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 versatility in thinking that fosters flexibility in action. They need capacity to act inconsistently when uniformity fails, diplomatically when emotions are raw, non-rationally when reason flags, politically in the face of vocal parochial self-interests, and playfully when fixating on task and purpose backfires.
Managers face a leadership paradox: maintaining integrity and mission without making organizations rigid and intractable. Leading requires walking 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 and 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 time-worn solutions, even when problems have changed. Doing what's familiar is comforting. It helps us believe 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 extremely 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. So it is with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Mr. Gorbachev's achievement was having the vision to see the inevitable, and adopting it as his program rather than applying the repressive apparatus at his command to suppress it" (1990, p. 1).
Gorbachev's extraordinary rise and rapid fall illustrate many of the daunting challenges that all leaders confront. 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 dimly foreseeable. Most important, they need to be in touch with their hearts as well as their heads. It has been said that the heart has a mind of its own. Good leaders listen.
Poetry and philosophy are rare topics in managerial training, and business schools seldom ask if spiritual development is central to their mission. It is no wonder that managers are often viewed as chameleons who can adapt to anything, guided only by expediency. Analysis and agility are necessary, but not enough. Organizations need leaders who can provide a durable sense of purpose and direction, rooted deeply in values and the human spirit. "We have a revolution to make, and this revolution is not political, but spiritual" (Guéhenno, 1993, p. 167).
Leaders need to be deeply reflective and dramatically explicit about core values and beliefs. Many of the world's legendary corporate heroes articulated their philosophies and values so strikingly that they are still visible in today's behavior and operations. In government, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, and Lee Kuan Yew were controversial, but each espoused enduring values and beliefs. These served as a guiding beacon for their respective nations.
Commitment to both resilient values and elastic strategies involves a paradox. Franklin Roosevelt's image as lion and fox, Mao's reputation as tiger and monkey, and Mary Kay Ash's depiction as both fairy godmother and pink panther were not so much inconsistencies as signs that they could embrace contradiction. They intuitively recognized the multiple dimensions of society and moved flexibly to implement their visions. The use of multiple frames permits leaders to see and understand more—if they are able to employ the different logics that accompany diverse ways of thinking.
Leaders fail when they take too narrow a view. Unless they can think flexibly and see organizations from multiple angles, they will be unable to deal with the full range of issues they inevitably encounter. Jimmy Carter's preoccupation with details and rationality made it hard for him to marshal support for his programs or to capture the hearts of most Americans. Even FDR's multifaceted approach to the presidency—he was a superb observer of human needs, a charming persuader, a solid administrator, a political manipulator, and a master of ritual and ceremony—miscarried when he underestimated the public reaction to his plan to enlarge the Supreme Court.
Multiframe thinking is challenging and often counterintuitive. To see the same organization as machine, family, jungle, and theater requires the capacity to think in different ways at the same time about the same thing. Like surfers, leaders must ride the waves of change. Too far ahead, they will be crushed. If they fall behind, they will become irrelevant. Success requires artistry, skill, and the ability to see organizations as organic forms in which needs, roles, power, and symbols must be integrated to provide direction and shape behavior. The power to reframe is vital for modern leaders. The ability to see new possibilities and to create new opportunities enables leaders to discover alternatives when options seem severely constrained. It helps them find hope and faith amid fear and despair. Choice is at the heart of freedom, and freedom is essential to achieving the twin goals of commitment and flexibility.
Organizations everywhere are struggling to cope with a shrinking planet and a global economy. The accelerating pace of change continues to produce grave political, economic, and social discontinuities. A world ever more dependent on organizations now finds them evolving too slowly to meet pressing social demands. Without wise leaders and artistic managers to help close the gap, we will continue to see misdirected resources, massive ineffectiveness, and unnecessary human pain and suffering. All these afflictions are already here, and there is no guarantee that they will not get worse—unless we can enlarge our palette of options.
We see prodigious challenges ahead for organizations and those who guide them, yet we remain optimistic. We want this revised volume to lay the groundwork for a new generation of managers and leaders who recognize the importance of poetry and philosophy as well as analysis and technique. We need pioneers who embrace the fundamental values of human life and the human spirit. Such leaders and managers will be playful theorists who can see organizations through a complex prism. They will be negotiators able to design resilient strategies that simultaneously shape events and adapt to changing circumstances. They will understand the importance of knowing and caring for themselves and the people with whom they work. They will be architects, catalysts, advocates, and prophets who lead with soul.