Latest / Humanity Working / The Curse of Ambiguity

Transcript

The Curse of Ambiguity · Humanity Working

• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: All right, Paul, you've said ambiguity isn't just annoying, it's dangerous.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and it's dangerous and inevitable, I guess, is the is is the most interesting thing about it.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: So what I mean by that is that work is obviously, as we've mentioned many, many times before, becoming more unstructured and ambiguous.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, enabled by technology.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: It basically means if you if you live in a in a fast changing world where where the work environments need to adapt and adjust to external circumstances, where various black swan events happen happen frequently, you're gonna design all your or your systems and you're gonna design many of your roles so that they are highly flexible.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: What that tends to result in is that work tends to be ambiguous in nature.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the inevitable part of it.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: But the dangerous part of it is probably uh just as important.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: In most cases, people are just not wired or equipped to navigate the ambiguity and uncertainty.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: And what that translates to is people having, in many cases, like a form of low-level burnout because we've seen this a lot in our work at billion minds, because ambiguity translates for many people to being deeply unsure of what success looks like in their role.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: So on a day-to-day basis, they're unaware of whether they're being successful or not.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I mentioned this before a couple of years ago on the pod, actually, we did a we did a a very, very simple test with some people in some knowledge workers inside a tech company.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: And we asked them one simple question, which is what did you do today?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: And a good proportion were unable to name a single thing they'd done that day.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: So it's translating into a world whereby we're just doing some stuff, yeah, and then we're forgetting what we did.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_02: So that clearly in those circumstances, there's no connection to purpose, there's no connection to anything.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_02: And you're just sort of existing in the workplace, and that relate that results in stress, burnout, all those kind of nasty things that we don't want in the workplace.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I wonder if not having a pile of finished things subconsciously really messes with you, you know?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think it does.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um there was do you remember that show Dirty Jobs?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember who the I can't remember the guy who hosted that.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Mike, Mike something.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was, wasn't it?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember seeing an interview with him, and uh it might have been with Colbert, but I was he it he the interview was really interesting because they he said one of the things that he observed about those jobs is how often people that do in quotes dirty jobs actually have reasonably high job satisfaction.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_02: And what he attributed it to was that the job in the vast majority of cases with those jobs, let's uh the the job itself is very clear, it's very unambiguous, and the results in most cases are extremely visible.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: So let's say your job is to clean the streets, right?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: When you start, the streets are dirty.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: When you finish, the streets are clean.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: So you can see the results of your actions.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: And seeing the results of your actions is actually something that is associated very strongly with people being satisfied with their work.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not not a ton of that in knowledge work.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh obviously, you could go and check your email stats and see how many emails you sent this week.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but yeah, it's very, very interesting.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: So it's yeah, and it's not immediately visible.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like the old school information worker with the in tray and the outray, and at the end of the day, the x-ray was big and your in-tray was little.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: That was doing something.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I'm not saying we should go back to that, but it was doing something.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it's that's very interesting.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like managing ambiguity because it's you have to deal with so much of it to exist, but eliminate it because it makes you not feel as good about your work.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a crazy balance.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: I worked in when I was at Microsoft, I worked in a team called the Applied Incubation Team.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_02: It later became the Applied Innovation Team.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: And we lived in this, we lived in a world of enormous amount of ambiguity, way more than in even other parts of Microsoft.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_02: Because even though even though what we were going to do was changing every few weeks, um, the why we would do it would often change as uh would often change as well.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so kind of like keeping on top of that and behaving um in a uh and living well in that ambiguous world, um it taught me, I think, two very, very important lessons.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: One is that if you do live in a very ambiguous environment, it can become an excuse for having ambiguity everywhere, even including places where you don't need it.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: It can become an excuse, for example, for not managing a project well.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: It can become an excuse for uh not clearly defining what deliverables are or who's working on something, or when something is due, or any of those things.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: And you ex-and if you're not careful, you can excuse all of that.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so what I and that's very damaging.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, it will lead to the team performing, underperforming, and all that kind of stuff.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: So what you have to do, particularly when you're in an in an unstructured, ambiguous environment, is you've got to find all the stuff that does not need to be ambiguous and make sure that it is not, right?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: And then at the same time, be able to tolerate it.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: So we used to say that the mindset needs to be I I'm comfortable living in ambiguity, but at the same time, I dislike it and want to eliminate it.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Those are the sort of thing, the kind of two things that you have to hold in your head at the same time in order to be able to kind of like deal with all the gray areas of work.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's so interesting.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: I literally just posted to my team this week uh about being comfortable operating in gray for a while because we're not going to have black and white for a while.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta get comfortable in this, but you're absolutely right.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's like while we're doing that, we also need to give people something to hold on to.
• 7:06
  unknown: Yeah.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it doesn't just help them, as I say, it's also associated with performance, right?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, these are that there are reasons why we measure things and why we manage things and why we uh and why we have definable goals and all of this kind of stuff.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's reasons why we do that.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: And new th newer mechanisms like OKRs and things like that, they do help us with this type of stuff.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but they're but they're not a cure-all, right?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen OKRs being used as though the ex just the existence of them, um, which is objectives and key results for people that are not familiar with, as though just the existence of them or the existence of stand-ups or the existence of sprints, that in its own right is going to allow you to be able to manage and navigate this uncertainty.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that's absolutely not true.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't have the right culture and the right approach to the work that you're doing, those frameworks are nothing other than empty frameworks.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: But once you combine them with the right mindset and the right skill set of the people in the organization, then they can be very powerful.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a it's a combination.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I mean, it's a tough one because you know how can leaders help move that along and make sure that that's getting in there because it does rely on the on the on the teams, but the leaders have to be able to support it.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's I think it's really two things.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um so first is like simplifying what you measure and measuring it, right?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: So simplify and so and by measuring, I mean every every aspect of that, like measuring, reporting, acting on, all that kind of stuff, right?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so determine what's going to be, what can be managed, what will be managed, and measure it consistently and measure it well.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but then as you do that, then you need to really work on those durable skills of adaptability and self-direction and so on.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: And you you give people training on how to live uh well within that ambiguity.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: And it's that specific type of durable skills programming that is really gonna help with that.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a that's a tough one.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's a really interesting one.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, more to come uh on that one, I'm sure.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And uh appreciate it.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Good episode, Paul.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: All right, thanks.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced and edited for Billion Minds by Matt Neal.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you like this podcast, please subscribe, like, and recommend us to others.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: It helps us reach more people.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to learn more about how Billion Minds gets companies ready for the future of work by building adaptable, resilient employees, look for them on LinkedIn or visit their website at billionminds.com.