Data Meditations #2: Dealing with Ambiguous Situations : A Guide
Here are six ways you can approach them.
What are some ways you can deal with it?
If your like me, dealing with ambiguity is a daily part of your life. It get frustrating, and navigating it at home and work can be a pain. The frustrations mount especially when you are thrown into events, tasks, and situations beyond your comfort zone.
Instead of avoiding all ambiguity, wouldn’t be interesting to have a framework to work with? In this article, I will use a discuss 6 things I assess to navigate through these situations.
1. Define The Goal.
Goals are the foundation. Without goals, it is impossible to maneuver or accomplish much in an ambiguous situation. Goals help focus and set limits for your efforts. They direct and motivate the flow of all actions. They teach us if a goal is worth fighting for or if we need to withdraw from pursuing it.
So to define our goals were do we start? You must define:
End State. A measurable outcome of what we want to accomplish. An end-state does not need to be perfect. But it does need to be measurable.
Requirements. This are the key concepts and facts that support our outcome. By defining these, we are able to figure out which to prioritize to reach the end state.
Processes. These are means by which these concepts are enacted in an environment. The most efficient and effective path should be your aim.
These are things that must be discovered for anything to get done in ambitious situations. You must ask questions to navigate ambiguity. If you cannot get a clearly defined end state, it may be best to reassess the situation you are in.
A well defined goal takes away much of the frustration of ambiguity. It also helps you save valuable time and resources, and concentrate them. It helps you focus on what facts you need to get to the end.
Goals in the long run also help build your confidence. They create mental frameworks from repeated experience, allowing you to objectively assess your abilities. Eventually an ambiguous situation becomes a known one.
2. Know what is within your control.
This means three things: resources and yourself. Resources are the tools, money, and other limited things that are key to achieving goals. Yourself comes from your emotions and current abilities.
Knowing your current resources allows you to prioritize in an ambiguous situation. It enables calculation of the most efficient action, by knowing how much you have and how long it takes to acquire more resources.
Your emotions and abilities are the most important part of knowing what is within your control.
Emotions are your thoughts, fears, and perceptions of the situation. You must acknowledge them when making decisions in ambiguous situation. And you separate them from the facts you observe, to make the most optimal decisions.
Abilities are the current strengths, weaknesses, and experience you have handling similar situations.
All of this takes self knowledge and discipline. Self-knowledge lets you assess your weaknesses and strengths, and how you react to situations. Discipline lets you separate your emotions from the logic needed to
3. Know what is out of your control.
Knowing what you do not control is a very difficult one. It is easy to overestimate your abilities or to even ignore factors out of your control.
There are three things usually out of your control:
People. The individuals involved in the situation has different personalities, priorities, and thoughts. Even if you cannot predict them, you must account for them to reach your endstate.
Unforeseen circumstance. These are factors you cannot predict. It is unimportant to predict them. It is more important to react well to them.
Time. This is how much time you have to reach the end state. This usually dictated by the goals you set and/or the circumstance. It limits how quickly you can respond.
To know what is out of your control takes courage: you must face the unpleasant factors to be able to account for them.
And that’s okay. Knowing and accepting them as facts is the most important part. Then you must see all of these as data to work within ambiguity.
4. Positioning.
Once you know what you have control over and do not have over, then you can position. Positioning is devoting your resources, time, and energy to a good tactical or strategic position.
So what is a good position? A good position has the following:
Concentration. Taking it allows you to take an action quickly when an opportunity presents itself.
Resource conservation and concentration. Reduces the amount of resources (time, energy, money, etc.) needed to take an action. Increases the amount of resources to maximize an advantage.
Maneuverability. A good position opens up multiple courses of action — and multiple courses of action enable greater opportunity. Multiple positions increase this exponentially. It connects well with other positions you take.
A good position is important in ambiguous situations. It allows you to address multiple scenarios without having to react. For unexpected scenarios, it allows you to apply the maximum amount of resources, increasing the chances of success. Positioning helps you maintain the initiative.
5. Mental Mindset.
Mental mindset means that you are in a state of mental readiness-even if you are unsure about what to do next. You must able to be in the moment- observing the the situation without anticipating. If an opportunity presents itself, you are able to respond without hesitation
Most important to this mindset? A willingness to accept the consequences of actions in an ambiguous situation. You must go into the situation with strong determination — acceptance of both failure and success.
Ambiguous situations do not consistently present favorable choices. Or even a choice between a bad or good one. More often than not? The choice is between a bad choice and worse one. A right mindset teaches you to accept all these outcomes.
Acceptance is the key to making the most of unfavorable ambiguous situations. It increases your flexibility and speed of response. But more importantly? It teaches you to win and to lose well in these situations.
6. Flexibility
Flexibility is a willingness to give up one action for another. Uncertainty is a fact of life. Know that there is no right path. There is an optimal path to the end state you are trying to achieve.
For each action you take, you must give up something. You must seek the optimal path in ambiguous situations, not the correct path. And you must calculate out the gain from that path, and the loss from not choosing other paths.
Of all six means of navigating ambiguity, flexibility relies heavily on doing the previous five reasonably well.
Conclusion
Congratulations! You have just learned how to think in ambiguous situations. Summary of the analysis above:
Find the end goal or define the desired end result.
Know what is within and outside of your control.
Positioning strategically and tactically.
Correct mental mindset and spirit — acceptance and commitment to the decisions you make.
Flexibility — the ability to the first 5, and decide which is the most optimal course of actions.
I hope the insights in this article will help you take appropriate actions towards navigating ambiguous situations.
Working with ambiguity is by no means an easy thing to do. It’s a process that we have to learn and relearn. With time, practice, experience, and focused reflection, anyone can learn to do it.
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