of its infectious disease reporting (Myers, 2020).
The rules were clear. Why weren't they followed? The answer takes us to a very familiar story of leadership and life in organizations. Around the world managers and officials look up the chain of command for signals about what they are and aren't supposed to do. They often believe that keeping bosses happy is one of the surest routes to survival and success. Nowhere is this truer than in China, where leaders in every organization answer to the Communist Party, which has created the world's most sweeping system for suppressing news or opinions that could make the government or the Party look bad. That's why local officials in Guangdong had tried to cover up the SARS outbreak in 2003. Seventeen years later, officials in Wuhan followed the same playbook (Cook, 2020). A twenty‐first‐century reporting system fell victim to ancient human impulses. Instead of being recognized for her diligence, Dr. Ai was reprimanded “harshly” by her hospital for not following the unspoken rules (Chheda, 2020; Kuo, 2020).
Despite the cover‐up, online reports were quickly leaked. The news reached Beijing, setting off alarm bells. On December 31, China's National Health Commission ordered Wuhan to make a public announcement about the new illness and to inform the World Health Organization that China was seeing a cluster of suspicious pneumonia cases. That was when the world first heard about the new virus, but the information was spotty and only a few infectious disease experts immediately recognized the risk of a pandemic. Meanwhile, disease control specialists from Beijing raced to Wuhan. There they were greeted with warm welcomes and reassurance that the new illness was nothing to worry about—not much different from seasonal influenza.
Privately, however, Wuhan officials scrambled to hide a grimmer reality (Myers, 2020). Local police rounded up eight doctors on January 1, sending a clear message to the local medical community to stay silent. When one of them, Li Wenliang, died from Covid‐19 a few weeks later, the Chinese public made him a posthumous hero rather than a luckless victim (Buckley, 2020).
For a few critical weeks in January, Wuhan officials continued to suppress the case count, instructing doctors not to report cases without official clearance (Myer, 2020; Shih, Rauhala, and Sun, 2020). Officials apparently hoped to get the new illness under control and make it slither away. But events were racing beyond their control, dooming any efforts to keep the lid on. Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, is a major air and rail hub, and travelers were already beginning to carry the new disease well beyond its birthplace.
After
