Homework answers / question archive / You will write a living case study of a challenge faced by a leader and team in an organization

You will write a living case study of a challenge faced by a leader and team in an organization

Business

Share With

You will write a living case study of a challenge faced by a leader and team in an organization. Putting yourself in the role of the leader, you will apply the four frames(Structural, political, human resources, symbolic) used to understand the problem, guide the interviews you will hold, and underlie the solution you will propose. (Please scan chapter 20 in Reframing Organizations as a preliminary model for this assignment.)

i have a powerpoint slides on this project, however, i need it written down.

Organizational Analysis:

The written paper shall include these areas:

1. Description of organization and context.
2. Clear description of the challenge and problem to be solved.
3. Background of the leader.
4. Background of other parties involved.
5. History of the organization, in light of the challenge and problem.
6. Tell the story of the leader’s approach to the organization and challenge.
7. Document the interviews and activities.
8. Describe structural issues and options.
9. Describe human resource issues and options.
10. Describe political issues and options.
11. Describe symbolic issues and options.
12. Summarize the results of the four-frame approach in a table.
13. Assess how the leader addressed the challenge.
14. Make recommendations to the leader on how he/she may have enhanced the outcome using concepts in the class.
15. Fourth Edition Reframing Organizations Artistry, Choice, and Leadership LEE G. BOLMAN TERRENCE E. DEAL B est- se l l i n g a u t h o rs of LEADING WITH SOUL FOURTH EDITION Reframing Organizations Artistry, Choice, and Leadership Lee G. Bolman • Terrence E. Deal Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741—www.josseybass.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-6468600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-7486011, fax 201-748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Credits are on page 528. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax 317-572-4002. Jossey-Bass also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bolman, Lee G. Reframing organizations : artistry, choice, and leadership / Lee G. Bolman, Terrence E. Deal.—4th ed. p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass business & management series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7879-8798-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-7879-8799-2 (pbk.) 1. Management. 2. Organizational behavior. 3. Leadership. I. Deal, Terrence E. II. Title. HD31.B6135 2008 658.4'063—dc22 2008022738 Printed in the United States of America fourth edition HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 PB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The Jossey-Bass Business & Management Series An updated online Instructor’s Guide with test bank is available at www.wiley.com/college/bolman Available in spring 2009: New with this fourth edition of Reframing Organizations is an online assessment program that runs in Blackboard, WebCT, and Vista. Each chapter includes 15–20 multiple choice, true/false, matching, and essay questions designed to assess understanding of the key concepts presented in the text. Multiple choice, matching, and true/false questions will include detailed feedback for incorrect answers, and students will also be provided references to the text for incorrect answers. Please consult your sales representative for further details. CONTENTS Preface vii PA RT O N E Making Sense of Organizations ONE Introduction: The Power of Reframing 3 TWO Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations 23 PA RT T W O The Structural Frame Getting Organized THREE 45 FOUR Structure and Restructuring 71 FIVE Organizing Groups and Teams 99 PA R T T H R E E SIX The Human Resource Frame People and Organizations SEVEN EIGHT 119 Improving Human Resource Management 139 Interpersonal and Group Dynamics 165 v The Political Frame PA R T F O U R NINE TEN Power, Conflict, and Coalition The Manager as Politician Organizations as Political Arenas and Political Agents 191 211 ELEVEN The Symbolic Frame PA R T F I V E T W E LV E Organizational Symbols and Culture Culture in Action T H I RT E E N 229 F O U RT E E N Organization as Theater PA R T S I X Improving Leadership Practice 251 279 293 FIFTEEN Integrating Frames for Effective Practice 311 SIXTEEN Reframing in Action: Opportunities and Perils 327 Reframing Leadership SEVENTEEN Reframing Change in Organizations: Training, Realigning, Negotiating, and Grieving 341 EIGHTEEN NINETEEN Reframing Ethics and Spirit Bringing It All Together: Change and Leadership in Action 373 397 TWENTY T W E N T Y- O N E Epilogue: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership Appendix: The Best of Organizational Studies: Scholars’ Hits and Popular Best-Sellers References The Authors Name Index Subject Index vi Contents 411 435 439 445 481 483 494 PREFACE T his is the fifth release of a work that began in 1984 as Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations. We’re grateful to readers around the world who have told us the book gave them ideas that make a difference—at work and elsewhere in their lives. It is time for an update, and we’re gratified to be back by popular demand. Like everything else, organizations and their leadership challenges have been changing rapidly in recent years, and scholars have been running hard to keep up. This edition tries to capture the current frontiers of both knowledge and art. The four-frame model, with its view of organizations as factories, families, jungles, and temples, remains the book’s conceptual heart. But much else has changed. We have updated our case examples extensively to keep up with the latest developments in managerial practice. We have updated a feature we inaugurated in the third edition, “greatest hits in organization studies.” These features offer pithy summaries of key ideas from the some of the most influential works in the scholarly literature (as indicated by a citation analysis, described in the Appendix at the end of the book). As a counterpoint to the scholarly works, we have also added occasional summaries of recent management best-sellers. Life in organizations has also produced many new examples, and there is new material throughout the book. At the same time, we worked zealously to minimize bloat by tracking down and expunging every redundant sentence, marginal concept, or extraneous example. We are proud that, despite new material in vii every chapter, this edition is actually a bit shorter than the last one. At the same time, we’ve tried to keep it fun. Collective life is an endless source of examples as entertaining as they are instructive, and we’ve sprinkled them throughout the text. We apologize to anyone who finds that an old favorite fell to the cuttingroom floor, but we think most readers will find the book an even clearer and more efficient read. As always, our primary audience is managers and future leaders. We have tried to answer the question, What do we know about organizations and leadership that is genuinely relevant and useful to practitioners? We have worked to present a large, complex body of theory, research, and practice as clearly and simply as possible. We tried to avoid watering it down or presenting simplistic views of how to solve managerial problems. Our goal is to offer not solutions but powerful and provocative ways of thinking about opportunities and pitfalls. We continue to focus on both management and leadership. Leading and managing are different, but they’re equally important. If an organization is overmanaged but underled, it eventually loses any sense of spirit or purpose. A poorly managed organization with a strong, charismatic leader may soar briefly—only to crash shortly thereafter. Malpractice can be as damaging and unethical for managers and leaders as for physicians. Myopic managers or overzealous leaders usually harm more than just themselves. The challenges of modern organizations require the objective perspective of managers as well as the brilliant flashes of vision that wise leadership provides. We need more people in managerial roles who can find simplicity and order amid organizational confusion and chaos. We need versatile and flexible leaders who are artists as well as analysts, who can reframe experience to discover new issues and possibilities. We need managers who love their work, their organizations, and the people whose lives they affect. We need leaders and managers who appreciate management as a moral and ethical undertaking. We need leaders who combine hard-headed realism with passionate commitment to larger values and purposes. We hope to encourage and nurture such qualities and possibilities. As in the past, we have tried to produce a clear and readable synthesis and integration of the field’s major theoretical traditions. We concentrate mainly on organization theory’s implications for practice. We draw on examples from every sector and around the globe. Historically, organization studies have been divided into several intellectual camps, often isolated from one another. Works that seek viii Preface to give a comprehensive overview of organization theory and research often drown in social science jargon and abstraction and have little to say to practitioners. We try to find a balance between misleading oversimplification and mindboggling complexity. The bulk of work in organization theory has focused almost exclusively on either the private or the public sector, but not both. We think this is a mistake. Managers need to understand similarities and differences among all types of organizations. The public and private sectors increasingly interpenetrate one another. Public administrators who regulate airlines, nuclear power plants, or pharmaceutical companies face the problem of “indirect management” every day. They struggle to influence the behavior of organizations over which they have very limited authority. Private firms need to manage relationships with multiple levels of government. The situation is even more complicated for managers in multinational companies coping with the subtleties of governments with very different systems and traditions. Across sectors and cultures, managers often harbor narrow, stereotypic conceptions of one another that impede effectiveness on both sides. We need common ground and a shared understanding that can help strengthen public and private organizations in the United States and throughout the world. The dialogue between public and private, domestic and multinational organizations has become increasingly important. Because of their generic application, the frames offer an ecumenical language for the exchange. Our work with a variety of organizations around the world has continually reinforced our confidence