60 ORGANIZING ACADEMIC COLLEGES: A GUIDE FOR DEANS • Will the financial investment be neutral due to reallocation of effort or reassignment of responsibilities? • If additional resources are required, will you receive support from your superiors and reports that this is an acceptable place to invest these resources given other needs within the college? • Would a change itself be supported by your superiors, and will your superiors be around long enough to support the change through to its completion? • Would the change itself be supported or at least be understood by department heads and faculty? • Are there other change actions underway in the office that would be negatively, or positively, impacted by such a change? • Do your office staff expect this change will still be needed in the college five or more years from now? A Framework for Optimizing Successful Change From our interviews and discussions with deans who have considered, implement- ed, or have been subject to a change in their college’s organizational structure, it is clear deans often have an intuitive sense of what actions and processes can help make a change process successful. Many of those whom we interviewed mention such things as: “I kept my provost informed;” “Faculty have to be part of the pro- cess from the beginning;” and “Our university has policies that tell us what steps we needed to follow.” Such comments fall within a framework for organizational change first proposed by Lee Bolman and Terry Deal in their landmark book, Modern Approaches to Un- derstanding and Managing Organizations (1984) and further refined and applied in numerous subsequent publications. In fact, in his 2014 book Change Leadership in Higher Education, Jeffery L. Buller calls their framework “perhaps the most familiar way” used to describe the process of reexamining change and organizational culture in higher education (p 39). This model suggests there are four “frames” at play in organizational dynamics: Structural, Political, Human Resource, and Symbolic. We propose that deans use this framework as a backdrop as they are considering changes to their college (either their office model or at the departmental level). Being attentive to and reflective about each of these frames as you initiate and process changes—while not guaranteeing suc- cess—can at the least ensure that you are not missing any landmines.