MBAX 6005 Week 1 Four Frames Discussion Post Example

Week 1 Discussion: Seeing an Organization Through Frames

Dark Validators, Double Charges and a Wave-Through Order: Choosing a Working Frame for a Transit Agency's Contactless Fare Launch Before the Theory Arrives

I manage part of the call center at Riverbend Regional Transit, a composite mid-sized bus agency, and last fall I spent three months taking calls about our contactless fare launch. Three facts sum it up. Validators on our older buses dropped offline for hours at a time, so riders could not tap. When a slow validator did respond, some riders tapped twice and were charged twice. And within two weeks, garage supervisors told drivers to wave riders through whenever a validator was dark, which is still the practice on many routes.

Bolman and Deal (2017) offer four frames for reading an organization. One frame asks who is supposed to do what and how the pieces connect. Another asks whether the jobs suit the people holding them. A third asks who wants what and who has the power to get it. The last asks what events mean to the people living through them. Each could claim at least one of my three facts: the dark validators look like a coordination gap, the double charges like a design flaw nobody owned, and the wave-through order like a deal between drivers and supervisors.

My working answer is structural. When I trace any of the three facts back, I end at the same gap: no office owned the moment a rider boarded the bus. Finance owned the fare project, information technology owned the validators, operations owned the buses and drivers, and my call center owned the complaints. Each did its part, and the boarding moment fell between them. Galbraith (1974) argued that when a task brings more uncertainty than an organization's rules can handle, it needs new ways to coordinate across units, and that is what our launch lacked. I hold this answer loosely. If I learned that the gap was known months before launch and left open on purpose, because someone gained from leaving it, I would switch to the political frame.

What is the one fact in your own organization's last change that would move you from one frame to another?

Reply to Bianca

Bianca, you read your hospital's badge-access rollout through the symbolic frame, as nurses resisting a symbol of distrust. That fits the "watched" comments you quoted. What would you make of the fact that the complaints dropped once the badge readers on the supply rooms were fixed? If a repair to the hardware quieted the objection, the structural frame may explain more than it first appears. Did the complaints stop everywhere, or only on the units whose readers now work?

Reply to Derek

Derek, I like that you chose the political frame for your warehouse's new scheduling system and named the shift leads' lost power to grant overtime. I would push on one point. Bolman and Deal (2017) treat scarcity as what turns ordinary differences into contests. Was overtime actually scarce after the change, or did the system simply move the decision elsewhere? If overtime hours stayed the same, the contest may be about who decides rather than about resources, which is still political, but a different kind of fight. Pfeffer (1992) would say the shift leads lost a source of power, and that is worth naming directly.

References

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership (6th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Galbraith, J. R. (1974). Organization design: An information processing view. Interfaces, 4(3), 28-36. https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.4.3.28

Pfeffer, J. (1992). Managing with power: Politics and influence in organizations. Harvard Business School Press.