that the frames are relevant everywhere. Political issues, for example, are universally important, even though the specifics vary greatly from one country or culture to another. The idea of reframing continues to be a central theme. Throughout the book, we show how the same situation can be viewed in at least four ways. In Part Six, we include a series of chapters on reframing critical organizational issues such as leadership, change, and ethics. Two chapters are specifically devoted to reframing real-life situations. We also continue to emphasize artistry. Overemphasizing the rational and technical side of an organization often contributes to its decline or demise. Our counterbalance emphasizes the importance of art in both management and leadership. Artistry is neither exact nor precise; the artist interprets experience, expressing it in forms that can be felt, understood, and appreciated. Art fosters Preface ix emotion, subtlety, and ambiguity. An artist represents the world to give us a deeper understanding of what is and what might be. In modern organizations, quality, commitment, and creativity are highly valued but often hard to find. They can be developed and encouraged by leaders or managers who embrace the expressive side of their work. OUTLINE OF THE BOOK The first part of the book, “Making Sense of Organizations,” tackles a perplexing question about management: Why is it that smart people so often do dumb things? Chapter One, “The Power of Reframing,” explains why: Managers often misread situations. They have not learned how to use multiple lenses to get a better sense of what they’re up against and what they might do. Chapter Two, “Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations,” uses several famous cases (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and a friendly-fire tragedy in the skies over Iraq in 1994) to show how managers’ everyday thinking and theories can lead to catastrophe. We explain basic factors that make organizational life complicated, ambiguous, and unpredictable; discuss common fallacies in managerial thinking; and spell out criteria for more effective approaches to diagnosis and action. Part Two, “The Structural Frame,” explores the key role that social architecture plays in the functioning of organizations. Chapter Three, “Getting Organized,” describes basic issues managers must consider in designing structure to fit an organization’s goals, tasks, and context. It demonstrates why organizations— from Harvard University to McDonald’s—need different structures in order to be effective in their unique environments. Chapter Four, “Structure and Restructuring,” explains major structural pathologies and pitfalls. It presents guidelines for aligning structures to situations, along with several cases illustrating successful structural change. Chapter Five, “Organizing Groups and Teams,” shows that structure is a key to high-performing teams. Part Three, “The Human Resource Frame,” explores the properties of both people and organizations, and what happens when the two intersect. Chapter Six, “People and Organizations,” focuses on the relationship between organizations and human nature. It shows how a manager’s practices and assumptions about people can lead either to alienation and hostility or to commitment and high motivation. It contrasts two strategies for achieving effectiveness: “lean and mean,” or investing in people. Chapter Seven, “Improving Human Resource x Preface Management,” is an overview of practices that build a more motivated and committed workforce—including participative management, job enrichment, self-managing workgroups, management of diversity, and organization development. Chapter Eight, “Interpersonal and Group Dynamics,” presents an example of interpersonal conflict to illustrate how managers can enhance or undermine relationships. It also discusses how group members can increase their effectiveness by attending to group process, including informal norms and roles, interpersonal conflict, leadership, and decision making. Part Four, “The Political Frame,” views organizations as arenas. Individuals and groups compete to achieve their parochial interests in a world of conflicting viewpoints, scarce resources, and struggles for power. Chapter Nine, “Power, Conflict, and Coalition,” analyzes the tragic loss of the space shuttles Columbia and Challenger, illustrating the influence of political dynamics in decision making. It shows how scarcity and diversity lead to conflict, bargaining, and games of power; the chapter also distinguishes constructive and destructive political dynamics. Chapter Ten, “The Manager as Politician,” illustrates basic skills of the constructive politician: diagnosing political realities, setting agendas, building networks, negotiating, and making choices that are both effective and ethical. Chapter Eleven, “Organizations as Political Arenas and Political Agents,” highlights organizations as both arenas for political contests and political actors influencing broader social, political, and economic trends. Case examples such as Wal-Mart and Ross Johnson explore political dynamics both inside and outside organizations. Part Five explores the symbolic frame. Chapter Twelve, “Organizational Symbols and Culture,” spells out basic symbolic elements in organizations: myths, heroes, metaphors, stories, humor, play, rituals, and ceremonies. It defines organizational culture and shows its central role in shaping performance. The power of symbol and culture is illustrated in cases as diverse as HarleyDavidson, the U.S. Congress, Nordstrom department stores, the Air Force, and an odd horse race in Italy. Chapter Thirteen, “Culture in Action,” uses the case of a computer development team to show what leaders and group members can do collectively to build a culture that bonds people in pursuit of a shared mission. Initiation rituals, specialized language, group stories, humor and play, and ceremonies all combine to transform diverse individuals into a cohesive team with purpose, spirit, and soul. Chapter Fourteen, “Organization as Theater,” draws on dramaturgical and institutional theory to reveal how organizational structures, Preface xi activities, and events serve as secular dramas, expressing our fears and joys, arousing our emotions, and kindling our spirit. It also shows how organizational structures and processes, such as planning, evaluation, and decision making, are often more important for what they express than for what they accomplish. Part Six, “Improving Leadership Practice,” focuses on the implications of the frames for central issues in managerial practice, including leadership, change, and ethics. Chapter Fifteen, “Integrating Frames for Effective Practice,” shows how managers can blend the frames to improve their effectiveness. It looks at organizations as multiple realities and gives guidelines for aligning frames with situations. Chapter Sixteen, “Reframing in Action,” presents four scenarios, or scripts, derived from the frames. It applies the scenarios to the harrowing experience of a young manager whose first day in a new job turns out to be far more challenging than she expected. The discussion illustrates how leaders can expand their options and enhance their effectiveness by considering alternative approaches. Chapter Seventeen, “Reframing Leadership,” discusses limitations in traditional views of leadership and proposes a more comprehensive view of how leadership works in organizations. It summarizes and critiques current knowledge on the characteristics of leaders, including the relationship of leadership and gender. It shows how frames generate distinctive images of effective leaders as architects, servants, advocates, and prophets. Chapter Eighteen, “Reframing Change in Organizations,” describes four fundamental issues that arise in any change effort: individual needs, structural alignment, political conflict, and existential loss. It uses cases of successful and unsuccessful change to document key strategies, such as training, realigning, creating arenas, and using symbol and ceremony. Chapter Nineteen, “Reframing Ethics and Spirit,” discusses four ethical mandates that emerge from the frames: excellence, caring, justice, and faith. It argues that leaders can build more ethical organizations through gifts of authorship, love, power, and significance. Chapter Twenty, “Bringing It All Together,” is an integrative treatment of the reframing process. It takes a troubled school administrator through a weekend of reflection on critical difficulties he faces. The chapter shows how reframing can help managers move from feeling confused and stuck to discovering a renewed sense of clarity and confidence. The Epilogue (Chapter Twenty-One) describes strategies and characteristics needed in future leaders. It explains why they will need an artistic combination of conceptual flexibility and commitment to core values. Efforts to prepare future leaders have to focus as much on spiritual as on intellectual development. xii Preface ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As we noted in our first edition, “Book writing often feels like a lonely process, even when an odd couple is doing the writing.” This odd couple keeps getting older (both closing in on seventy)—and, some would say, even odder and more grumpy. Yet the process seems less lonely because of our close friendship and our contact with many other colleagues and friends. The best thing about teaching is that you learn so much from your students. Students at Harvard, Vanderbilt, the University of Missouri–Kansas City, and the University of Southern California have given us invaluable criticism, challenge, and support over the years. We’re grateful to the many readers who have responded to our invitation to write and ask questions or share comments. Their input has made the book better in many ways. (The invitation is still open—our contact information is in “The Authors” section.) We wish we could personally thank all of the leaders and managers from whose experience we have profited in seminars, workshops, and consultations. Their knowledge and wisdom are the foundation and touchstone for our work. As in the past, we owe much to our colleagues. Thanks again to all who helped us in the prior editions; your contribution still lingers in this work. But we particularly want to mention those who have made more recent contributions. We have learned much from collaboration with a number of teaching fellows and graduate assistants at the University of Missouri–Kansas City; in particular, we are very grateful for the help of Mary Yung, Hooilin Chan, Vera Stoykova, and Zhou Yongjie. They all did an outstanding job helping us develop the citation analysis that appears in the Appendix, and Vera did excellent work on developing a test bank. We wish we could thank all the colleagues and readers in the United States and around the world who have offered valuable comments and suggestions, but the