Early in my agile career, a mentor asked me what quality all good leaders had. I replied with something standard, like “good communication skills”, but otherwise couldn’t answer. Her answer? Good leaders were comfortable with ambiguity. Being relatively new to any sort of outside-the-box thinking, I had no idea what this meant, and went on with my day. But the interaction stuck with me, and the answer even more so. What did “comfort with ambiguity” even mean, and how could one get better at it?
Years later – years spent thinking about this and other leadership challenges (particularly through an agile lens) – I think I have an idea. So let’s tease this out…
When I think about ambiguity, I think of it as a function of change within a system. When change occurs, there are likely less knowns about what’s ahead than the previous state had. If you were operating at a particular speed within this system, your line of sight is now reduced. The risk of failing has gone up, and this perhaps requires more careful consideration of what decisions we’re making, before we continue. The fear of failing a symptom of ambiguity, and it causes things to stall.
We see this all the time in command-and-control ways of working: people are hired to do a thing and absolutely no coloring outside the lines is allowed. Things move smoothly enough, but if there’s a change in management or prioritize, things seize up. Not exactly a win for the organization, right?
The thing is, change happens all. the. time. People move in and out. Strategies change. Customers change. Being able to respond to change is, and has been for decades, a cornerstone of agile product development. And so if you’re comfortable with ambiguity – comfortable with change, risk, and the unknown – you will ultimately succeed, if only because everyone else around you is seizing up, scared to move forward.
So what’s this mean for Leadership? It’s critical that you enable your teams to be resilient to ambiguity. That means giving them options and the ability to own outcomes, and make decisions that help them reduce the risks they may face. It means communicating clearly what needs to be done (see, I wasn’t totally wrong), and trusting them to execute (after all, why did you hire them?)
Of course, none of this is new. It’s baked into the Agile manifesto and principles, it’s described ad nauseam in many leadership books. But in my world, being “comfortable with ambiguity” never made sense, and only just has this week. Perhaps now it’s worth giving those books and methods a re-read, knowing the best leaders are indeed those most prepared to not have all the answers.
Goscin.ski 