William,
I helped launch a different Herman Miller product—the popular Aeron chair, so I love the example you use.

Let’s take for a moment your example of a “frameless” chair as a metaphor for leadership structure and pair it with what I learned from watching the product development process at Herman Miller.  Herman Miller promotes their SAYL chair as having a “frameless back”.  If you look at the product photos, indeed, it doesn’t have the typical full-backed frame structure that you see in more traditional office chairs.  But it does have a center support section running up the back of the chair. This makes sense to me, because my experience with the product development process (and physics in general) is that you need material that will somehow support the mass of a person who’s sitting in chair.  So, while the chair may not have a traditional frame, it does provide a certain amount of structure so that it can support the seated person.

In the same way, I see leadership as needing to have some form of structure or support, otherwise it’s not leadership, it’s anarchy. My take on this metaphor is that as leaders, we don’t completely remove the frame, but rather ensure that the frame is properly supporting the contributor base.

We also should ensure that the “frame” (or I would call it boundaries) aren’t so constricting that they limit possibility. On that point, I think you and I agree.