Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 28

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 their subordinates (the Dilberts of the world) think they are. The consequences of myopic management and leadership show up every day, sometimes in small and subtle ways, sometimes in large and blatant catastrophes. Think of the enormous differences in levels of suffering and death between the relatively few countries that contained the Covid‐19 pandemic effectively, and the many that did not. Our basic premise is that a primary cause of managerial failure is faulty thinking rooted in inadequate ideas and truncated possibilities. Managers and those who try to help them too often rely on narrow models that capture only part of organizational life.

Learning multiple perspectives, or frames, is a defense against thrashing around without a clue about what you are doing or why. Frames serve multiple functions. They are sources of new questions, filters for sorting essence from trivia, maps that aid navigation, and tools for solving problems and getting things done. This book is organized around four frames rooted in both managerial wisdom and social science knowledge. The structural approach focuses on the architecture of organization—the design of units and subunits, rules and roles, goals and policies. The human resource lens emphasizes understanding people—their strengths and foibles, reason and emotion, desires and fears. The political view sees organizations as competitive arenas of scarce resources, competing interests, and struggles for power and advantage. Finally, the symbolic frame focuses on issues of meaning and faith. It puts ritual, ceremony, story, play, and culture at the heart of organizational life.

Each of the frames is powerful and coherent. Collectively, they make it possible to reframe, looking at the same thing from multiple lenses or points of view. When the world seems hopelessly confusing and nothing is working, reframing is a powerful tool for gaining clarity, regaining balance, generating new questions, and finding options that actually make a difference.