by Lee G Bolman
But sometimes they get it wrong because their diagnostic categories don’t quite work for the situation at hand. They put indicators in the wrong category and lock on to the first answer that seems right, even if a few messy facts don’t quite fit. Their mind plays tricks on them, and they ignore any inconvenient data that should tell them they’re adrift.
Treating patients is hard enough, but the challenge is even tougher in the workplace because organizations are so complex and the diagnostic categories are less well defined. The quality of your judgments depends on the information at hand, your mental maps, and how well you’ve 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.
Even with the right map, getting around will be slow and awkward if you have to stop and ponder 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 true only if you reflect on it and extract its real lessons. It wasn’t clear, for example, that Bob Nardelli learned very much from his Home Depot experience. In his next leadership opportunity as CEO of Chrysler, he managed to drive the company into bankruptcy in two years—after he passed on a government loan that would have required a cap on executive pay. His stints at Home Depot and Chrysler combined to earn him spots on at least two lists of the worst American CEOs of all time.21
His successor, Sergio Marchionne, took the loan and the pay cap, and brought the company back to profitability. One of the key traits of successful executives is that they never pass up a good learning opportunity.22
FRAME BREAKING
Framing involves matching mental maps to situations. Reframing involves shifting frames when circumstances change. But reframing also requires another skill—the ability to break frames. Why do that? A news story from the summer of 2007 illustrates this. Imagine yourself among a group of friends enjoying dinner on the patio of your Washington, D.C., home. An armed, hooded intruder suddenly appears and points a gun at the head of a fourteen-year-old guest. It’s a potentially lethal home invasion. “Give me your money,” he says, “or I’ll start shooting.” If you’re at that table, what do you do? You could freeze. Or you could try to creatively break frame and put a new spin on the situation. That’s exactly what hostess Cristina “Cha Cha” Rowan did.
“We were just finishing dinner,” [she] blurted out. “Why don’t you have a glass of wine with us?”
The intruder took 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. Rowan offered him the bottle. The would-be robber, his hood now down, took another sip and had a bite of Camembert cheese that was on the table.
Then he tucked the gun into the pocket of his nylon sweatpants.
“I think I may have come to the wrong house,” he said, looking around the patio of the home in the 1300 block of Constitution Avenue NE.
“I’m sorry,” he told the group. “Can I get a hug?”
Rowan, . . . stood up and wrapped her arms around him. Then [the other guests followed suit].
“That’s really good wine,” the man said, taking another sip. He had a final request: “Can we have a group hug?”
The five adults surrounded him, arms out.
With that, the man walked out with a crystal wine glass in hand, filled with Chateau Malescot. No one was hurt, and nothing was stolen.
. . . In the alley behind the home, investigators found the intruder’s empty crystal wine glass on the ground, unbroken.23
After the event, the father of the teenager commented, “There was this degree of disbelief and terror at the same time. Then it miraculously just changed. His whole emotional tone turned—like, we’re one big happy family now. I thought: Was it the wine? Was it the cheese?”24
The wine and cheese helped, but breaking frame made the key difference. In one stroke, Cha Cha Rowan redefined the situation from “we might all be killed here” to “let’s try offering our guest some wine.” Like her, artistic managers frame and reframe experience fluidly, sometimes with extraordinary results.
John Lewis, one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s lieutenants, reportedly was with King in a protest march when a Southern redneck confronted him and spit in his face. Lewis was silent for a moment and then asked, “May I borrow your handkerchief?” After a long period of startled staring, the man gave Lewis his handkerchief. A conversation led to a friendship. A final example: A critic once commented to the artist Paul 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, Lewis, 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. Each window offers a unique view. Every tool has strengths and limitations. Only experience and practice bring you the adroitness and wisdom to take stock of a situation and use suitable tools with confidence and skill.
FOUR LEADERSHIP FRAMES
Leading in an organization is probably as demanding as anything you have ever tried to do. Not surprisingly, what you read or hear about leadership goes off in many different directions, producing conflicting schools of thought. Each version has its own ideas about how to understand and lead organizations. When you are looking for help, you have to sort through a cacophony of voices and visions.
