Managing Ambiguity
Geek work is plagued by ambiguity and uncertainty, and this can have a strong negative impact on the work, the team, and the stakeholders. Managing this ambiguity (and its perception) is a critical skill for the leader in an IT environment.
What Is Ambiguity?
Ambiguity is the opposite of clarity and certainty. Something may be ambiguous because you don't fully understand it, have incomplete information, don't understand its implications, or are completely unaware of it.
In most business operations, things are known, or there is at least a pretty good basis for estimation based on similar precedent.
Meanwhile, Geek work is about discovery - discovering the (unknown) solution to a (vaguely defined) problem requires investigation, testing assumptions, and doing things that you're not certain will actually work. When a task begins, the answer is completely unknown, and even the question is questionable.
The Nature of Ambiguity
The author categorizes ambiguity into three kinds:
- Environmental - This includes uncertainty about the "big picture," and how things fit together
- Structural - Encompasses a range of questions about the immediate phenomenon and the other elements that are tangent to it
- Task - Encompasses the ways in which a specific task must (or can) be performed to achieve a desired outcome
Leaders tend to focus more on the environmental level of ambiguity: the geeks themselves deal with the task and its surrounding structure, but leave the task of dealing with the external factors to their leader.
Mainly, external ambiguity deals with the importance of the work being done by the geeks and the organization, industry, market, and sociopolitical culture in which that work is being done. If the work is not meaningful in one or more of these contexts, then it's a waste of time and resources (and is likely to be put to a stop).
Managing Environmental Ambiguity
Managing this ambiguity often means mitigating it: help the geeks to understand the environment, and help those in the environment understand the geeks. The challenge is often that neither cares about the other, and would generally prefer to disregard it entirely.
CLASS="en">EN: The author becomes very vague and general at this point, begins repeating things that have been said before, and uses anecdotes to suggest what he means. I don't think he's quite got a handle on this.