Avenues of Intervention II: Framing and Utilization
Transferring know-how across contexts
Note from the Editor
This is the final, significantly expanded version of the draft posted prematurely yesterday, replacing it. Apologies.
—Ellen
Avenues of Intervention II: Framing and Utilization
Last week, in the sixth of the present series of seven articles plus Epilogue on achieving rapid, effortless culture change in organizations, we looked briefly at two of four broad avenues for intervening to flip the corporate culture overnight from the present, problematic pattern, to the desired one: Contextual Intervention (comprising Pattern Intervention and Context Intervention), and Filtering Intervention. This week we shall briefly look at the remaining two of those four avenues: Framing Intervention and Utilization Approaches.
Framing Intervention
The third network of avenues of intervention into the corporate culture is Framing Intervention. Framing Intervention can, in practice, be closely related to Filtering Intervention, and like the latter, but in sharp contrast to Contextual Intervention, involves intervening in how individual managers choose to see the world.
When we change the context, no one has to buy into the new context or change how they see things; the context has changed whether they like it or not, and there’s nothing they can do about it; no one gets a vote. Their buy-in is not required, nor can they help seeing things differently from now on, for the context has changed irrevocably.
In all forms of Framing Intervention, by contrast, someone at least needs to accept the new frame and not go back to their old one, an undertaking which is inherently fraught with far greater hazards than context intervention as it does require the new frame to be taken on board, and unlike Context Intervention discussed last time is not entirely within the decision maker’s control.
Some people are more persistent than others in clinging to their old frame, while others are quite flexible. So the choice of avenue (changing the frame or the context) is a matter of horses for courses.
There are three broad kinds of Framing Intervention: Framing, Deframing, and Reframing
Deframing
Deframing involves removing the frame the individual uses to interpret the facts of the situation. This involves a number of methodologies for getting the client to separate the unalterable, ‘non-negotiable’ facts of the situation from the (highly negotiable) attributed meaning, and getting down to what we call ‘video descriptions’—descriptions not going beyond what could be picked up on a video with sound.
Once we get down to video descriptions, an integrated set of related approaches is concerned with reestablishing an agreed ‘inventory’ of the situation—a selection of which facts are most usefully to be regarded as being part of the situation and which are not. Sometimes, this is all that it takes for the decision maker to see his way clear to taking the action he can now see he needs to take.
Reframing
Reframing involves placing the non-negotiable, objective facts of the situation in a new frame which permits new options to be perceived. By changing the way the problem or situation is viewed, the individual can generate alternative ways of dealing with it.
Person A reframes the problem for Person B, finding a more abstract class of which
(a) the problem situation and
(b) a non-problematic reference-situation
are both equally members, so that within the new, wider frame both the problem-situation and reference-situation appear as two versions of the same thing. This then allows Person B to readily transfer relevant individual and organizational know-how across contexts—from where it already exists to where it is needed.
Here is an example of reframing:
The head of a large marketing communications department felt that her department’s role was badly misunderstood by the rest of her organization. Inappropriate demands were being made on her and on her department, stretching resources beyond capacity and making it impossible to get on with the work that they ought to be doing.
This was the problematic situation P.
It was not difficult to find a non-problematic reference situation she knew perfectly well how to deal with, where the services marketed by one of the business units were misperceived by external customers, etc., thus calling for a marketing-communications solution.
This was the reference situation R.
The broader class, C, capable of including both P and R equally as members, might be described as: “customers’ misperception and incomplete understanding of what suppliers are offering.”
Placing both P and R within C, so that they appeared as two versions of the same problem, it now became obvious to her that her department needed to apply its marketing communications expertise to its own situation vis-a-vis its own internal customers. Now that was a problem she knew how to solve—she was already an expert in it, and once the penny dropped, she knew exactly what she had to do.
Framing
Framing involves an application of reframing at one remove. The client, say, usually as part of a multi-pronged minimalist intervention, is assisted to reframe for one or more members of her team or for particular relevant stakeholders, the action or actions to be undertaken. This is often so that what would otherwise be seen as directly counter to the organizational culture can be made congruent with it, while usually, in the process, initiating the creation of a new shared reality—and hence transforming part of the culture itself.
Utilization Approaches
Finally, Utilization Approaches constitute a fourth broad network of avenues of intervention that we wish briefly to draw attention to here, and so draw to a close our mini-survey of universally neglected approaches to transforming organizational culture that follow naturally from the view of organizational culture, the radical new view of change, and the new epistemology that we have been discussing, and which has always formed the basis of our work at Interchange Research for nigh on half a century.
Utilization Approaches, in general, comprise a very broad range of approaches for, if you will, short-circuiting problematic situations. These approaches enable the positive utilization of even the most apparently undesirable aspects of the situation—undesirable behaviour, limiting presuppositions, dysfunctional rigidities, and so on—as the favoured lever for bringing about change, and often (to go back to the short-circuiting metaphor) using them to short themselves out.
When applied to the transformation of organizational culture, Utilization Approaches would involve making a virtue of necessity and positively utilizing some of the “worst” features of the organizational culture as tools for transforming it. After all, we might as well if we can!
If the aim is to shift the culture from a highly (internally) competitive one to one that is more cooperative (and hence more externally competitive), we can find a way to utilize that internal competitiveness—perhaps by encouraging managers to compete to surpass each other in doing the very things that will, ultimately (and unbeknownst to them), shift the culture to a more cooperative one.
For the art of transforming organizational culture, I think you will agree from your own experience, is the art of making interventions that fit the existing culture and yet open up possibilities going beyond that culture.
An organization’s culture, like a person’s field of vision, may be excessively narrow and limited. But there is no point at all in standing outside the periphery of that limited visual field and excitedly waving and pointing at new horizons. First we must get within the exclusive focus of that narrowed visual field, then we must get the person’s attention, and only then, once we have learned the language she speaks, can we hold up a sign that says—in her own language—“Look thirty degrees to your right, and I think you’ll see what you’ve been looking for.”
And when she turns and looks straight at it she still may not yet recognize it because we tend only to see what we already know, and because it is difficult to see what does not fit our existing presuppositions. And so here too is where all that we have said earlier in this series of articles about presuppositions, and frames, and filtering, and contextual intervention, and reframing comes in.
This post has been adapted from “How Change has Changed: Organizational Culture and Justified Intervention,” by James Wilk
© Copyright 1987, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted