Reframing Organizations. Lee G. Bolman
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Название: Reframing Organizations

Автор: Lee G. Bolman

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Управление, подбор персонала

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isbn: 9781119756842

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СКАЧАТЬ and, ultimately, what you can do about it. Mental maps are vital because organizations don't come with computerized navigation systems to guide you turn‐by‐turn to your destination. Instead, managers need to develop and carry accurate charts in their heads.

      Dane and Pratt (2007) describe four key characteristics of this intuitive “blink” process:

       It is nonconscious—you can do it without thinking about it and without knowing how you did it.

       It is very fast—the process often occurs almost instantly.

       It is holistic—you see a coherent, meaningful pattern.

       It results in “affective judgments”—thought and feeling work together so you feel confident that you know what is going on and what needs to be done.

      The essence of this process is matching situational cues with a well‐learned mental framework—a “deeply held, nonconscious category or pattern” (Dane and Pratt, 2007, p. 37). This is the key skill that Simon and Chase (1973) found in chess masters—they could instantly recognize more than 50,000 configurations of a chessboard. This ability enables grand masters to play 25 lesser opponents simultaneously, beating all of them while spending only seconds on each move.

      The blink process is key to expertise and skill. Kahneman and Klein (2009) argue that it works best for individuals who have developed a deep understanding of a particular domain through experience and deliberate practice with feedback. Skill and expertise come to those who are willing to invest time and effort and learning (Ericsson, 2005). But for nonexperts, fast, intuitive thinking often leads to very bad judgments. Experts typically know when they don't know, but nonexperts think they know when they don't (Kahneman and Klein, 2009). “Subjective confidence is therefore an unreliable indication of the validity of intuitive judgments” (p. 524).

Type I (Intuitive) Type II (Deliberate)
Fast Nonconscious Automatic Does not rely on working memory Requires less mental energy Relies on tacit, implicit knowledge Slow Conscious Intentional Requires use of working memory Requires more mental energy Relies on explicit knowledge

      In medicine, there is a growing emphasis on “evidence‐based medicine”—basing diagnosis and treatment on rules derived from research. Emergency room physicians who treat stroke victims, for example, have a detailed set of guidelines for diagnosis and treatment that are periodically updated as new research comes in. Some scholars have argued that the same idea can also work for managers (Barends and Rousseau, 2018; Martelli and Hayirli, 2018; Pfeffer and Sutton, 2006, 2011), though evidence for the benefits of evidence‐based management is still sketchy (Reay, Berta, and Kohn, 2017). Pfeffer and Sutton (2011) cite research showing that incentive pay for teachers is a bad idea but teams work better with stable membership as examples of findings that could help managers make better decisions. Tourish (2019) counters that managers hoping to learn from published research will find that most of it is trivial, unreadable, and disconnected from practice.

      Even with the right map, getting around will be slow and awkward if you have to stop and study 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 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 one learns from it. McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison (1988, p. 122) found that a distinguishing quality among successful executives was that they were great learners, displaying an “extraordinary tenacity in extracting something worthwhile from their experience and in seeking experiences rich in opportunities for growth.”

      Reframing

      Frames define the questions we ask and solutions we consider (Berger, 2014). John Dewey defined freedom as the power to choose among known alternatives. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu made a similar point 2,500 years ago: “Many options bring victory, few options bring defeat, no options at all spell disaster” (Sun, 2012). When managers don't see options, they make mistakes but often fail to understand why.

      Take a simple question: “What is the sum of 5 plus 5?” The only right answer is “10.” Ask a different way, “What two numbers add up to ten?” Now the number of solutions is infinite (once you include fractions and negative numbers). The two questions differ in how they are framed. Albert Einstein once observed: “If I had a problem to solve and my whole life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty‐five minutes determining the question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in five minutes” (Seelig, 2015, p. 19).