Reframing Reorganizations

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What if the first question in a reorganization wasn’t “what changes on the chart,” but “what does this decision tell people about what we value”?

Not instead of the org chart. Not instead of the budget. Before them. As the question the other questions have to answer to before anything ships.

Most reorganizations don’t work this way. They start with structure: who reports to whom, what gets folded together, what gets cut. Then people: who’s affected, what support exists –on paper, how the transition gets “managed.” Then, if there’s friction, politics: whose buy-in matters, what compromise gets the plan through approval. Meaning comes last. If it shows up at all, it arrives as messaging. Something a communication’s officer drafts after the real decisions are locked, to help the decision land softer. Not something that shaped the decision in the first place.

That ordering is backward. And there’s a real body of research that agrees with me.

This isn’t a small problem right now. Universities, hospitals, government agencies, entire industries are mid-reorganization at the same time, consolidating offices, merging units, folding two departments into one and calling the result efficiency. Some of that consolidation is genuinely necessary. Budgets shrink. Missions shift. Laws change. Nobody sensible argues an organization should freeze its structure forever out of sentiment. But watch how these changes actually get planned, almost anywhere, and you’ll notice the same gap every time. Enormous care goes into the org chart. Almost none goes into what the org chart says about the people standing on it; much less, what message gets sent to the constituents, internal and external.

Four Lenses, One Habit

Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal gave management a useful “trick” decades ago: look at any organization and leadership decision through four lenses (frames), not just one or two.

Structural asks about the machine. Roles, rules, reporting lines, who owns what. Human resource asks about the people inside the machine: needs, skills, whether the organization fits the humans working in it, or forces the humans to bend around it instead. Political asks about power. Who’s negotiating. Whose interests actually drive the outcome once the meeting ends and the real conversation starts.

Symbolic asks something different. Not what changed. What the change means. What story it tells about who and what the organization —and the people leading it— actually values, independent of whatever the memo says.

Picture a single decision run through all four, like for example, cutting a program or service. Structurally, that’s a line removed from the budget and a reporting relationship that no longer exists. Through human resource, it’s a set of people who need new roles, new support, maybe a hard conversation about what comes next. Politically, it’s whoever wanted that program gone finally getting their way, and whoever fought for it losing a battle they’ll remember. Symbolically, it’s a message sent to everyone still standing: this is what gets protected here, and this is what doesn’t, regardless of value and performance.

Most leadership training stops at three lenses. The fourth gets a slide, sometimes, near the end, if there’s time.

Why the Fourth Lens Keeps Losing

There’s a reason symbolic keeps losing, and it isn’t that leaders don’t care about meaning. It’s that meaning doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet.

A structural change gets a line item. Political maneuvering produces something visible: a vote won, a coalition built, a budget fight settled one way or another. Symbolic work produces none of that. No metric tracks whether a decision felt respectful. No dashboard flags a euphemism the week it gets chosen.

Bolman and Deal’s own research backs this up directly, and it’s older than you’d think. They studied critical incidents written by working managers, looking for which of the four lenses actually showed up in real decisions. Most incidents drew on one lens. Maybe two. Very few used all four. Across every group they studied, structural appeared constantly. Symbolic barely showed up at all.

There’s a sharper distinction buried in their later work. What makes someone a good manager and what makes someone a good leader aren’t the same skill set. Structure and people-management predict the first. Symbols and politics predict the second. Which means the one lens most tied to leadership, specifically, is the one leaders practice least.

There’s also a simpler, more institutional reason. Every reorganization has a room where the real decisions get made, and every seat in that room has an owner. Finance owns the budget lens. HR owns the people lens. Legal and upper management own the political one, whether anyone calls it that out loud. Nobody owns symbolic. It’s everyone’s job in theory, which in practice means it’s nobody’s job, and the thing nobody owns is the thing that quietly doesn’t get done.

What This Actually Sounds Like in Practice

Start with the words. Every reorganization needs one to describe itself, and institutions have gotten good at choosing calm ones. Not “we eliminated this office.” A “sunset.” Not “this position no longer exists.” A “restructuring.” The word does real work. It tells everyone, including the person choosing it, that nothing violent happened here. Just the weather. Just time passing.

Harvard Business School’s Sandra Sucher has a name for this: euphemistic labeling, a form of what psychologists call moral disengagement. It isn’t primarily about softening the news for the person receiving it. It’s about managing the discomfort of the person delivering it. Choose “sunset” over “closure” and you get to believe you didn’t do anything to anyone. Something simply ended, the way seasons end, with nobody responsible for the ending.

