Book Review- Reframing Organizations by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal

The book has this great premise, that any major problem should be looked at in four different ways. By applying four different mental models, you can see the problem from many angles and find a solution that addresses a more complete systems view of the world. Today, let's talk about just one frame. Structural.

The structural framework is very popular amongst metrics driven minds and views the corporation like a machine. It has 6 core assumptions. Organizations exist to achieve a central set of goals and objectives. Efficiency is enhanced with specialization and a clear division of labor. Central coordination and control ensure the effective application of diverse efforts. Rationality should prevail over all other pressures. The fundamental structure needs to be set and adjusted to the current circumstance. Problems and performance issues are structural deficiencies. The reorg is the primary tool to create change and a good reorg revisits a variety of tools.

Tools of the trade include hierarchy and authority, rules and policies, planning and control at the top level. Meetings, task forces, dedicated coordination roles, matrix structures, and formal and informal networks of employees fill in the gaps. 

There are some powerful points here. If you design roles to conflict, you will get conflict. Tending to the system and the flow of information and materials results in very powerful actions. Clear goal setting drives behavior.

But alone the structural model of the business world falls short. People are simply not omnipotent and hyper rational. We have a certain amount of self-interest that drives decent reasoning, but never access to all the information, nor do we always turn the information we get into correct assumptions. This means that no matter how perfectly we assemble the structure, it will always be impacted by the nature of the human beings that compose the system, more so when you lack leadership transparency. You can smooth the gears with education and communication, but in the end you have to apply other models.

Now let's discuss the lens of the human.

This framework can be pretty radical if viewed alone. Instead of organizations existing to serve goals, they exist to serve the needs of people. Employees (first!), customers, and stock holders are all people the organization must serve, care for, and grow. Goals exist, but they are top vague and bottom specific, set by the workers in democratic ways. People and organizations need each other, neither succeeds without the other. The two can unlock great potential with mutually beneficial ideas and security or collapse together from power imbalance and failure to meet needs. 

The logic works like this: The human brain inherently craves and creates preferences. The ultimate expression of those preferences is self-actualization or mastery, the idea that you chose your potential and achieved it. Therefore, the best performing organization is the one that arranges conditions for individuals to set and achieve their own goals. It is called the Human Resources framework because most companies do this work through their HR department. The goal is personal and individual impacts through good relationships, but the system to create that is most often the daily actions of HR.

Organizations operate at scale, so the goals of an HR framework look like this: Set people first with a clear HR strategy. Hire the right people with meaningful and decisive moves. Retain them by rewarding well, protecting jobs, promoting from within, and sharing the wealth. Invest in people by training and growing them according to their own goals. Empower them with respect, autonomy, and transparency with purposeful organizational development. Be consistent and don't mess it up! 

At peak performance, teams self manage their work, set their own goals, have a major say in decisions, are empowered with flexibility, have their needs met with reliable security and investment in their growth, and good interpersonal practices. It's an idyllic framework, but it doesn't cover the short term needs of business reality and can't operate alone.

Because the goals are so individualistic, it is easier to describe what a human resources framework is not and spot its failures than its successes. The result is a lot of companies doing a 'good enough' job to avoid the failures but rarely using the framework to exceed. They set up HR to achieve a minimum with good words about people; and move on to the other frameworks. In my experience it is essential that the rest of the company stop and consider the HR framework. Paying a group to think this way and hoping you listen at the right moment, isn't sufficient to create the results or avoid the consequences of failure.

Let's talk about the political! 

In its purest form, this framework feels radical in a bad way. In the political frame, organizations don't necessarily serve goals, they serve power. The logic works like this: organizations are fundamentally built out of coalitions of interests. Coalitions will always have disagreements, inside and outside. All of the important decisions will involve scarce resources and struggle. Therefore, all discussions of importance will involve conflict in which the most powerful leader of the most powerful coalition, sets the goals and assigns the resources.

You might be thinking "why try?" Another way to look at this is that power is the capacity to take action. Action inherently has dependencies and those dependencies become leveraged for negotiation. Everything can be negotiated provided you manage the leverage. This is a function of skill. The most important skills are mapping out the coalitions, building and activating coalitions, and negotiating the action with the key players.

There are numerous ways to achieve leverage, or build power. You could have positional authority, control of the money, provide certainty through information or reputation, have personal charisma to convince people, organize alliances, control access to influence, or create the best and most rational story. 

What we generally see in research is that alliances and coalitions work better than any other category. In short, it's not enough to win people over or to tell them what to do. For real action you need to have a relationship that means they will show up for you when it gets hard. Using the structural framework, we can ensure people have the skills and organization to show up and deliver. Using the human resources framework, we can ensure they have the desire and capacity.

When considered alone, the political frame is cynical and destructive. An organization constantly in conflict and infighting is doomed to mediocrity through inconsistency and lost effort. Naked politics is extremely unpopular because one of our most shared interests is a desire for harmony and productivity. Politics is the model that reliably predicts success, more so than other frames. This means that at many times it is the most accurate description of how decisions actually get made. Meaning, to ignore the political frame is to fail.

Last up, we have the Symbolic or Cultural frame. Let's talk about it.

The cultural frame sees the organization as dramatic theatre or a faithful congregation. In short, the purpose of organizations is to serve meaning (belief and passion). What makes people work the weekend? Dig deep and bring their best? It's not money, its meaning. And this idea of meaning is bigger than metrics, individuals, and interests. To achieve meaning successfully and at scale, what matters is the how, not the what.

The logic flows like this: Everyone interprets events differently and this creates uncertainty and anxiety. The best answer for uncertainty and anxiety is a sense of meaning that is shared and greater than individual events. Symbols give direction and meaning, relieving anxiety. Therefore, the events and processes of an organization are about the bigger ideas, not the results. The tool for managing fresh and renewing certainty in the face of cosmic ambiguity, is culture.

So, how do you manage a culture? The symbolic framework recommends some key elements. The first is to build and encourage myths that help define your vision. The second is to get very clear on a vision that explains your core ideas, but also the unique ways we will create them together. Then, you need your heroes, whose every action exudes those ideas. From here, you build stories to quickly transfer that vision to other people, sparking action, calming the ambiguous noise, and educating them. Infusing regular activities with that vision is called ritual and renewing it annually is called ceremony. Lastly, you need room for play and humor so that despite all this powerful direction, people can still change and grow.

This framework can be a little hard to grasp, because the emotions created by the activity is the substance. Everything is for an audience and that audience wants consistent assurance. In this world, the process of planning isn't to create a plan for the following year; it is create the symbols of order and commitment in the face of ambiguity. Meetings are for expression and signaling, not decisions. Org structure is for audience and story, not function. Power is a matter of perception and something that one performs like an actor. Team's have a spiritual advisor who works to ensure that everyone feels the uniqueness of the team, from its specialized language and stories to its unique forms of fun.

I am sure you see the problem already. Without the other frameworks, nobody is watching the details.