list is long and our memories keep getting shorter. Elena Granell de Aldaz of the Institute for Advanced Study of Management in Caracas collaborated with us on developing a Spanish-language adaptation of Reframing Organizations as well as on a more recent project that studied frame orientations among managers in Venezuela. We are proud to consider her a valued colleague and wonderful friend. Bob Marx, of the University of Massachusetts, deserves special mention as a charter member of the frames family. Bob’s interest in the frames, creativity in developing teaching designs, and eye for video material have aided our thinking and teaching immensely. Cdr. Gary Deal, USN; Maj. Kevin Reed, USAF; Dr. Peter Minich, a transplant surgeon; and Jan and Ron Haynes of FzioMed all provided Preface xiii valuable case material. The late Peter Frost of the University of British Columbia continues to inspire our work. Peter Vaill of the Antioch Graduate School has been a continuing source of ideas, support, and inspiration. Kent Peterson, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Sharon Conley, University of California at Santa Barbara, are continuing sources of ideas and support. A number of individuals, including many friends and colleagues at the Organizational Behavior Teaching Conference, have given us helpful ideas and suggestions. We apologize for any omissions, but we want to thank Anke Arnaud, Carole K. Barnett, Max Elden, Kent Fairfield, Olivier Hermanus, Jim Hodge, Earlene Holland, Scott Johnson, Mark Kriger, Larry Levine, Hyoungbae Lee, Mark Maier, Magid Mazen, Thomas P. Nydegger, Dave O’Connell, Lynda St. Clair, Susan Twombly, and Pat Villeneuve. We only wish we had succeeded in implementing all the wonderful ideas we received from these and other colleagues. Bill Eddy, dean emeritus of the Bloch School at the University of Missouri– Kansas City, gets special thanks for nurturing an environment that helps scholarship flourish. His successors on the leadership team at the Bloch School, including Al Page, Homer Erekson, Karyl Leggio and Lanny Solomon, have kept that tradition alive. Other current or former Bloch School colleagues who have helped more than they know are Dave Bodde, Nancy Day, Dick Heimovics, Bob Herman, Doranne Hudson, Deborah Noble, Stephen Pruitt, David Renz, Beth Smith, and Marilyn Taylor. Lee’s colleagues in the Department of Organization, Leadership, and Marketing at the Bloch School have done their part, and he is grateful to Raj Arora, Gene Brown, Rita Cain, Pam Dobies, Mark Parry, Michael Song, and Rob Waris. Colleagues Carl Cohn, Stu Gothald, and Gib Hentschke of the University of Southern California offer both intellectual stimulation and moral support. Others to whom our debt is particularly clear are Chris Argyris, Sam Bacharach, Cliff Baden, Estella Bensimon, Margaret Benefiel, Bob Birnbaum, Barbara Bunker, Tom Burks, Ellen Castro, Norma Saba Corey, Carlos Cortés, Linton Deck, Jim Honan, Tom Johnson (always a source of creative ideas), Bob Kegan, Grady McGonagill, Judy McLaughlin, John Meyer, Harrison Owen, Michael Sales, Dick Scott, Joan Vydra, Roy Williams, and Karl Weick. Thanks again to Dave Brown, Phil Mirvis, Barry Oshry, Tim Hall, Bill Kahn, and Todd Jick of the Brookline Circle, now in its third decade of searching for joy and meaning in lives devoted to the study of organizations. Outside the United States, we are grateful to Poul Erik Mouritzen in Denmark; Rolf Kaelin, Cüno Pumpin, and Peter Weisman in Switzerland; xiv Preface Ilpo Linko in Finland; Tom Case in Brazil; Einar Plyhn and Haakon Gran in Norway; Peter Normark and Dag Bjorkegren in Sweden; Ching-Shiun Chung in Taiwan; Anastasia Vitkovskaya in Russia; and H.R.H. Prince Philipp von und zu Lichtenstein. Closer to home, Lee is very grateful to physical therapist Scott Knoche, whose intervention in a debilitating case of cervical radiculopathy produced nearmiraculous results. Lee also owes more than he can say to Bruce Kay, whose genial and unflappable approach to work, coupled with high levels of organization and follow-through, have all had a wonderfully positive impact since he took on the challenge of bringing a modicum of order and sanity to Lee’s professional functioning. We also continue to be grateful for the long-term support and friendship of Linda Corey, who still serves as our resident representative at Harvard, and Homa Aminmadani, who now lives part-time in Teheran. Couples of the Edna Ranch Vintners Guild—the Schnackenbergs, Pescatores, Hayneses, and Beadles—link efforts with Terry in exploring the ups, downs, and mysteries of the art and science of wine making. Three professional wine makers, Bob Schiebelhut of Tolosa, Romeo “Meo” Zuech of Piedra Creek Winery, and Brett Escalera of Consilience and TresAnelli, offer advice that applies to leadership as well as wine making. Meo reminds us, “Never overmanage your grapes,” and Brett prefaces answers to all questions with “It all depends.” We’re delighted to be well into the third decade of our partnership with Jossey-Bass. We’re grateful to the many friends who have helped us over the years, including Bill Henry, Steve Piersanti, Lynn Lychow, Bill Hicks, Debra Hunter, Cedric Crocker, Byron Schneider, and many others. In recent years, Kathe Sweeney has been a wonderful editor and even better friend, and we’re delighted to be working with her again. Rob Brandt has done superb work keeping us organized enough for the editorial process to move forward. Beverly Peavler’s keen eye, editorial judgment, and willingness to crack the whip gently have made for a much stronger manuscript. We received many valuable suggestions from a diverse, knowledgeable, and talented team of outside reviewers: Hannah Carter (University of Florida), Matthew Eriksen (University of Tampa), James “Jae” Espey (Clemson), Chris Foley (University of Pennsylvania), Frank Hamilton (Eckerd College), Robert “Bob” Innes (Vanderbilt), and Kristi Loescher (University of Texas, Austin). We did not succeed in implementing all of their many excellent ideas, and they did not always agree among themselves, but the manuscript benefited in many ways from their input. Preface xv Lee’s six children—Edward, Shelley, Lori, Scott, Christopher, and Bradley—all continue to enrich his life and contribute to his growth. He still wishes he could give them as much as they have given him. Brad has become a creative source of new ways to think about reframing, and Chris served as our consultant on contemporary music. Janie Deal Rice has delighted her father in becoming a fascinating and independent entrepreneur, running (with husband Jake, also mayor of Hagerman, Idaho) a catering business and bed and breakfast, Ein Tisch Inn. Janie has a rare talent of almost magically transforming simple ingredients into fine cuisine. Special mention also goes to Terry’s parents, Bob and Dorothy Deal. His father is deceased and his mother is now in her nineties, but both lived long enough to be pleasantly surprised that their oft-wayward son could write a book. We dedicate the book to our wives, who have more than earned all the credit and appreciation that we can give them. Joan Gallos, Lee’s spouse and closest colleague, combines intellectual challenge and critique with support and love. She has been an active collaborator in developing our ideas, and her teaching manual for previous editions was a frame-breaking model for the genre. Her contributions have become so integrated into our own thinking that we are no longer able to thank her for all the ways that the book has gained from her wisdom and insights. Sandy Deal’s psychological training enables her to approach the field of organizations with a distinctive and illuminating slant. Her successful practice produces examples that have helped us make some even stronger connections to the concepts of clinical psychology. She is one of the most gifted diagnosticians in the field, as well as a delightful partner whose love and support over the long run have made all the difference. She is a rare combination of courage and caring, intimacy and independence, responsibility and playfulness. To Joan and Sandy, thanks again. As the years accumulate, we love you even more. June 2008 Lee G. Bolman Kansas City, Missouri Terrence E. Deal San Luis Obispo, California xvi Preface PA R T O N E Making Sense of Organizations Introduction chapter ONE The Power of Reframing B ob Nardelli expected to win the three-way competition to succeed management legend Jack Welch as CEO of General Electric. He was stunned when Welch told him late in 2000 that he’d never run GE. The next day, though, he found out that he’d won the consolation prize. A director of Home Depot called to tell him, “You probably could not feel worse right now, but you’ve just been hit in the ass with a golden horseshoe” (Sellers, 2002, p. 1). Within a week, Nardelli hired on as Home Depot’s new CEO. He was a big change from the free-spirited founders, who had built the wildly successful retailer on the foundation of an uninhibited, entrepreneurial “orange” culture. Managers ran their stores using “tribal knowledge,” and customers counted on friendly, knowledgeable staff for helpful advice. Nardelli revamped Home Depot with a heavy dose of command-and-control management, discipline, and metrics. Almost all the top executives and many of the frontline managers were replaced, often by ex-military hires. At first, it seemed to work—profits improved, and management experts hailed the “remarkable set of tools” Nardelli used to produce “deep, lasting culture change” (Charan, 2006, p. 1). But the lasting change included a steady decline in employee morale and customer service. Where the founders had successfully promoted “make love to the customers,” Nardelli’s toe-the-line stance pummeled Home Depot to last place in its industry for customer satisfaction. 