Three New Ways To View an Organisation

Your approach to achieve business goals in innovative ways depends on the way you view your organisation. According to researchers Bolman and Deal, there are three lenses through which you can look at a business: structural, political, or cultural. Each view provides unique insights that can help you identify challenges and offer solutions.

Marc Ventresca, Programme Director on the Oxford Strategic Innovation Programme from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, explains the three organisational perceptions and how you can use them to enhance impact.

Transcript

So let’s start with the idea around conceptions of organisations. Here I’m drawing on the work of colleagues, Bolman and Deal. Bolman and Deal say there are three main ways that most of us think about organisations. The first, they call a structural or a design view, and it says the key is to design the right practices and processes, and to build kind of a machine, and then trust the rationality and the machine to go forward.

They also then say a second common way to think about this is to say organisations are contested arenas. There are actually places where there are rules of the game, where resources matter, where relationships matter. So these are political models. These are politics, not in the sense of negative energy politics, but really saying organisations are full of people and coalitions who can disagree about what is good or what is right, who see different ways to get to their broad goals and objectives.

So that’s a very generative view or productive view of politics. The third view they say is a theatre, or dramaturgy, or cultural view of organisations where we treat organisations as places where meaning is made, where people are perceiving and making sense of things. And really, in that view, the theatrical view or dramaturgical view of organisation, there the work is theatre: meaning, identity, roles, right?

These three views – a structural view or a design view, a political view, a contested arena’s view, or a theatrical or cultural view of organisation – give us important insights for two kinds of activities that are critical to getting things done in organisations and to implementing on innovation.

The first thing they give us is three frames of reference, three toolkits to look at any situation and evaluate it in terms of design and structure: How is this organisation built? What’s the current hierarchy? Who reports to whom? What’s the nature of the decision process? Those are good questions you should ask of every situation. The Bolman and Deal frames view would then say, now, also look at that same situation in terms of the contested arena. Who’s the dominant coalition? What matters in this organisation? What are the key resources? Who makes those decisions? How do we solve conflicts in this organisation in a regular way, in a routine way? And that gives us then another set of insights and resources.

The third, the theatrical or cultural view: What are dominant meanings? What’s the usual way we interpret things in this organisation? Most of us are engineers here, we think like engineers. Most of us are marketing people, we think like marketing people. Most of us are operations people. So you can begin to imagine, in every agency and every firm and every organisation, there’s a kind of a dominant logic of view of how we do things here – who we are.

Those three views, if you take each of those frames and look at the situation you’re trying to intervene in, you will see very different kinds of resources and also different kinds of issues you have to grapple with.

Many of us are most comfortable with the designer structural view. We look at the organisation chart. We ask, you know, who do we report to? We ask what’s the decision process or the sign-off process? That’s a very familiar and comfortable way to look at an organisation. I think a contested arena’s view adds to that.

It says, “No, no, that’s a starting point. You also have to think about which is the dominant coalition. What are the rules of the game here?” And then as I said, that third view, that third frame, the cultural frame, asks us to begin to say, “How are people making sense of the situation? What are the kinds of resources and assumptions they use to interpret activity? What’s the nature of the culture of the organisation?”

I’m asking to begin to incorporate in your everyday practice, your everyday decision-making, your everyday observation in an organisation, this three-frames analysis: using all three frames to look at any situation, both diagnostically, what’s happening here; and also in terms of providing solutions, how do we use the insights from each of the three frames to find and implement solutions?