This book helps you sift through the competing voices and merges them into an inclusive framework embracing four distinctive ideas about leadership. The ideas are powerful enough to capture the subtlety and complexity of leadership, yet simple enough to be helpful. We’ve combed through oceans of literature so you won’t have to. We’ve distilled our learning from thousands of managers and leaders, and scores of organizations. We’ve condensed it all into four major frames—structural, human resource, political, and symbolic.25 Each is used by academics and practitioners alike and found in bound form on the shelves of libraries and bookstores. Books, articles, and training programs typically present one frame or another, isolated from the others. Such single-lens views are exactly what got Johnson and Nardelli in trouble and frustrate other leaders.
To illustrate our point, imagine a harried executive browsing in the management section of her local bookseller on a brisk winter day in 2014. She worries about her company’s flagging performance and fears that her job might soon disappear. She spots the black cover of How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of “Intangibles” in Business. Flipping through the pages, she notices chapter titles such as “The Methods of Measurement,” “Calibration Exercise,” and “The Value of Information for Ranges.” She is drawn to such phrases as “A key step in the process is the calculation of the economic value of information. . . [A] proven formula from the field of decision theory allows us to compute a monetary value for a given amount of uncertainty reduction.”26 “This stuff may be good,” the executive tells herself, “but it seems a little too stiff and numbers driven.”
Next she finds Lead with LUV: A Different Way to Create Real Success. Glancing inside, she reads, “Many of our officers handwrite several thousand notes each year. Besides being loving, we know this is meaningful to our People because we hear from them if we miss something significant in their lives like the high school graduation of one of their kids. We just believe in accentuating the positive and celebrating People’s successes.”27 “Sounds nice,�
� she mumbles, “but a little too touchy-feely. Let’s look for something more down-to-earth.”
Continuing her search, she picks up Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t. She reads, “You can compete and triumph in organizations of all types . . . if you understand the principles of power and are willing to use them. Your task is to know how to prevail in the political battles you will face.”28 She wonders, “Does it really all come down to politics? It seems so cynical and scheming. Isn’t there something more uplifting?”
She spots Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization. She ponders its message: “Tribal leaders focus their efforts on building the tribe, or, more precisely, upgrading the tribal culture. If they are successful, the tribe recognizes them as leaders, giving them top effort, cult-like loyalty, and a track record of success.”29 “Fascinating,” she concludes, “but this seems a little too primitive for modern organizations.”
In her local bookstore, our diligent executive has discovered fragments that we have assembled into a coherent framework. The four distinct metaphors inform the essence of the books she examined: organizations as factories, families, jungles, and temples or carnivals. But she leaves still looking for something more. Some titles felt more compatible with her way of thinking. Others fell outside her comfort zone. She felt forced to choose one, because no single work brought all four together in a coherent way.
Factories
The first book she stumbled on, How to Measure Anything, provides counsel on how to think clearly and get the solid information you need to make decisions, extending a long tradition that treats an organization as a factory and the leader as an analyst and engineer. The structural frame, derived from sociology, depicts a world based on reason and emphasizes rationality and structure, including policies, goals, technology, specialized roles, coordination, and formal relationships.
Structures—commonly depicted by organization charts—are designed to fit an organization’s environment and technology. Leaders 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 up with current circumstances. At that point, some form of reorganization or redesign is needed to remedy the mismatch.
Families
Our executive next encountered Leading with LUV, with its focus on caring for people. The human resource perspective, rooted in psychology, sees the leader as servant and catalyst in an organization that is much like an extended family, made up of individuals with needs, feelings, prejudices, skills, and limitations. From a human resource view, the key challenge is achieving alignment between organizations and individuals—finding ways for people to get the job done while feeling good about themselves and their work. Followership and caring are seen as essential complements to leadership.
Jungles
Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t is a contemporary application of political science that sees organizations as arenas, contests, or jungles, and leaders as warriors, advocates, and negotiators. Parochial interests compete for power and scarce resources. Conflict is rampant because of enduring differences in interests, perspectives, and resources among contending individuals and groups. Bargaining, negotiation, coercion, and compromise are 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 a leader’s political skill and acumen—as Machiavelli suggested centuries ago in The Prince.
Temples and Carnivals
Finally, our executive encountered Tribal Leadership, with its emphasis on culture, symbols, and spirit as keys to organizational success. The symbolic lens, drawing on interpretive sociology and cultural anthropology, treats organizations as temples, tribes, theaters, or carnivals, with leaders functioning as magicians, prophets, and poets. It abandons the assumption of rationality prominent in other frames and depicts organizations as cultures propelled by rituals, ceremonies, stories, heroes, and myths rather than by rules, policies, power, and managerial authority. Organizations are also theaters: actors play their roles in the drama while audiences form impressions from what they see on stage. Problems arise when actors play their parts badly, symbols lose their meaning, or ceremonies and rituals lose their potency. Leaders rekindle the expressive or spiritual side of organizations through the use of symbol, myth, and magic.
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, as was our bookstore visitor. Some perspectives may seem clear and straightforward, while others seem puzzling. But learning to apply all four makes you a better, more versatile leader. The evidence is clear that the ability to use multiple frames is associated with greater effectiveness for managers and leaders.30 Like Lou Gerstner, successful leaders reframe, consciously or intuitively, until they understand the situation at hand. They use multiple perspectives to develop a diagnosis of what’s really going on and what course of action might set things right. They transform puzzlement into a comprehensive view of complex situations.
Leaders operate in circumstances that are too complex and messy to take everything in. Consciously or not, they construct simplified cognitive maps in order to make sense of things. The maps are never perfect, but they only need to be good enough for individuals to understand what’s going on and what to do next. If your maps are cockeyed, your choices will be too. Your results are disappointing or worse. Our research has repeatedly shown that the odds of success are higher for multiframe leaders who can approach situations from more than one angle. They draw on all four frames to get a more complete picture of any situation.
Less versatile leaders get in trouble because gaps in their thinking keep them from seeing or understanding some of the important challenges they face. They may, for example, be very good at handling technical problems, but mystified by issues of human emotion and motivation. Or they may find conflict so stressful that they can’t face political realities. They may trip over subtleties of customs and traditions that they’ve never learned to see, much less understand.
It all adds up to a simple truth, one that is easy to overlook because it is at odds with everyday experience. The world you perceive is constructed in your mind. Your ideas, or theories, determine whether a given situation is foggy or clear, mildly interesting or momentous, a paralyzing disaster or a genuine learning experience. In any situation, there is simply too much happening for you to attend to everything. Your personal theories or frames tell you what is important and what can be safely ignored, and they group scattered bits of information into manageable patterns. Thus it is vital to understand how your habits of mind influence what you see and what you miss or misread.
Exhibit 1.1. Overview of the Four-Frame Model
Frame
Structural Human Resource Political Symbolic
Metaphor for organization Factory Family Jungle Temple, theater
Central concepts Rules, roles, goals, policies, technology, environment Needs, emotions, 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, significance
Basic leadership challenge Attune structure to task, technology, environment Align organization with human needs and talent Develop agenda and power base Create faith, hope, meaning, and belief
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 have been. Such statements betray a failure of both imagination and courage and reveal a paralyzing fear of uncer
tainty. You may find it comforting to think that failure was unavoidable and that you did all you could. But it also can be liberating to realize there is always more than one way to respond to any problem or dilemma. Those who master reframing report a liberating sense of choice, freedom, and power.
Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon recounts the same event through the eyes of several witnesses. Each tells a different story. Similarly, every organization is 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 your organization truly understandable or manageable. You need multiple lenses, the skill to use each, and the wisdom to match frames to situations.
CONCLUSION
How leaders think determines what they see, how they act, and what results they achieve. Each of four lenses—structural, human resource, political, and symbolic—opens a new set of possibilities for leaders to use in finding their bearings and choosing a course. Narrow thinking all too often leads to a failure of imagination, a major cause of the shortfall between the reach and the grasp of so many leaders—the empty chasm between noble aspirations and disappointing results. The commission appointed by President George W. Bush to investigate the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, concluded that the strikes “should not have come as a surprise” but did because the “most important failure was one of imagination.” Multiframe thinking is a powerful stimulus to the broad, creative mind-set that imagination and great leadership require.