One Decision, Four Frames

As a student in the School Leadership Program at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, Bolman and Deal's Four Frames Framework was often used to analyze organizational decisions. The framework suggests looking at strategic decisions through four different lenses: structural, symbolic, political, and human resources. Through this approach, one can analyze decisions and predict resistance. During last week's board meeting, Reach made the decision to add a second program site in the fall. Using the four frames allows a full understanding of the factors that led to this decision.

Structural: One of my board members dropped a wonderful pearl of wisdom when he said, "duplication is easy, but expansion is really hard." The comment, while simple, really drives home the idea that we must focus on learning before we focus on scaling. Growing an organization while solidifying a program model necessitates constant expansion efforts. However, if we create the strongest possible program now, we will have the ability to focus largely on duplication in the future. This means we should proceed slowly during this learning stage.

Symbolic: As a new organization, every decision largely influences the way Reach is perceived in the community. As we begin investigating expansion opportunities, we must keep this in mind. Our first site, Hyde Leadership, is a charter school. This means that we must be very cautious about selecting a charter school as our second site. The decision to partner with another charter might lead those in the community to begin thinking of Reach as an organization that serves only charter schools.

Political: Nonprofit organizations deal with political realities on a number of levels. For Reach, political considerations involve remaining committed to our students despite sometimes challenging relationships with partner schools - we want to be seen as an organization that weathers storms. Additionally, serving specific communities carries significant political weight in the funding community. For Reach, these political considerations, and our desire to serve the students that face the most significant obstacles, drive us to aggressively explore relationships in Wards 5, 6, 7, and 8.

Human Resources: Perhaps the most obvious challenge for next year will be one of staffing. At our first site, I was able to handle all aspects of program planning and execution. As we expand to a second site, we will have to design the systems necessary to achieve success at multiple schools. Developing these systems will not be easy, which is one of the reasons that we are satisfied to add one more site for the coming academic year. By doing so, we will ensure that appropriate supervision structures are created so we continue to succeed with our students.

Above all, our board decided that our current focus should be placed squarely on program quality. We will not consider ourselves successful if we effectively scale an organization that provides mediocre services. While we want to provide high-quality services to every one of DC's struggling adolescent readers, we recognize that we must focus on becoming great before we can focus on addressing the problem's significant scale.

This year, we're serving approximately 45 students. There are thousands in need of our services. Next year, let's focus on providing the highest quality services to about a hundred of those kids. Only by taking these careful first steps will we be able to make an even more significant impact in the future.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Mark