SEER Series 2025: Advancing Change through the Four Frames of Organizations

Unlock your ability to better understand how the organizational dynamics of your higher education institution(s) or organization(s) influence and affect your change initiative(s). In this workshop, participants will learn to apply Bolman and Deal’s (2017) four frames, embedded within the human-centric organizational change mindset of the Integrative Professional Framework (IPF) and SEER Process, to advance their change work.

1) The symbolic frame consists of an organization’s culture, the ethos surrounding its development (i.e., its origin story), and often unspoken rules that guide its operations.
2) The structural frame represents an organization’s mission and goals, policies and procedures, and the layout of leadership and organizational units.
3) The human resource frame focuses on the people of an organization, their needs, their motivators, and how they interact together.
4) Lastly, the political frame deals with power dynamics, resource constraints, and conflict that influence organizational operations.

The four frames, individually and collectively, are powerful tools in examining how an organization functions, which in turn, provides insight into the selection and execution of organizational change activities.