Organizing Frameworks — Organizational, Learning, & Self-Development
Imagine having a set of powerful lenses that reveal fresh insights into organizations, inspire learning, and ignite personal growth. A variety of frameworks, models, and assessments offer exactly that — transformative perspectives that reshape how we understand and lead in complex environments.
I wanted to consolidate a few of my favorites here, and provide additional reflection on them in the future.
I use “framework” broadly to encompass various ways of structuring abstract ideas, including models, theories, and taxonomies.
Essentially, these serve as “lenses” to explore and discuss complex topics such as organizational dynamics, learning processes, and adult development.
Organization-level Frameworks
1. Competing Values Framework (CVF), often assessed using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI)
The OCAI is used to find out how strongly an organization represents each the four dominant types of corporate culture: Clan culture, hierarchal culture, adhocracy culture, and market culture (Koehn, 2022). Each of these types of culture contains preferences, norms, and tensions in managing accountability. OCAI defines culture as shared assumptions in an organization regarding how to adapt, survive, and thrive.
Clan Culture: Informal, values-driven teams with a family-like atmosphere. Employees act autonomously without waiting for top-down directives but may avoid reporting misconduct due to close relationships.
Adhocracy Culture: Encourages independent judgment and challenging leadership. Employees feel empowered to speak up, but success depends on a strong learning culture, which can be uneven across organizations.
Market Culture: Focused on results, with internal competition and risk aversion. Employees are driven to win and maintain the organization’s reputation for high performance.
Hierarchical Culture: Structured and formal. Employees rely on leadership and policy, but this can stifle initiative and create a false sense of security.
2. Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) explains how individuals acquire and maintain behaviors through a combination of personal, behavioral, and environmental factors.
- The theory goes deep on the internal and external sanctions that support self-regulation. For example, self-sanctions refer to the internal standards and regulatory processes that guide an individual’s behavior. These self-sanctions help regulate behavior in alignment with one’s moral and ethical belief
- The theory emphasizes the importance of self-efficacy (confidence in one’s ability to act) and reciprocal determinism, where personal factors, behavior, and the environment interact and influence each other. This makes SCT a comprehensive framework for understanding behavior and learning in social contexts.
3. Multiple Accountability Conceptions
Koppell’s (2005) concept of multiple accountability explores the challenges organizations face in balancing different, sometimes conflicting, forms of accountability. He identifies five dimensions of accountability:
- Transparency: Providing clear, accessible information…Did the organization disclose accurate information about its performance?
“An accountable organization cannot obfuscate its mistakes to avoid scrutiny.”
- Liability: Being held responsible for failures or misconduct…Did the organization face consequences for its performance?
“Individuals and organizations should be held liable for their actions, punished for malfeasance, and rewarded for success.”
- Controllability: Being responsive to oversight and control…Did the organization act in accordance with the principal’s (e.g., Congress, president) directives?
“The degree of constraint on organizational behavior in both procedural and substantive arenas.”
- Responsibility: Meeting expectations of ethical behavior…Did the organization adhere to established rules and regulations?
“Fidelity to law is most straightforward…Responsibility can also take the form of formal and informal professional standards or behavioral norms.”
- Responsiveness: Addressing the needs and concerns of stakeholders…Did the organization meet the substantive demands or needs expected of it?
“The needs and desires of an organization’s constituents (or clients).”
Evaluating an organization’s accountability requires recognizing five distinct dimensions: transparency, liability, controllability, responsibility, and responsiveness. Each dimension poses a unique question about accountability, which complicates assessments when organizations are expected to fulfill all dimensions simultaneously. Often, conflicting expectations arise. This complexity underscores the importance of distinguishing between these dimensions in accountability evaluations.
Graphics depicting the relieving tension by choosing one concept versus when leaders choose to balance multiple concepts:
4. Stakeholder Theory: organizational management and ethics that focuses on the responsibilities of an organization to all its stakeholders, not just its shareholders.
Developed by R. Edward Freeman, it argues that businesses must consider the interests of various groups that are affected by or can affect the organization, such as employees, customers, suppliers, the community, and the environment. The theory emphasizes that long-term success depends on balancing these diverse interests, rather than focusing solely on profit maximization for shareholders.
5. Bolman and Deal’s Four-Frame Model offers four lenses to understand and navigate organizational change management:
- Structural Frame: Emphasizes reorganizing roles, responsibilities, and policies to align with new objectives.
- Human Resource Frame: Focuses on employee engagement, support, and communication to address their needs during change.
