OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Symbolic Frame Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the symbolic frame
2. Apply the symbolic frame to your personal case situation

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other course
materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and format for your
Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

Aperture Software is an accounts payable automation software company with two offices in
Portland, OR and Brea, CA. The software is intended for mid to large level enterprises and
boasts a customer base of about 50 customers across a broad range of subscription thresholds.

I was a full-time individual contributor serving as a Customer Success Manager on a team of 2.

The only other teammate was my manager, Tracy, that worked as the Manager of Customer
Success. My book of business consisted of 28 accounts. I frequently collaborated with other
adjacent teams such as sales, customer support, and product management.

I managed some of the highest spend and strategic accounts at Aperture Software but I was
unhappy at the organization due to both the internal culture and the isolation brought on by
COVID-19. I ultimately chose to make a horizontal move for the same role to another
organization where I am significantly happier and very grateful that I decided to pivot to another
industry and job.

2) Describe how the symbols of the organization influenced the situation.

At Aperture, the only heroes that were ever highlighted were the heads of the departments,
typically leadership figures that fed good news up to the leadership team. It never felt like we
celebrated individual work as much as we celebrated leaders hitting a quota. In this way, the
sales team was often the closest to being celebrated for hitting a deal of a particular size. The
worst part of this, as the team that maintained that customer relationship, was that the sales team
didn’t know the product very well and often oversold it with functionality that did not exist,
leaving the success team to clean up the mess and sometimes see the customer break the
relationship over these lies.

As far as the myths and fairy tales about how Aperture came to be, the story was very short: an
engineer and his wife put together their savings and started a business. This was told to
employees as a passing comment if asked, but Aperture’s origins were typically spoken about
negatively, painting the small business as a disorganized mess that was hemorhaging money.

1
 When the new CEO took over, he rarely acknowledged the Aperature of the past, and brought no
more interesting story to his takeover to the company. The origins felt more like a mystery, as if
the business had just popped into existence one day twenty years before, and by the sounds of it,
barely survived.

Rituals were rare aside from a monthly All Hands that consisted mostly of organizational
changes, such as abrupt personnel changes or exits, and new company goals and the teammates
that would own those goals, often a surprise to those uninformed teammates. These meetings
were a huge source of anxiety for me. We did have on positive recurring meeting, which was a
Friday “Lunch and Learn” where an employee would volunteer to walk the company through a
great book they had read or a new skill or a new product release followed by a Q&A. This was
very helpful to my product understanding as we did not do a great job of documentation, and
where we did, it was rarely in a form that a layman or non-engineer could understand. I looked
forward to these meetings and the catered lunches that came with them.

3) Recommend how you would use organizational symbols for an alternative course of action
regarding your case.

I ultimately left Aperture due to a lack of culture, stating as my #1 concern and #1 reason that I
would not ever work there again. I found that the leadership team caused a great deal of anxiety
for most individual contributors, creating a looming paranoia and sense of powerlessness through
the company. My manager, an experienced leader in software-as-a-service (SaaS) organizations
was often shut down for her contributions, even as the entire leadership board had never worked
in this industry before.

I think the smallest attempt at driving culture could have been a massive improvement. For
example, make it a requirement that every All Hands meeting has one positive element to it.
Nearly all these meetings brought bad news, to the point where a couple coworkers would make
sure to block out an hour after these meetings for our lunch so we could collectively express our
disbelief at whatever the news was.

Creating a sense of belonging was not easy for Aperture and most people never quite felt like it
was a home for them, especially newer employees.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned about this
frame.

I think one of the greatest learnings I have gained from this frame is that my current place of
work is the best possible place for me and it’s the culture that makes it so wonderful.

To draw some parallels of situations where the different course of action made a massive impact
on me, my current place of work, AskNicely, celebrates heroes everyday. For example, every
Monday in our weekly All Hands, we have a section reserved for shout outs and there are always
10-15 shout outs of everyone across the organization calling others out for doing something really
well. Further, during our quarterly Town Halls, we celebrate a single member of the team that
exemplified one of our core values by outlining what they did and why they are a symbol of the

2
 great things at AskNicely. The recipient receives a $200 Amazon giftcard and joins our Hall of
Fame in our company Wiki. These are small gestures that do wonders for making the workforce
feel meaningfully recognized for their efforts and allows others to always lead by example.

The legends of AskNicely origins rumble through the company with framed photos of the
original first office (a shed in our founder’s backyard) and a conference room affectionately
named ‘The Shed’. Our CEO tells the tale with such whimsy, excitedly sharing photos of the
original pub where the idea came to them, no longer in business. He tells the tale of a man,
working in customer marketing, and dejected by the lack of decent customer experience
platforms. His close friend, our eventual CTO, agrees emphatically. The two discuss what could
be done better and that night, the engineer goes home and starts to code the early alpha build of
what would become AskNicely. It makes the product feel like a magical creation that came from
a place of passion and purpose. Our CEO shares this story with every new employee in a one-on-
one session called the ‘Induction Meeting’ where he personally introduces himself and AskNicely
and spends the time to learn about you. As a result, it feels like you are an important piece of a
puzzle that has been missing all along. Your arrival has been long awaited.

Rituals are common at AskNicely. Our founder, hailing from New Zealand and Maori origin,
starts every meeting with a new Maori phrase, stating the significance and a small piece of New
Zealand history. Similarly, at the end of every meeting, we all perform an exercise called
“Tejime” where we all, across our three scattered offices, clap a single clap altogether.