3 A growing chorus of critics harped about everything from the declining stock price to Nardelli’s extraordinary $245 million in compensation. At Home Depot’s 2006 shareholders’ meeting, Nardelli hoped to keep naysayers at bay by giving them little time to say anything and refusing to respond to anything they did say: “It was, as even Home Depot executives will concede, a 37-minute fiasco. In a basement hotel ballroom in Delaware, with the board nowhere in sight and huge time displays on stage to cut off angry investors, Home Depot held a hasty annual meeting last year that attendees alternately described as ‘appalling’ and ‘arrogant’ ” (Barbaro, 2007, p. C1). The outcry from shareholders and the business press was scathing. Nardelli countered with metrics to show that all was well. He seemed unaware or unconcerned that he had embarrassed his board, enraged his shareholders, turned off his customers, and reinforced his reputation for arrogance and a tin ear. Nardelli abruptly left Home Depot at the beginning of 2007 (Grow, 2007). Nardelli’s old boss, Jack Welch, called him the best operations manager he’d ever seen. Yet, as talented and successful as he was, Nardelli flamed out at Home Depot because he was only seeing part of the picture. He was a victim of one of the most common afflictions of leaders: seeing an incomplete or distorted picture as a result of overlooking or misinterpreting important signals. An extensive literature on business blunders attests to the pervasiveness of this lost-at-sea state (see, for example, Adler and Houghton, 1997; Feinberg and Tarrant, 1995; Ricks, 1999; Sobel, 1999). Enron’s demise provides another example of floundering in a fog. In its heyday, Enron proclaimed itself the “World’s Leading Company”—with some justification. Enron had been a perennial honoree on Fortune’s list of “America’s Most Admired Companies” and was ranked as the “most innovative” six years in a row (McLean, 2001, p. 60). Small wonder that CEO Kenneth W. Lay was among the nation’s most admired and powerful business leaders. Lay and Enron were on a roll. What could be wrong with such a big, profitable, innovative, fast-growing company? The trouble was that the books had been cooked, and the outside auditors were asleep at the switch. In December 2001, Enron collapsed in history’s thenlargest corporate bankruptcy. In the space of a year, its stock plunged from eighty dollars to eighty cents a share. Tens of billions of dollars in shareholder wealth evaporated. More than four thousand people lost their jobs and, in many 4 Reframing Organizations cases, their savings and retirement funds.1 The auditors also paid a steep price. Andersen Worldwide, a hundred-year-old firm with a once-sterling reputation, folded along with Enron. What went wrong? After the cave-in, critics offered a profusion of plausible explanations. Yet Enron’s leaders seemed shocked and baffled by the abrupt free fall. Former CEO Jeffrey K. Skilling, regarded as the primary architect of Enron’s high-flying culture, was described by associates as “the ultimate control freak. The sort of hands-on corporate leader who kept his fingers on all the pieces of the puzzle” (Schwartz, 2002, p. C1). Skilling resigned for unexplained “personal reasons” only three months before Enron imploded. Many wondered if he had jumped ship because he foresaw the iceberg looming dead ahead. But after Enron’s crash, he claimed, “I had no idea the company was in anything but excellent shape” (p. C1). Ultimately, in October 2006, both he and Lay were convicted of multiple counts of fraud for their role in Enron’s disintegration. During their trials both steadfastly contended that they had done nothing wrong. Enron, they insisted, had been a sound and successful company brought down by forces they either weren’t aware of or couldn’t control. Despite public opinion to the contrary, both seemed to genuinely believe that they were victims rather than villains. Skilling and Lay were both viewed as brilliant men, yet both sought refuge in cluelessness. It is easy to argue they claimed ignorance only because they had no better defense. Even so, they were out of touch at a deeper level. Lay and Skilling were passionate about building Enron into the “World’s Leading Company.” They staunchly believed that they had created a mold-breaking company with a revolutionary business model. They knew risks were involved, but you have to bend or break old rules when you’re exploring uncharted territory. Investors bought the stock, and business professors wrote articles about the management lessons behind Enron’s success. The snare was that Lay and Skilling had misread their world and had no clue that they were destroying the company they loved. The curse of cluelessness is not limited to corporations—government provides its share of examples. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Levees failed, and much of the city was underwater. Tens of thousands of people, many poor and black, found themselves stranded for days in desperate circumstances. Government agencies bumbled aimlessly, and help was slow to arrive. As Americans watched television footage of the chaos, they were stunned Introduction 5 to hear the nation’s top disaster official, the secretary of Homeland Security, tell reporters that he “had no reports” of things viewers had seen with their own eyes. It seemed he might have been better informed if he had relied on CNN rather than his own agency. Homeland Security, Enron, and Home Depot represent only a few examples of an endemic challenge: how to know if you’re getting the right picture or tuning in to the wrong channel. Managers often fail this test. Cluelessness is a fact of life, even for very smart people. Sometimes, the information they need is fuzzy or hard to get. Other times, they ignore or misinterpret information at hand. Decision makers too often lock themselves into flawed ways of making sense of their circumstances. For Lay and Skilling, it was a mistaken view that “we’re different from everyone else—we’re smarter.” For Nardelli, it was his conviction that his metrics gave him the full picture. In the discussion that follows, we explore the origins and symptoms of cluelessness. We introduce reframing—the conceptual core of the book and our basic prescription for sizing things up. Reframing requires an ability to think about situations in more than one way. We then introduce four distinct frames— structural, human resource, political, and symbolic—each logical and powerful in its own right. Together, they help us decipher the full array of significant clues, capturing a more comprehensive picture of what’s going on and what to do. VIRTUES AND DRAWBACKS OF ORGANIZED ACTIVITY Before the emergence of the railroad and the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century, individuals managed their own affairs—America had no multiunit businesses and no need for professional managers (Chandler, 1977). Explosive technological and social changes have produced a world that is far more interconnected, frantic, and complicated than it was in those days. Humans struggle to catch up, at continual risk of drowning in complexity that puts us “in over our 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 rules of the game and suddenly turned yesterday’s organizations into antiques” (pp. 14–15). 6 Reframing Organizations The proliferation of complex organizations has made most human activities collective endeavors. We grow up in families and then start our own families. We work for business or government. We learn in schools and universities. We worship in synagogues, churches, and mosques. 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 human enterprises because of what they can do for us. They offer goods, entertainment, social services, health care, and almost everything else that we use, consume, or enjoy. All too often, however, we experience a darker side. Organizations can frustrate and exploit people. Too often, products are flawed, families are dysfunctional, students fail to learn, patients get worse, and policies backfire. Work often has so little meaning that jobs offer nothing beyond a paycheck. If we can believe mission statements and public pronouncements, every company these days aims to nurture its employees and delight its customers. But many miss the mark. Schools are blamed for social ills, universities are said to close more minds than they open, and government is criticized for red tape and rigidity. The private sector has its own problems. Automakers drag their feet about recalling faulty cars. Producers of food and pharmaceuticals make people sick with tainted products. Software companies deliver bugs and “vaporware.” Industrial accidents dump chemicals, oil, toxic gas, and radioactive materials into the air and water. Too often, corporate greed and insensitivity create havoc for individual lives and communities. The bottom line: we seem hard-pressed to manage organizations so that their virtues exceed their vices. The big question: Why? The Curse of Cluelessness 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 act stupid because of personality flaws—things like pride, arrogance, and unconscious desires to fail. It’s true that psychological flaws have been apparent in such brilliant, self-destructive individuals as Adolph Hitler, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. But on the whole, intellectually challenged people have as many psychological problems as the best and brightest. The primary source of cluelessness is not personality or IQ. We’re at sea whenever our sense-making efforts fail us. If our image of a situation is wrong, Introduction 7 our actions will be wide of the mark as well. But if we don’t realize our image is incorrect, we won’t understand why we don’t get what we hoped for. So, like Bob Nardelli, we insist we’re right even when we’re off track. Vaughan (1995), in trying to unravel the causes of the 1986 disaster that destroyed the Challenger space shuttle and killed its crew, underscored how hard it is for people to surrender their entrenched mental models: “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). All of us sometimes construct our own psychic prisons, and then lock ourselves in. When we don’t know what to do, we do more of what we know. 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. But most probably don’t realize it: Kruger and Dunning (1999) found that the more incompetent people are, the more they overestimate their performance, partly because they don’t know what good performance looks like. • About half of the high-profile senior executives companies hire fail within two years, according to a 2006 study (Burns and Kiley, 2007). • In 2003, the United States was again the world’s strongest economy, yet corporate America set a new record for failure with two of history’s top three bankruptcies—WorldCom at $104 billion and Conseco at $61 billion. Charan and Useem (2002) trace such failures to a single source: “managerial error” (p. 52). Small wonder that so many organizational veterans nod 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: The Track Record We have certainly made an effort to improve organizations. Legions of managers report to work each day with that hope in mind. Authors and consultants spin out a flood of new answers and promising solutions. Policymakers develop laws and regulations to guide organizations on the right path. 8 Reframing Organizations The most common improvement strategy is upgrading management. Modern mythology promises that organizations will work splendidly if well managed. Managers are supposed to have the big picture and look out for their organization’s overall health and productivity. Unfortunately, they have not always been equal to the task, even when armed with computers, information systems, flowcharts, quality programs, and a panoply of other 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 prevail. When managers cannot solve problems, they hire consultants. Today, the number and variety of advice givers is overwhelming. Most have a specialty: strategy, technology, quality, finance, marketing, mergers, human resource management, executive search, outplacement, coaching, organization development, 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, consultants have yet to make a significant dent in problems plaguing organizations—businesses, public agencies, military services, hospitals, and schools. Sometimes the consultants are more hindrance than help, though they often lament clients’ failure to implement their profound insights. McKinsey & Co., “the high priest of high-level consulting” (Byrne, 2002a, p. 66), worked so closely with Enron that managing partner Rajat Gupta 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 frequently responds with legislation, policies, and regulations. Constituents badger elected officials to “do something” about a variety of ills: pollution, dangerous products, hazardous working conditions, and chaotic schools, to name a few. Governing bodies respond by making “policy.” A sizable body of research records a continuing saga of perverse ways in which the implementation process distorts policymakers’ intentions (Bardach, 1977; Elmore, 1978; Freudenberg and Gramling, 1994; 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 the same as America’s switch to the metric system. In the 1950s Congress passed legislation mandating adoption Introduction 9 of the metric standards and measures. To date, progress has been minimal (see Chapter Eighteen). If you know what a hectare is, or can visualize the size of a three-hundred-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 implemented. In short, difficulties surrounding improvement strategies are well documented. Exemplary intentions produce more costs than benefits. Problems outlast solutions. It is as if tens of thousands of hard-working, highly motivated pioneers keep hacking at a swamp that persistently produces new growth faster than the old can be cleared. To be sure, there are reasons for optimism. Organizations have changed about as much in the past few 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 activity to design faster, more flexible organizational forms. New organizational models flourish in companies such as Pret à Manger (the socially conscious U.K. sandwich shops), Google (a hot American company), 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 key 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, and cognitive lenses, to name a few.2 Following the work of Goffman, Dewey, and others, we have chosen the label frames. In describing frames, we deliberately mix metaphors, referring to them as windows, 10 Reframing Organizations maps, tools, lenses, orientations, filters, 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 understand and negotiate a particular “territory.” A good frame makes it easier to know what you are up against and, ultimately, what you can do about it. Frames are vital because organizations don’t come with computerized navigation systems to guide you turn-by-turn to your destination. Instead, managers need to develop and carry accurate maps in their heads. Such maps make it possible to register and assemble key bits of perceptual data into a coherent pattern—a picture of what’s happening. When it works fluidly, the process takes the form of “rapid cognition,” the process that Gladwell (2005) examines in his best-seller Blink. He describes it as a gift that makes it possible to read “deeply into the narrowest slivers of experience. In basketball, the player who can take in and comprehend all that is happening around him or her is said to have ‘court sense’ ” (p. 44). Dane and Pratt (2007) describe four key characteristics of this intuitive “blink” process: • It is nonconscious—you can do it without thinking about it and without knowing how you did it. • It is very fast—the process often occurs almost instantly. • It is holistic—you see a coherent, meaningful pattern. • It results in “affective judgments”—thought and feeling work together so you feel confident that you know what is going on and what needs to be done. The essence of this process is matching situational clues with a well-learned mental framework—a “deeply-held, nonconscious category or pattern” (Dane and Pratt, 2007, p. 37). This is the key skill that Simon and Chase (1973) found in chess masters—they could instantly recognize more than fifty thousand configurations of a chessboard. This ability enables grand masters to play twentyfive lesser opponents simultaneously, beating all of them while spending only seconds on each move. The same process of rapid cognition is at work in the diagnostic categories physicians rely on to evaluate patients’ symptoms. The Hippocratic Oath— “Above all else, do no harm”—requires physicians to be confident that they know what they’re up against before prescribing a remedy. Their skilled judgment Introduction 11 draws on a repertoire of categories and clues, honed by training and experience. But sometimes they get it wrong. One source of error is anchoring: doctors, like leaders, sometimes lock on to the first answer that seems right, even if a few messy facts don’t quite fit. “Your mind plays tricks on you because you see only the landmarks you expect to see and neglect those that should tell you that in fact you’re still at sea” (Groopman, 2007, p. 65). Treating individual patients is hard, but managers have an even tougher challenge because organizations are more complex and the diagnostic categories less well defined. That means that the quality of your judgments depends on the information you have at hand, your mental maps, and how well you have learned to use them. Good maps align with the terrain and provide enough detail to keep you on course. If you’re trying to find your way around downtown San Francisco, a map of Chicago won’t help, nor one of California’s freeways. In the same way, different circumstances require different approaches. Even with the right map, getting around will be slow and awkward if you have to stop and study at every intersection. The ultimate goal is fluid expertise, the sort of know-how that lets you think on the fly and navigate organizations as easily as you drive home on a familiar route. You can make decisions quickly and automatically because you know at a glance where you are and what you need to do next. There is no shortcut to developing this kind of expertise. It takes effort, time, practice, and feedback. Some of the effort has to go into learning frames and the ideas behind them. Equally important is putting the ideas to use. Experience, one often hears, is the best teacher, but that is only true if you reflect on it and extract its lessons. McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison (1988, p. 122) found that a key quality among successful executives was an “extraordinary tenacity in extracting something worthwhile from their experience and in seeking experiences rich in opportunities for growth.” Frame Breaking Framing involves matching mental maps to circumstances. Reframing requires another skill—the ability to break frames. Why do that? A news story from the summer of 2007 illustrates. Imagine yourself among a group of friends enjoying dinner on the patio of a Washington, D.C., home. An armed, hooded intruder suddenly appears and points a gun at the head of a fourteen-year-old guest. “Give me your money,” he says, “or I’ll start shooting.” If you’re at that table, 12 Reframing Organizations what do you do? You could try to break frame. That’s exactly what Cristina “Cha Cha” Rowan did. “We 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 [Associated Press, 2007]. In one stroke, Cha Cha Rowan redefined the situation from “we might all be killed” to “let’s offer our guest some wine.” 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.” Like Cézanne and Rowan, leaders have to find new ways to shift points of view when needed. Like maps, frames are both windows on a territory and tools for navigation. Every tool has distinctive strengths and limitations. The right tool makes a job easier, but 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 at hand a diverse collection of high-quality implements. Experienced managers also Introduction 13 understand the difference between possessing a tool and knowing when and how to use it. Only experience and practice bring the skill and wisdom to take stock of a situation and use suitable tools with confidence and skill. The Four Frames Only in the last half century 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 and assumptions, 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 writing this book. We are not searching for the one best way. Rather, we consolidate major schools of organizational thought 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 found on the shelves of libraries and bookstores. Four Frames: As Near as Your Local Bookstore Imagine a harried executive browsing in the management section of her local bookseller on a brisk winter day in 2008. She worries about her company’s flagging performance and fears that her job might soon disappear. She spots the black-on-white spine of The Last Link: Closing the Gap That Is Sabotaging Your Business (Crawford, 2007). Flipping through the pages, she notices chapter titles like “Data,” “Discipline,” and “Linking It Together.” She is drawn to phrases such as “It all comes down to one thing, doesn’t it. Are you making your numbers?” and “a new formula for 21st-century business success.” “This stuff may be good,” the executive tells herself, “but it seems a little stiff.” 14 Reframing Organizations Next, she finds The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything (Covey and Merrill, 2006). Glancing inside, she reads, “Take communication. In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.” “Sounds nice,” she mumbles, “but a little touchy-feely. Let’s look for something more down to earth.” Continuing her search, she picks up Secrets to Winning at Office Politics: How to Achieve Your Goals and Increase Your Influence at Work (McIntyre, 2005). She scans chapter titles: “Forget Fairness, Look for Leverage,” “Political Games: Moves and Countermoves,” “Power, Power, Who Has the Power?” She chews over the book’s key message—that we all engage in politics every day at work, even though we don’t like to admit it. “Does it really all come down to politics?” she wonders. “It seems too cynical. Isn’t there something more uplifting?” She spots The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary (Michelli, 2006). She ponders the five basic principles the book credits for the success of Starbucks: Make it your own. Everything matters. Surprise and delight. Embrace resistance. Leave your mark. She reads that these principles “remind all of us—you, me, the janitor, and the CEO—that we are responsible for unleashing a passion that ripples outward from behind the scenes, through the customer experience, and ultimately out into our communities” (p. 1). She wonders if such fervor can be sustained for long. In her local bookstore, our worried executive has rediscovered the four perspectives at the heart of this book. Four distinct metaphors capture the essence of each of the books she examined: organizations as factories, families, jungles, and temples or carnivals. Factories The first book she stumbled on, The Last Link, provides counsel on how to think clearly and get organized, extending a long tradition that treats an organization as a factory. Drawing from sociology, economics, and management science, the structural frame depicts a rational world and emphasizes organizational architecture, including goals, structure, technology, specialized roles, coordination, and formal relationships. Structures—commonly depicted by organization charts—are designed to fit an organization’s environment and technology. Organizations allocate responsibilities (“division of labor”). They then create rules, policies, procedures, systems, and hierarchies to coordinate diverse activities into a unified effort. Problems arise when structure doesn’t line Introduction 15 up well with current circumstances. At that point, some form of reorganization or redesign is needed to remedy the mismatch. Families Our executive next encountered The SPEED of Trust, with its focus on interpersonal relationships. The human resource perspective, rooted in psychology, sees an organization as an extended family, made up of individuals with needs, feelings, prejudices, skills, and limitations. From a human resource view, the key challenge is to tailor organizations to individuals—finding ways for people to get the job done while feeling good about themselves and their work. Jungles Secrets to Winning at Office Politics is a contemporary application of the political frame, rooted in the work of political scientists. It sees organizations as arenas, contests, or jungles. Parochial interests compete for power and scarce resources. Conflict is rampant because of enduring differences in needs, perspectives, and lifestyles among contending individuals and groups. Bargaining, negotiation, coercion, and compromise are a normal part of everyday life. Coalitions form around specific interests and change as issues come and go. Problems arise when power is concentrated in the wrong places or is so broadly dispersed that nothing gets done. Solutions arise from political skill and acumen—as Machiavelli suggested centuries ago in The Prince ([1514] 1961). Temples and Carnivals Finally, our executive encountered The Starbucks Experience, with its emphasis on culture, symbols, and spirit as keys to organizational success. The symbolic lens, drawing on social and cultural anthropology, treats organizations as temples, tribes, theaters, or carnivals. It abandons assumptions of rationality prominent in other frames and depicts organizations as cultures, propelled by rituals, ceremonies, stories, heroes, and myths rather than rules, policies, and managerial authority. Organization is also theater: actors play their roles in the drama while audiences form impressions from what they see on stage. Problems arise when actors don’t play their parts appropriately, symbols lose their meaning, or ceremonies and rituals lose their potency. We rekindle the expressive or spiritual side of organizations through the use of symbol, myth, and magic. The FBI and the CIA: A Four-Frame Story A saga of two squabbling agencies illustrates how the four frames provide different views of the same situation. Riebling (2002) documents the long history of 16 Reframing Organizations head-butting between America’s two intelligence agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. Both are charged with combating espionage and terrorism, but the FBI’s authority is valid within the United States, while the CIA’s mandate covers everywhere else. Structurally, the FBI is housed in the Department of Justice and reports to the attorney general. The CIA reported through the director of central intelligence to the president until 2004, when a reorganization put it under a new director of national intelligence. At a number of major junctures in American history (including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks), each agency held pieces of a larger puzzle, but coordination snafus made it hard for anyone to see all the pieces, much less put them together. After 9/11, both agencies came under heavy criticism, and each blamed the other for lapses. The FBI complained that the CIA had known, but had failed to inform the FBI, that two of the terrorists had entered the United States and had been living in California since 2000 (Seper, 2005). But an internal Justice Department investigation also concluded that the FBI didn’t do very well with the information it did get. Key signals were never “documented by the bureau or placed in any system from which they could be retrieved by agents investigating terrorist threats” (Seper, 2005, p. 1). Structural barriers between the FBI and the CIA were exacerbated by the enmity between the two agencies’ patron saints, J. Edgar Hoover and “Wild Bill” Donovan. When he first became FBI director in the 1920s, Hoover reported to Donovan, who didn’t trust him and tried to get him fired. When World War II broke out, Hoover lobbied to get the FBI identified as the nation’s worldwide intelligence agency. He fumed when President Franklin D. Roosevelt instead created a new agency and made Donovan its director. As often happens, cooperation between two units was chronically hampered by a rocky personal relationship between two top dogs who never liked one another. Politically, the relationship between the FBI and CIA was born in turf conflict because of Roosevelt’s decision to give responsibility for foreign intelligence to Donovan instead of Hoover. The friction persisted over the decades as both agencies vied for turf and funding from Congress and the White House. Symbolically, different histories and missions led to very distinct cultures. The FBI, which built its image with the dramatic capture or killing of notorious gang leaders, bank robbers, and foreign agents, liked to pounce on suspects quickly and publicly. The CIA preferred to work in the shadows, believing that patience Introduction 17 and secrecy were vital to its task of collecting intelligence and rooting out foreign spies. Senior U.S. officials have recognized for many years that the conflict between the FBI and CIA damages U.S. security. But most initiatives to improve the relationship have been partial and ephemeral, falling well short of addressing the full range of issues. Multiframe Thinking The overview of the four-frame model in Exhibit 1.1 shows that each of the frames has its own image of reality. You may be drawn to some and repelled by others. Some perspectives may seem clear and straightforward, while others seem puzzling. But learning to apply all four deepens your appreciation and understanding of organizations. Galileo discovered this when he devised the first telescope. Each lens he added contributed to a more accurate image of the heavens. Exhibit 1.1. Overview of the Four-Frame Model. FRAME STRUCTURAL 18 HUMAN RESOURCE POLITICAL SYMBOLIC Metaphor for organization Factory or machine Family Jungle Carnival, temple, theater Central concepts Rules, roles, goals, policies, technology, environment Needs, skills, relationships Power, conflict, competition, organizational politics Culture, 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, beauty, meaning Reframing Organizations Successful managers take advantage of the same truth. Like physicians, they reframe, consciously or intuitively, until they understand the situation at hand. They use more than one lens to develop a diagnosis of what they are up against and how to move forward. This claim about the advantages of multiple perspectives has stimulated a growing body of research. Dunford and Palmer (1995) found 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). Multiframe 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. Such statements betray a failure of both imagination and courage and reveal a paralyzing fear of uncertainty. 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 sense of choice and power. Managers are imprisoned only to the extent that their palette of ideas is impoverished. 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 their own interpretations of what is and should be happening. Each version contains a glimmer of truth, but each is a product of the prejudices and blind spots of its maker. No single story is comprehensive enough to make an organization truly understandable or manageable. Effective managers need multiple tools, the skill to use each, and the wisdom to match frames to situations.3 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. The commission appointed by President George W. Bush to investigate the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, concluded that the strikes “should not have Introduction 19 come as a surprise” but did because the “most important failure was one of imagination.” Taleb (2007) depicts events like 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 be situations we’ve never experienced before. Imagination is our best chance for being ready when a black swan sails into view, and multiframe thinking is a powerful stimulus to the broad, creative mind-set imagination requires. Engineering and Art Exhibit 1.2 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 Exhibit 1.2. Expanding Managerial Thinking. 20 HOW MANAGERS THINK HOW MANAGERS MIGHT THINK They often have a limited view of organizations (for example, attributing almost all problems to individuals’ flaws and errors). They need a holistic framework that encourages inquiry into a range of significant issues: people, power, structure, and symbols. Regardless of a problem’s source, managers often choose rational and structural solutions: facts, logic, restructuring. They need a palette that offers an array of options: bargaining as well as training, celebration as well as reorganization. Managers often value certainty, rationality, and control while fearing ambiguity, paradox, and “going with the flow.” They need to develop creativity, risk taking, and playfulness in responses to life’s dilemmas and paradoxes, focusing as much on finding the right question as the right answer, on finding meaning and faith amid clutter and confusion. Leaders often rely on the “one right answer” and the “one best way”; they are stunned at the turmoil and resistance they generate. Leaders need passionate, unwavering commitment to principle, combined with flexibility in understanding and responding to events. Reframing Organizations interpretation. The first portrays managers as technicians; the second sees them as artists. 