- Political Frame: Acknowledges power struggles, competing interests, and the need to build coalitions for effective change.
- Symbolic Frame: Stresses the importance of creating shared meanings, rituals, and symbols to inspire and sustain a new vision.
If all four frames aren’t addressed, organizational change is unlikely to be sustainable. For instance, the US military’s push for greater accountability for stopping sexual harassment and assault began with structural changes in policy, aligning with their hierarchical culture. However, without fostering employee engagement (human resource frame), resolving internal power dynamics (political frame), and reinforcing the new vision through meaningful symbols (symbolic frame), the initiative risks lacking long-term impact. Addressing all frames ensures a more comprehensive and lasting change.
Learning Taxonomies
1. In Bloom’s Taxonomy, cognitive processes are organized from less complex to more complex:
- Remember: Recall and recognize key information.
- Understand: Interpret, summarize, classify, and explain (use specific, observable actions like “summarize” instead of vague terms like “understand”).
- Apply: Execute and implement learned concepts.
- Analyze: Differentiate and compare elements or ideas.
- Evaluate: Check and critique to assess the validity or quality.
- Create: Generate, plan, and produce new ideas or products.e
2. Fink’s Taxonomy of Significant Learning includes six dimensions that foster deep, meaningful learning:
- Foundational knowledge focuses on understanding core concepts
- Application develops thinking and practical skills.
- Integration connects ideas and experiences, and the
- Human dimension emphasizes self-awareness and understanding others.
- Caring encourages shifts in values or interests
- Learning how to learn fosters self-directed inquiry and lifelong learning habits. Together, these dimensions promote a holistic learning experience beyond simple content mastery.
3. Vertical Leadership Development is in between self-development and learning.
It is the framework that identifies three key conditions that support leadership development: Heat Experiences, Colliding Perspectives, and Elevated sensemaking. From my career and research, many companies provide “heat experiences” as challenges for employees, some offer and support “colliding perspectives” from diverse views, but few provide time and support for “elevated sensemaking.” The lack of reflection and sensemaking can leave leaders primed for development, but without the opportunity to deeply reflect, grow, and solidify their change.
Individual Assessments for Self-Development
- StrengthsFinder: Identifies a person’s top strengths or talents from 34 possible themes, helping individuals focus on their natural abilities to maximize personal and professional growth.
Personal preference: I’ve used StrengthsFinder as an an effective team building and self development tool that helped teams better understand and encourage other members’ unique strengths. There is grid available where you can visualize the team’s results to see how well strengths are balanced within the team, within the four broader domains (Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, or Strategic Thinking). The matrix can be helpful for identifying what strengths the team might want to recruit for next.
2. Enneagram: A personality system with nine interconnected types that explores core motivations, fears, and behavioral patterns, aiming to foster personal growth and self-awareness.
Personal preference: It’s great for coaching 1–1 and going deeper to support an individual in understanding their tendencies. It feels a little more therapeutic than other individual workplace assessments.
3. MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator): Categorizes individuals into 16 personality types based on preferences in how they perceive the world and make decisions (e.g., introversion vs. extroversion).
Personal preference: MBTI is “old school” and critiqued, however, I love how simple the outcome is…INTJ, for example. Even though the result doesn’t highlight where on the spectrum an individual might be between these preferences, limiting its specificity, the MBTI results are something everyone can remember. This makes it a great assessment for an initial introduction to the idea that people can have very different personal preferences in areas that highly relevant for the workplace.
4. DISC: A behavioral assessment focusing on four main traits — Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness — used to understand communication styles and improve team dynamics.
Personal preference: This one is actually not a preferred assessment, but a critique. I have not experienced DISC as valuable to the individual or the team. I find that the connotation of “dominance” is distracting and that overall, the traits don’t stick as being helpful in the workplace. There is a complexity to the results that makes it hard to understand its application for yourself and others.
5. Leadership 360’s: Designed to obtain perspectives from multiple sources in a person’s work environment and use that feedback to facilitate with the person under review for self-awareness, assessment, and development. Raters are usually peers, supervisors, and subordinates of the person under review. Leaders who view themselves in a way that closely matches how others see them are typically considered more effective.
Personal preference: Participants in my study noted that the 360 feedback was a welcomed challenge and offered that it should be done earlier in one’s career with better assurance of anonymity for contributors.
In summary…
These are a few of my favorite things and it’s helpful to have them organized. While dealing with complexity, it is nice to agree upon a framework through which to structure and assess a developmental project. It is nice to have options at the organizational level, in the theme of ensuring learning, and to support individual development.