The Business of Ambiguity
The following is an excerpt from The Business of Ambiguity, by Debbie Sutherland, available January 11, 2022 from River Grove Books.
Praise for The Business of Ambiguity
“In combining academic theory of organizational psychology with actual peo- ple and situations, the author brings to life the challenges faced in addressing uncertainty, complexity, and imperfect information. This is an invaluable busi- ness guide for the world in which we now live.”
— Deborah Hazell, CEO of Unity Trust Bank and nonexecutive director of Global Parametrics
“In corporate life, the ability to see around corners, to anticipate what bad (or good) thing may happen next, is a precious and rare attribute. As Debbie Sutherland eloquently argues in this essential book, we are all a product of our personal experiences; we all learn to deal with ambiguity through our values, behaviors, and mindsets. If COVID-19 has demonstrated one thing to those in corporate life, it’s that constancy, the steadfastness of mind under duress, predictability, and anticipation are at least as mission critical as technical ca- pabilities. This is a vital body of work for these times, allowing the successful executive to embrace and thrive amid so much ambiguity.”
— Ed Sims, president and CEO of WestJet Airlines
INTRODUCTION
The Ambiguity Mindset
Knowledge gaps are our reality. We live in a dynamic and interconnected world, and making well-informed and long-term decisions has become progressively difficult, given our limited understanding of the basis of unanticipated events or unintended business consequences. As this complexity increases, patterns of error and system-wide problems become more difficult to predict, and even our new technologies and interconnectedness continue to complicate global businesses. Ambiguous situations are now normal for global companies, and executives must constantly struggle with that uncertainty to make informed decisions.
The issues are compounded, as even highly educated executives may struggle with the pace of change. Each project comes with unique demands, and the pathway through ambiguous situations has no predefined learning path. Executives need to make leadership decisions in real time for maximum efficiency. Organizations also have many different types of corporate and personal relationships, which are a melting pot of behaviors, emotions, and attitudes that can invoke feelings of anxiety, confusion, or conflict. So how do you absorb, manage, or mitigate all these business uncertainties while still making good business decisions?
The ambiguity mindset is the cognitive and behavioral capacity to reflect on, examine, and adapt perspectives and to seek meaning from dynamic connections, interactions, experiences, and behaviors to determine the ideal decision pathway. It is a thinking and behavioral action mindset that enables you to make good decisions. The ambiguity mindset is a way of addressing cognitive complexities and behavioral insights and a way of learning how to think and act while immersed in unfamiliar situations. Systems thinking, adult learning, and organizational behavior theories provide insights into the nuances of business uncertainty to decode the key principles.
The purpose of an ambiguity mindset is to learn how to embrace the components of ambiguous situations, dive into why ambiguous situations occur, and learn to see and appreciate the nuances with better clarity. Developing an ambiguity mindset is a multifaceted and multilevel process that will enable you to understand the behavior patterns, relationships, inferences, and perceptions within the network of systems to avoid unintended business consequences. You must learn this intellectual thinking competency and avoid linear thinking within layers of systems; you also must transform wisdom into dynamic actions and understand cause-and-effect relationships necessary to solve recurring or systemic issues. To do this, you must self-reflect on faulty biases and assumptions you may hold so you can understand the true nature of ambiguity.
The ambiguity mindset journey will help you embrace a new way of thinking. Its foundation is framed by the main decoding principles and includes four concepts that are also part of an ambiguity mindset: mental models, systems thinking, complex adaptive systems, and learning from experience.
DECODING PRINCIPLES
The first decoding principle is to view the world through a wide-angle lens. You will learn the value of gaining perspective-taking skills. This big-picture decoding principle explains how your own perspective can expand to capture more clues for broader understanding. Learning about your own and other people’s thinking patterns is the first step toward understanding your blind spots, assumptions, and biases so you can see the world through multiple viewpoints.
The second decoding principle builds a behavior and thinking architecture for an ambiguity mental model. Even with no prior knowledge of systems thinking, you will learn the systems thinking foundation and become more familiar with sophisticated terminology such as feedback loops, dynamic interactions, and unintended consequences, as well as the repercussions of short-term thinking. The fact is that you are a product of your upbringing, which created your personal values; you have learned experiences from the context of situations around you. But the rule of this decoding principle is that you need to see all the elements in the fluid and dynamic system you live in. By understanding more about your own and other people’s thinking and behavior patterns, you will move away from introspection and into the outer spheres — the organizational and environmental space — and start to build skills to understand why context matters. You will then be able to switch between self and others and will learn to ask key questions that build the connections in all three macro spheres: individual, organization, and environment.
The third decoding principle is based on the different experiences and the environments in which you learn. The fact is that we all learn differently, and adults learn differently than children. More than likely, you have not thought about how you learn or how you think while working in unfamiliar situations with different groups of people— specifically, in complex adaptive systems. This decoding principle will enable you to seek meaning in your situational experiences and build communities and networks to create new learning pathways.
The three decoding principles help build the ambiguity mindset foundation and enable you to understand inexactness, paradoxes, or uncertain situations (ambiguity) within the business context (principles, behaviors, and knowledge-making architecture) and the ideal conditions (influencers, elements, interactions, and experiences) to develop an ambiguity mindset. Now, let’s dive into the four main concepts of an ambiguity mindset and how you can start to visualize your thinking and behavior actions in different spheres of insight. All of these components build the foundation for your strategic learning path.