Then there’s when, and how. A reclassification lands in an inbox at ten at night. The hard conversation gets scheduled for the Friday before a long weekend. None of this is written into any policy anywhere. Nobody has to sign off on delivering consequential news at an hour that guarantees the person receiving it sits with it alone, unable to call anyone, unable to ask a real question until Monday.

The timing isn’t neutral. It’s a second message layered on top of the first one. Whether anyone intended it that way barely matters at the point of impact. The person on the other end reads urgency, or carelessness, or something closer to institutional cowardice: get it into the record before there’s a conversation to have about it.

Paperwork carries its own contradictions as well, and I’ve watched this one take a dozen different shapes over the years. Sometimes a title survives the reorganization untouched while the classification underneath quietly drops a tier. Sometimes the salary holds steady and the scope doesn’t: a budget line disappears from someone’s portfolio, a reporting relationship gets reassigned, and nothing on the org chart admits any of it happened. The specifics shift from case to case. The pattern never does. Something visible gets preserved. Something that actually mattered gets removed or hidden. Two messages sent at once, pointing in opposite directions, and everyone involved is somehow expected to react only to the first one.

Research on job titles backs this up in a roundabout way. Titles carry real identity weight for employees precisely because they’re assumed to track actual scope and standing. Preserve the title while hollowing out what it used to mean, and a demotion hasn’t been avoided. It’s just been made harder to name out loud, which is its own kind of message.

There’s another version of this I’ve seen often enough to expect it. Someone spends years hearing nothing but good news and praises about their work. Every review positive. Every comment from a colleague or a supervisor warm, sometimes warm enough to feel almost excessive: “your program and your team set a standard and an example for the organization”. Nobody disputes any of it.

Then a reorganization comes, and none of that history counts for much. Not as protection. Not even as a detail anyone raises in the room where the actual decision gets made, and if they did, it doesn’t matter. The praise sits in one column and the decision sits in another, and the two never seem to talk to each other. Nobody has to say the work didn’t matter. The outcome says it for them.

That’s the symbolic frame doing its quiet work. An institution doesn’t need to announce that praise and performance don’t buy protection. It just needs to make one decision that treats them as irrelevant, in the room where it counts. Everyone watching draws the same conclusion without being told: recognition is nice, but it isn’t currency here. And once people believe that, a lot of them quietly stop doing the kind of work that earns recognition in the first place.

The Bill Nobody Itemizes

None of this shows up on a budget line. That’s the actual problem.

There’s research on what happens to people whose sense of who they are gets tangled up in the structure that just changed. The finding is blunt: it isn’t the new task list that produces resistance. It’s the rupture in the story someone had been telling about their own work for years. People with less history, less identification, adapt faster. People who spent decades building something experience the same change as closer to a small grief. Call it cynicism if you need a word that fits on a dashboard. It’s closer to mourning, and it behaves like mourning.

A separate study of a university-wide reorganization found something worse than disagreement. It found two groups making sense of the identical decision in genuinely incompatible ways. Leadership’s story: better support, smarter structure, more resources for the mission. The story from people living inside the change: damage to careers, to stability, to the thing they’d spent years building. Not two opinions about the same set of facts. Two different realities, running in parallel, neither one visible from inside the other.

That gap is the actual cost. Not morale, the soft line nobody on a board has to justify. Trust. Whether the next reorganization gets any benefit of the doubt. Whether people believe what they’re told the next time something changes, or quietly start protecting themselves instead. An organization can survive being wrong about a structure. Recovering from being disbelieved takes a great deal longer, and some institutions never fully manage it.

Ask anyone who’s lived through two or three reorganizations in the same institution what happens by the third one. Nobody reads the memo at face value anymore. Everyone reads it for what it’s hiding. That instinct doesn’t come from paranoia. It comes from an accurate track record.

Back to the Question

So go back to the opening question. What if meaning came first?

Not a values page. Not a slide at an all-staff meeting. An actual check, applied before a decision ships: what does this say, not just what does it do. Naming decisions get the same scrutiny as budget decisions. Timing gets treated as a design choice, not an administrative afterthought nobody owns. Evaluation systems get audited, periodically, for whether they can actually see the kind of work they now claim to measure.

None of that requires new software or a bigger HR budget. It requires believing the fourth lens is load-bearing, not decorative. Most institutions don’t believe that yet.

The ones that figure it out first are going to have an advantage nobody’s currently measuring for.

Four Lenses, One Habit

Why the Fourth Lens Keeps Losing

What This Actually Sounds Like in Practice

The Bill Nobody Itemizes

Back to the Question

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