Term one is done.
Two MBA courses complete. One of them changed how I see my job.
The course was built around Reframing Organizations by Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal.
The core idea: every organization can be viewed through four distinct frames, and your default frame limits your impact and how you lead.
Great leaders use all 4, but quality almost always only uses one.
Research on organizational leadership suggests that companies themselves tend to default to the structural frame while paying considerably less attention to the other three, and quality professionals, by training and by job description, are structural thinkers by design. Procedures, metrics, org charts, accountability. That is the water we swim in.
That is not wrong. But it is incomplete.
The Four Frames
Structural. Our home base.
This frame assumes people are rational actors working toward shared goals. Give them clear roles, defined processes, and measurable accountability, and they will perform. Organizations are essentially machines — every part has a function, and the job of leadership is to keep the machine running.
Most quality systems live here. Procedures. Corrective actions. Calibration schedules. Audit programs. When something breaks, the structural instinct is to add more structure.
Sometimes that is exactly right. Often, it is not.
Human Resource. This one starts with a basic truth most quality professionals overlook.
People need jobs. Employers need people. That relationship is not equal, and it is not frictionless.
The human resource frame says organizations run on that tension. Employees bring needs — safety, belonging, recognition, growth, fairness. Organizations bring demands — output, compliance, efficiency, change. When those two sets of needs align, you get engagement and discretionary effort. When they conflict, you get quiet resistance, passive compliance, and processes that get followed on paper and ignored in practice.
Here is a real example. You roll out a new inspection checklist. It is thorough, it is documented, it makes complete structural sense. Two months later, it is not being used consistently. Through the structural frame, you assume training was insufficient. You schedule retraining.
Through the human resource frame, you ask a different question: what does following this checklist cost the operator? Does it make them slower? Does it imply they were doing it wrong before? Does it signal they are not trusted? If the checklist threatens something they need, no amount of retraining fixes it. You have a relationship problem, not a knowledge problem.
Political. This frame does not assume the best idea wins.
It assumes decisions reflect who has power. And power is not always where the org chart says it is.
Think about a union shop steward. Their formal title may not appear anywhere in your quality reporting structure. But when you want to change a work instruction on the floor, they matter more than the process engineer who wrote it. That is political power.
Or consider a long-tenured production supervisor who has survived four quality managers. They have outlasted every initiative you can name. They have informal authority built on relationships and institutional memory. When they signal skepticism about your new system, people listen to them before they listen to you.
The political frame also explains budget fights. Your quality improvement project competes with the sales team's new CRM, the operations team's equipment request, and the CFO's cost reduction target. These groups are not being unreasonable. They are advocating for their own interests, which is exactly what people do when resources are limited.
Quality professionals tend to believe that if the data is good enough, the decision will follow. The political frame says the data is one input. The relationships, the coalitions, and the timing matter just as much. Often more.
Symbolic. This frame is the hardest one to measure and the easiest one to underestimate.
The symbolic frame says organizations run on meaning. What gets celebrated tells people what is actually valued. What gets tolerated tells people what the rules really are. The stories employees tell each other about leadership, about past initiatives, about what happened to the last person who raised a problem — those stories are your real quality culture document.
Here is the test: what happens after a customer escape?
In some organizations, the response is a focused investigation, honest root cause, and a process change. People share what they learned. That story spreads.
In others, the response is finding someone to blame, documenting a correction quickly, and moving on. That story spreads too.
Your quality manual does not determine which story gets told. Your leadership does. And if the organizational ritual around failure is self-protection, no corrective action procedure will change that. The symbol is more powerful than the system.
The symbolic frame is why two companies can have identical QMS documentation and completely different cultures. The documents are not the culture. The culture is the culture.
Why This Matters for Quality
Most quality initiatives fail in the last three frames and get diagnosed in the first one.
The process gets rewritten. The procedure gets revised. The training gets repeated. And the problem comes back, because the real obstacle was never structural.
This is not an argument to abandon structure. It is an argument to stop treating it as the only tool you have.
Put It to Work This Week - 2 options
Two simple practices. No extra meetings, no new software.
Option 1: Frame Your Friday
At the end of the week, pick one situation that did not go as expected. Write two sentences describing it through a frame that is not your default. That is the whole exercise.
Start here: "This situation looked like a [structural] problem. Through the [political] frame, I think it is actually about ___."
Five minutes. Do it four Fridays in a row and watch what shifts in how you read your organization.
Option 2: The Resistance Log
Start a list — paper or notes app, does not matter — of recurring resistance points in your work. For each one, write one sentence: "What frame am I using to try to solve this?" Then write one sentence using a different frame.
Start here: "I keep hitting resistance on ___. Structurally, I have tried ___. Through the human resource frame, the real issue might be ___."
Three entries in the next 30 days. That is it. You are not solving anything yet. You are just learning to see.
One question to close.
If every quality problem you have been circling for the past year is actually a human, political, or cultural problem wearing a structural disguise, what would you do differently starting Monday?
Hit reply. I want to know which frame you have been missing.
