Tired of facing the same old cultural obstacles to innovation in your organization? Wouldn’t it be nice to see the light from the other side through them?

If you crave that kind of relief, you’ll appreciate it. restructuring organizations, a great book by Bolman and Deal that I recently used to teach an Organizational Behavior course at Portland State University. From a comprehensive review of organizational behavior studies and theories, these people have discovered four themes, or frameworks, from which organizational behaviors and challenges can be better understood. Each framework provides a different perspective, and each leads to different insights into the causes and potential opportunities.

The four frames are:

• Structural – Organization as a factory
• Political – Organization like jungle
• Human Resources – Family organization
• symbolic – Organization as theater

There is a whole book full of wisdom that goes with the frameworks. But you can see from just this little tidbit that applying metaphors to what’s going on in your team, department, or company makes you think in new ways.

Your organization’s prevailing culture likely supports thinking and acting from a single framework, and that’s the box you’re in. The most effective leaders break out of the box by being able to invoke whichever of the four frameworks provides the best understanding and influencing strategies for the current situation. That kind of balance is rare in organizations, but it can be developed.

The Bolman and Deal frameworks do not have an implicit sequence, but resonate with the four sequential activities that make up the reciprocal model, a creative process model that I use in my leadership development work. The sequence adds value because it shows the way out of the box. Here are the four creative process activities, in order, that go with the Bolman and Deal frameworks:

1. Structural framework – challenge activity (develops quality)
2. Political framework – Produce activity (develops ability)
3. Human Resources Framework – Appreciate activity (develops commitment)
4. Symbolic framework – Explore activity (develops curiosity)

If you can identify what your organization’s current default framework is, then the path to a more adaptive culture can begin by using the next framework in sequence to inform your analysis and guide your planning. And you can start down that path by engaging in the activity of the creative process associated with the following chart.

So, for example, if you determine that your organization defaults to the Symbolic framework (organization as theater), then the output would be the Structural framework (organization as factory) and the activity to perform would be the Challenge activity (keeping potential options in check). tall). to the vote in order to choose one to run).

Many organizations eventually realize that the default framework they are working within is no longer useful. Unfortunately, their approach at that point is usually to recast themselves into a different default framework and stay there until it stops working for them. So every few years there is a restructuring that uses a lot of organizational energy and loses a lot of valuable organizational memory. With that strategy, the underlying problem, the lack of balance, is never addressed.

I don’t think that’s the best use of an organization’s resources. It would be more effective for an organization to develop the ability to execute all four frameworks more smoothly as each situation requires. The Creative Process offers practical guidance for doing just that. I encourage you to check out the white paper to get an idea of ​​how it might apply to your work situation. And then, of course, I encourage you to give it a try. If you do, let me know how it goes.