Ambiguity – Patrick Mayfield

I had an experience this summer from which I didn’t emerge very well. Or did I? You be the judge.

I was shopping for summer shoes. So I found a pair I liked in an M&S outlet. So I took these shoes to a stool to try them on. The right shoe did fit me quite well. “This looks promising,” I thought.

Then I tried to put on the left shoe. I struggled. I struggled some more. Putting this shoe on was proving to be harder than I had expected.

The sort of narrative that was running through my head went something like this: “Maybe this pair isn’t for me. Maybe my left foot is slightly larger than the other; it happens. But why haven’t I been aware of it before? Maybe I should abandon buying this style of shoe.”

Then it occurred to me to check the soles for the shoe sizes.

Yep! Sure enough, I’d picked up a size smaller for the left shoe.

Embarrassing!

I could have berated myself for being stupid, or a useless shopper. Instead, I decided to do something slightly different: I checked my heuristic.

A heuristic, from the Greek to find or discover, is an approach to problem-solving. The problem I was trying to solve was whether a new pair of shoes would fit my feet. However, it wasn’t getting me anywhere until I first checked I had a pair of the same size. My shoe-shopping heuristic missed a step – pardon the pun!

This incident illustrates how we can learn from instances where our current heuristic fails. We reflect, and we change or augment our learning process. However, we often don’t.

Check Your Heuristic

Project management is an attempt to systematise, to make repeatable, steps in a project. The problem comes when a project manager moves to a different context; their heuristic often seems to fail them. So when it comes to developing new skills to a higher level, failure is an asset. A skilled project manager becomes so because they experience a widely different set of contexts and levels of complexity. Book learning can fail them, but that is not necessarily the book’s fault.

So we need learning environments where we are always consciously honing our skills, where we can value failing in a positive way.

What failures have been useful to you? Leave your observations below in the comments.

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Ambiguity in a VUCA World

I am very proud of my daughter, Sarah. She has made a name for herself in the very male-dominated world of historic building restoration and ornamental plastering. She uses all her skills as a sculptress and has developed a keen eye for the health of historic buildings. I was walking with her recently through the centre of Newbury, an old market town in Berkshire, UK, that boasts a fairly modern shopping centre. And she began to illustrate for me how ambiguity works in a VUCA world. (‘VUCA’ stands for an environment defined by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.)

Ambiguity is all around us. The trouble is, by definition, we don’t recognise it.

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So when Sarah suddenly objected at the sight of this wall (pictured above) it got my attention. What was wrong with it? To my untrained eye, someone had been responsible for preserving this fine building by re-pointing the wall. That was a good thing, right?

Well, no. Sarah pointed out that the traditional material to bind bricks was lime. Concrete, though less perishable, does not absorb water.

I still didn’t get it. Not absorbing water is a good thing, right?

Again I stood to be corrected. A building such as this, Sarah explained, is a living system. When it rains, where will the water go? It will seep into the most porous and also the most precious part of the structure, the timbers. It will stay there and eventually rot away the wood. In about ten years time, these ancient timbers will be rotting and need replacing. And they are irreplaceable.

This illustrated a couple of things for me about ambiguity:

It’s often experience and skill that offers us the only way of recognising ambiguity in our work. I thought the repair was a good, responsible job; my daughter knew it was a restoration crime.
The frame of reference we bring to the world matters. In this case, do we think of a building as an inert, static structure or as a living system, a system that needs to flex and breathe? Our frame of reference is how we see reality, how the world appears to us.

Our worldview conditions how the world occurs to us.

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In the world of leading change, we make assumptions about people and their behaviour. For example, someone reacts with surprising hostility towards the changes we are trying to make. We can make the assumption that they are a trouble-maker, they dislike us, or that they are just a stubborn reactionary.

We need to look closer. My experience draws me towards that person, towards that conflict; it triggers exploratory, compassionate questions. And my frame of reference is that very few people are sociopaths, so there is probably another reason why this person appears unreasonable.

I look deeper, and I find that this person is going through a domestic trauma and that the only stability in their life right now seems to be their workplace. And I’m about to take away that last refuge of stability.

Suddenly their reaction begins to make sense. Now I can view them very differently. I can begin to work positively with that person.

Ambiguity in this VUCA world is all around us. The problem is, by definition, we don’t see it.

The more we grow in experience and what worldview we bring to our work, the more we challenge our own initial assumptions, the more we are likely to uncover and recognise important ambiguity.