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. Artistic leaders and managers help us look beyond today’s reality to new forms that release untapped individual energies and improve collective performance. The leader as artist relies on images as well as memos, poetry as well as policy, reflection as well as command, and reframing as well as refitting. SUMMARY As organizations have become pervasive and dominant, they have also become harder to understand and manage. The result is that managers are often nearly as clueless as 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 organizational catastrophes. Our basic premise is that a primary cause of managerial failure is faulty thinking rooted in inadequate ideas. Managers and those who try to help them too often rely on constricted 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 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. Introduction 21 Each of the frames is both 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 options, and finding strategies that make a difference. NOTES 1. Enron’s reign as history’s greatest corporate catastrophe was brief. An even bigger behemoth, WorldCom, with assets of more than $100 billion, thundered into Chapter 11 seven months later, in July 2002. Stock worth more than $45 a share two years earlier fell to nine cents. 2. 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. 3. 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 multiframe approaches to groups and social collectives. 22 Reframing Organizations Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations chapter TWO A merica’s East Coast welcomed a crisp, sunny fall morning on September 11, 2001. For airline passengers in the Boston– Washington corridor, the perfect fall weather offered prospects of on-time departures and smooth flights. The promise would be broken for four flights, all bound for California. Like Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was a day that will live in infamy, a tragedy that changed America’s sense of itself and the world. If we probe the how and why of 9/11, we find determined and resourceful terrorists, but we also find vulnerability and errors in organizations charged with detecting and preventing such catastrophes. American Airlines flight 11 was first in the air, departing from Boston on time at 8:00 am. United 175 followed at 8:15, ten minutes behind schedule. American 77, after a twenty-minute delay, left Washington-Dulles at 8:20 am. Delayed forty minutes by congestion at Newark, United flight 93 departed at 8:42 am. The first sign that something was amiss for American 11 came less than fifteen minutes into the flight, when pilots stopped responding to input from air traffic controllers. For United 175, signs surfaced when the aircraft changed beacon codes, deviated from its assigned altitude, and failed to respond to New York air traffic controllers. American 77 departed from its assigned course at 8:54 am, and attempts to communicate with the plane were futile. The last flight, United 93, 23 followed a routine trajectory until the aircraft dropped precipitously. The captain radioed “Mayday,” and controllers heard sounds of a violent struggle in the cockpit. All four planes had been hijacked by teams of Al Quaeda terrorists who had managed to board the planes in spite of a security checkpoint system aimed at preventing such occurrences. In a meticulously planned scheme, the terrorists turned commercial aircraft into deadly missiles. Each aircraft was aimed at a high-profile target—New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the nation’s Capitol. One by one, the planes slammed into their targets with devastating force. Only United 93 failed to reach its objective. A heroic passenger effort to regain control of the plane failed but thwarted the terrorists’ intentions to ram the White House or Capitol building. Why did no one foresee such a catastrophe? In fact, some had. As far back as 1993, security experts had envisioned an attempt to destroy the World Trade Center using airplanes as weapons. Such fears were reinforced when a suicidal pilot crashed a small private plane onto the White House lawn in 1994. But the mind-set of principals in the national security network was riveted on prior hijacks, which had almost always ended in negotiations. The idea of a suicide mission, using commercial aircraft as missiles, was never incorporated into homeland defense procedures. America’s homeland air defense system fell primarily under the jurisdiction of two government agencies: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). As the events of 9/11 unfolded, it became clear that these agencies’ procedures to handle hijackings were inadequate. The controller tracking American 11, for example, began to suspect a hijacking early on and relayed the information to regional FAA headquarters, which began to follow its hijack protocol. As part of that protocol, a designated hijack coordinator could have requested a military fighter escort for the hijacked aircraft—but none was requested until too late. At the same time, communication channels fell behind fast-moving events. Confusion at FAA headquarters resulted in a delay in informing NORAD about United 93. An interagency teleconference to provide coordination between the military and the FAA was hastily put together, but technical delays kept the FAA from participating. When NORAD asked for FAA updates, they got either no answer or incorrect information. Long after American 11 crashed into the World Trade Center, NORAD thought the flight was still headed toward Washington, D.C. 24 Reframing Organizations In the end, nineteen young men were able to outwit America’s homeland defense systems. We can explain their success in part by pointing to their fanatical determination, meticulous planning, and painstaking preparation. Looking deeper, we can see a dramatic version of an old story: human error leading to tragedy. But if we look deeper still, we find that even the human-error explanation is too simple. In organizational life, there are almost always systemic causes upstream of human failures, and the events of 9/11 are no exception. The nation had a web of procedures and agencies aimed at detecting and monitoring potential terrorists. Those systems failed, as did procedures designed to respond to aviation crises. Similar failures have marked other well-publicized disasters: nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, for example, and the botched response to Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast in 2005. Each event illustrates a chain of error, miscommunication, and misguided actions. Events like 9/11 and Katrina make headlines, but similar errors and failures happen every day. They rarely make front-page news, but they are all too familiar to people who work in organizations. The problem is that organizations are complicated, and communication among them adds another tangled layer. Reading messy situations accurately is not easy. In the remainder of this chapter, we explain why. We discuss how the fallacies of human thinking can obscure what’s really going on and lead us astray. Then we describe some peculiarities of organizations that make them so difficult to figure out and manage. COMMON FALLACIES IN EXPLAINING ORGANIZATIONAL PROBLEMS Albert Einstein once said that a thing should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. When we ask students and managers to analyze cases like 9/11 they often make things simpler than they really are. They do this by relying on one of three misleading, oversimplified one-size-fits-all concepts. The first and most common is blaming people. This approach casts everything in terms of individual blunders. Problems result from bad attitudes, abrasive personalities, neurotic tendencies, stupidity, or incompetence. It’s an easy way to explain anything that goes wrong. Once Enron went bankrupt, the hunt was on for someone to blame, and the top executives became the target of reporters, prosecutors, and talk-show comedians. One CEO said, “We want the bad guys exposed and the bad guys punished” (Toffler and Reingold, 2004, p. 229). Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations 25 As children, we learned it was important to assign blame for every broken toy, stained carpet, or wounded sibling. Pinpointing the culprit is comforting. Assigning blame resolves ambiguity, explains mystery, and makes clear what must be done next: punish the guilty. Enron had its share of culpable individuals, some of whom eventually went to jail. But there is a larger story about the organizational and social context that set the stage for individual malfeasance. Targeting individuals while ignoring larger system failures oversimplifies the problem and does little to prevent its recurrence. G R E AT E S T H I T S F R O M O R G A N I Z AT I O N STUDIES Hit Number 10: James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations (New York: Wiley, 1958) March and Simon’s pioneering 1958 book Organizations sought to define a new field by offering a structure and language for studying organizations. It was part of the body of work that helped to earn Simon the 1978 Nobel Prize for economics.1 No brief summary can cover the range of topics March and Simon considered. They offered a cognitive, social-psychological view of organizational behavior with an emphasis on thinking, information processing, and decision making. The book begins with a model of behavior that presents humans as continually seeking to satisfy motives based on their aspirations. Aspirations at any given time are a function of both individuals’ history and their environment. When aspirations are unsatisfied, people search until they find better, more satisfying options. Organizations influence individuals primarily by managing the information and options, or “decision premises,” that they consider. March and Simon followed Simon’s earlier work (1947) in critiquing the economic view of “rational man,” who maximizes utility by considering all available options and choosing the best. Instead, they argue that both individuals and organizations have limited information and restricted ability to process what is available. They never will know all the options. Instead, they gradually alter their aspirations as they search for alternatives. Instead of looking for the best option, “maximizing,” 26 Reframing Organizations individuals and organizations “satisfice,” choosing the first option that is good enough. Organizational decision making is additionally complicated because the environment is complex. Resources (time, attention, money, and so on) are scarce, and conflict among individuals and groups is constant. Organizational design happens through piecemeal bargaining that holds no guarantee of optimal rationality. Organizations simplify the environment to reduce the pressure on limited information-processing and decision-making capacities. They simplify by developing “programs”— standardized routines for performing repetitive tasks. Once a program is in place, the incentive is to stay with it as long as the results are marginally