The wheel is come full circle.

—William Shakespeare, King Lear

In 1983 we published Modern Approaches to Understanding and Managing Organizations. We laid out for the first time the four frames as a way to better understand organizations and leadership. Much has happened in the years since. Prominent corporations have disappeared; new ones have arisen to take their place. We wrote the first book using pen on paper and a primitive early personal computer—in a time before cell phones, the Internet, or female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies.

Since then, we have gained more confidence in our framework. Thousands of readers and students throughout the world have told us how much our ideas helped them master the leadership challenges they faced. A large body of research has confirmed the validity and power of the frames. We've worked with organizations in the United States and around the world—corporations, professional and military organizations, schools, colleges, churches, hospitals, unions, and many others. The combination of research evidence and our own experience has confirmed our initial hope that the frames help leaders expand their capacity to see more of what's going on. Then, and only then, can they figure out what to do amid the complexities of organizational life, particularly the subtle, often-mystifying political and symbolic realms.

We hope Reframing Organizations continues to inspire inventive management and wise leadership. Both managers and leaders require high levels of personal artistry if they are to respond to today's challenges, ambiguities, and paradoxes. They need a sense of choice and personal freedom to find new patterns and possibilities in everyday life at work. They need versatile thinking that fosters flexibility in action. They need capacity to act inconsistently when uniformity fails, diplomatically when emotions are raw, intuitively when reason flags, politically in the face of vocal parochial self-interests, and playfully when fixating on task and purpose backfires.

Leaders face a paradox: how to maintain integrity and mission without making organizations rigid and intractable. They walk a fine line between rigidity and spinelessness. Rigidity saps energy, stifles initiative, misdirects resources, and leads ultimately to catastrophe. This pattern can be seen graphically in the decline of great corporations (such as Circuit City, Digital Equipment, Lehman Brothers, Arthur Andersen, Pan American Airlines, Polaroid, and TWA) and the disappearance of many others into corporate mergers. We see it in the escalation of chronic ethnic violence and terrorism. In a world of “permanent white water” (Vaill, 1989), nothing is fixed and everything is in flux. It is tempting to track familiar paths in a shifting terrain and to summon timeworn solutions, even when problems have changed. Doing what's familiar is comforting. It reassures us that our world is orderly and that we are in command. But when old ways fail, managers often flip-flop: They cave in and try to appease everyone. The result is aimlessness and anarchy, which kill or maim concerted, purposeful action. Collins and Porras (1994) made it clear. “Visionary” companies have the paradoxical capacity to stimulate change and pursue high-risk new ventures while simultaneously maintaining their commitment to core ideology and values.

Good managers and leaders sustain a tension-filled poise between extremes. They combine core values with elastic strategies. They get things done without being done in. They know what they stand for and what they want and communicate their vision with clarity and power. But they also understand and respond to the vortex of forces that propel organizations in conflicting trajectories. They think creatively about how to make things happen. They develop strategies with enough elasticity to respond to the twists and turns of the path to a better future.

There is a misguided notion that a leader ventures into uncharted terrain with omniscient foresight and unlimited courage. Keller comes closer to the reality: “The greatest leaders are often, in reality, skillful followers. They do not control the flow of history, but by having the good sense not to stand in its way, they seem to (1990, p. 1).

Leaders need confidence to confront gnarly problems and deep divisions. They must expect conflict, knowing their actions may unleash forces beyond their control. They need courage to follow uncharted routes, expecting surprise and pushing ahead when the ultimate destination is only dimly foreseeable. Most important, they need to be in touch with their hearts and souls as well as their heads. It has been said that the heart has a mind of its own. Good leaders listen.