Intense Ambiguity by management fails

Business, to a great extent, suffers from ambiguity and necessarily so. We don’t know how well a product will do, or whether our competition will blindside us with something new or know how successful a new manager will be in a department. So we deal with ambiguity.

But there’s a different type of ambiguity out there: Intense Ambiguity. Over at Thinking Faster (http://workingsmarter NULL.typepad NULL.com/my_weblog/), Jeffrey Phillips defines Intense Ambiguity (http://workingsmarter NULL.typepad NULL.com/my_weblog/2009/06/intense-ambiguity NULL.html) as:

…there (is) significant pressure from the management team to do something – especially new and interesting things.  However, there isn’t necessarily a corresponding amount of clarity about what those things should be.  So, there’s a lot of pressure to get things done, just no one is really sure what kinds of things should be done.

There is a school of thought that says we should let our people discover their own best ways of getting things done. That contrasts with guiding every step. There is a happy medium, of course, that good managers use to help each of the people on the team.

But, with the economy and business as bad as it is, I suspect there is a lot more Intense Ambiguity going on for a simple reason: management doesn’t know what to do next and can’t guide the people working for them into the right direction.

Are you feeling Intense Ambiguity from management?

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