satisfactory. Otherwise, the organization is forced to expend time and energy to innovate. Routine tends to drive out innovation, because individuals find it easier and less taxing to devote limited time and energy to programmed tasks (which are automatic, well practiced, and more certain of success). Thus, a student facing a term-paper deadline may find it easier to “fritter”—make tea, rearrange the desk, check e-mail, and browse the Web—than to figure out how to write a good opening paragraph. A manager may sacrifice quality to avoid changing a well-established routine. March and Simon’s book falls primarily within the structural and human resource views. But their discussions of scarce resources, power, conflict, and bargaining recognize the reality of organizational politics. Although they do not use the term framing, March and Simon reaffirm its logic as an essential component of choice. Decision making, they argue, is always based on a simplified model of the world. Organizations develop unique vocabulary and classification schemes, which determine what people are likely to see and respond to. Things that don’t fit an organization’s mind-set are likely to be ignored or reframed into terms the organization can understand. When it is hard to identify a guilty individual, a second popular option is blaming the bureaucracy. Things go haywire because organizations are stifled by rules and red tape—or because a lack of clear goals and roles creates chaos. One or the other explanation almost always applies. If things are out of control, then Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations 27 the system needs clearer rules and procedures, as well as tighter job descriptions. The 9/11 terrorist attacks could have been thwarted if agencies had had better protocols for such a terrorist attack. Tighter financial controls could have prevented Enron’s free fall. The problem is that piling on rules and regulations typically leads to bureaucratic rigidity. Rules inhibit freedom and flexibility, stifle initiative, and generate reams of red tape. Could Enron have achieved its status as America’s most innovative company if it had played by the old rules? When things become too tight, the solution is to “free up” the system so red tape and rigid rules don’t stifle creativity and bog things down. But many organizations vacillate endlessly between being too loose and too tight. A third fallacy attributes problems to thirsting for power. In the case of Enron, key executives were more interested in getting rich and expanding their turf than in advancing the company’s best interests. The various agencies dealing with 9/11 all struggled prior to the disaster for their share of scarce federal resources. This view sees organizations as jungles teeming with predators and prey. Victory goes to the more adroit, or the more treacherous. Political games and turf wars cause most organizational problems. You need to play the game better than your opponents—and watch your backside. Each of these three perspectives contains a kernel of truth but oversimplifies a knottier reality. Blaming people points to the perennial importance of individual responsibility. Some problems are caused by personal characteristics: rigid bosses, slothful subordinates, bumbling bureaucrats, greedy union members, or insensitive elites. Much of the time, though, condemning individuals blocks us from seeing system weaknesses and offers few workable options. If, for example, the problem really is someone’s abrasive or pathological personality, what do we do? Even psychiatrists find it hard to alter character disorders, and firing everyone with a less-than-ideal personality is rarely a viable option. Training can go only so far in preparing people to carry out their responsibilities perfectly every time. The blame-the-bureaucracy perspective starts from a reasonable premise: organizations are created to achieve specific goals. They are most effective when goals and policies are clear (but not excessive), jobs are well defined (but not constricting), control systems are in place (but not oppressive), and employees behave prudently (but not callously). If organizations always behaved that way, they would presumably work a lot better than most do. In practice, this perspective is better at explaining how organizations should work than why they often don’t. Managers who cling to facts and logic become discouraged and frustrated 28 Reframing Organizations when confronted by intractable irrational forces. Year after year, we witness the introduction of new control systems, hear of new ways to reorganize, and are dazzled by emerging management methods and gurus. Yet old problems persist, seemingly immune to every rational cure we devise. As March and Simon point out, rationality has limits. The thirst-for-power view highlights enduring, below-the-surface features of organizations. Its dog-eat-dog logic offers a plausible analysis of almost anything that goes wrong. People both seek and despise power but find it a convenient way to explain problems. Within hours of the 9/11 terror attacks, a senior FBI official called Richard Clarke, America’s counterterrorism czar, to tell him that many of the terrorists were known members of Al Quaeda. “How the f__k did they get on board then?” Clarke exploded. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. CIA forgot to tell us about them.” In the context of the long-running battle between the FBI and CIA, the underlying message of blame was clear: the CIA’s selfinterested concern with its own power caused this catastrophe. The tendency to blame what goes wrong on people, the bureaucracy, or the thirst for power is part of our mental wiring. But there’s much more to understanding a complex situation than assigning blame. Certain universal peculiarities of organizations make them especially difficult to sort out. PECULIARITIES OF ORGANIZATIONS Human organizations can be exciting and challenging places. At least, that’s how they are often depicted in management texts, corporate annual reports, and fanciful managerial thinking. But in reality they can be deceptive, confusing, and demoralizing. It is a mistake to assume that organizations are either snake pits or rose gardens (Schwartz, 1986). Managers need to recognize characteristics of life at work that create opportunities for the wise as well as traps for the unwary. A case from the public sector provides a typical example: D E C E P T I O N AT W O R K Helen Demarco arrived in her office to discover a clipping from the local paper. The headline read, “Osborne Announces Plan.” Paul Osborne had arrived two months earlier as Amtran’s new chief executive. His mandate was to “revitalize, cut costs, and improve efficiency.” After Simple Ideas, Complex Organizations 29 twenty years, Demarco had achieved a senior management position at the agency. She had little contact with Osborne, but her boss reported to him. Along with long-term colleagues, Demarco had been waiting apprehensively to learn what the new chief had in mind. She was startled as she read the newspaper account. Osborne’s plan made technical assumptions directly related to her area of expertise. He might be a change agent, she thought, but he doesn’t know much about our technology. She saw immediately the new plan’s fatal flaws. If he tries to implement this, it’ll be the worst management mistake since the Edsel, she thought to herself. Two days later, Demarco and her colleagues received a memo instructing them to form a committee to work on the revitalization plan. When the group convened, everyone agreed the plan was crazy. “What do we do?” someone asked. “Why don’t we just tell him it won’t work?” said one hopeful soul. “He’s already gone public! You want to tell him his baby is ugly?” “Not me. Besides, he already thinks a lot of us are deadwood. If we tell him it’s no good, he’ll just think we’re defensive.” “Well, we can’t just go ahead with it. We’d be throwing away money and it’ll never work!” “That’s true,” said Demarco thoughtfully. “But what if we tell him we’re conducting a study of how to implement the plan?” Her suggestion was approved overwhelmingly. The group informed Osborne that a study was under way. They even got a substantial budget to support their “research.” No one mentioned the study’s real purpose: buy time and find a way to minimize the damage without alienating the boss. Over time, the group developed a strategy. Members assembled a lengthy technical report, filled with graphs, tables, and impenetrable jargon. The report offered Osborne two options. Option A, his original plan, was presented as technically feasible but expensive—well beyond anything Amtran could afford. Option B, billed as a “modest downscaling” of the original plan, was projected as a more cost-effective alternative. When Osborne pressed the group on the huge cost disparity between the two proposals, he received a barrage of technical language and 30 Reframing Organizations complicated cost-benefit projections. No one mentioned that even Option B offered few benefits at a very high cost. Osborne argued and pressed for more information. But given the apparent facts, he agreed to proceed with Option B. The plan required several years to implement, and Osborne moved on before it became operational. Even so, the “Osborne plan” was widely heralded as another instance of Paul Osborne’s talent for revitalizing ailing organizations. Helen Demarco came away with deep feelings of frustration and failure. The Osborne plan, in her view, was a wasteful mistake, and she had knowingly participated in a charade. “But,” she rationalized to herself, “I really didn’t have much choice. Osborne was determined to go ahead. It would have been career suicide to try to stop him.” Demarco had other options, but she couldn’t see them. She and Paul Osborne both thought they were on track. They were tripped up in part by human fallibility, but even more important, by how hard it can be to understand organizations. The first step in managerial wisdom and artistry is to recognize key characteristics of organizations. Otherwise, managers are persistently surprised and caught off guard. First, organizations are complex. They are populated by people, whose behavior is notoriously hard to predict. Large organizations in particular include a bewildering array of people, departments, technologies, and goals. Moreover, organizations are open systems dealing with a changing, challenging, and erratic environment. Things can get even more knotty across multiple organizations. The 9/11 disaster resulted from a chain of events that involved several separate systems. Almost anything can affect everything else in collective activity, generating causal knots that are hard to untangle. After an exhaustive investigation, our picture of 9/11 is woven from sundry evidence, conflicting testimony, and conjecture. Second, organizations are surprising. What you expect is often not what you get. Paul Osborne s...