Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

Part Six. Improving Leadership Practice

Up to now, we have emphasized the unique features of four distinctive ways to think about organizations. But making sense of a complex situation is not a single-frame activity. A messy, turbulent world rarely presents bounded, well-defined problems. In this part of the book, we focus on combining lenses to achieve multi-frame approaches to managing and leading.

In Chapter Fifteen, we contrast a stereotype of crisp, orderly rationality with a more frantic, reactive reality of managerial life. We show how routine activities and processes such as strategic planning, decision making, and conflict take on different meanings depending on how they are viewed. We provide an example to illustrate the cacophony that ...