I’ve had 4 consecutive days of team building with different organizations and groups, and at some point, each one of the four touched on the importance of dealing with ambiguity in a meaningful way.
In the first session, I frustrated a handful of very bright individuals by not giving them the agenda for our talk ahead of time. In the second, a not-for-profit Board discussed the challenges of holding conversations that could—at any moment—become fundraising solicitations, referrals, recruiting opportunities, or introductions. With an executive team, we walked through a model for handling internal politics. And today, with a delegation from a company’s internal HR group, I led a discussion on interviewing job candidates in which we discussed how to compare candidates when using open ended questions that yield a wide range of answers.
The common element I saw was that people—no surprise here—avoid ambiguity when they can. More interesting was that even in a conversation about ambiguity, some individuals struggled with the concept… I was asked by several people for a more structured approach to learning how to handle ambiguity. My facilitating style is to set up the “classroom” as a real-time experiment, so in a session on ambiguity, I tend to be less directive than I am with other topics, and I just found the desire for more structure in a discussion about ambiguity to be, in a word, ironic!
I’m interested in others’ experiences here: I often struggle when preparing sessions in finding that “magic balance” between providing enough structure to convey the concepts on the one hand, and providing enough opportunity to struggle so that participants can experience the concepts and the models for themselves on the other. Go too far with the structure, and I find that no real learning occurs—the lessons are not internalized. Go too far the other way, however, and participants don’t have enough material to connect the dots. I know there is temptation to simply put everything out there, because people will feel like they’re learning and will rate the session highly and will leave smiling, thus creating opportunities to come back and finish the job at a future date. Then there is another part of me that says my job isn’t to get high scores for myself, it’s to help people unlock their expertise, and my feeling is that spoon fed lessons are like candy bars: they feel good in the moment but leave behind nothing of substance.
Especially with the topic of “handling ambiguity,” I find the balance tough to strike; in fact, I often don’t know until well after the session has closed if I found it or not.
Am I alone in experiencing this struggle?
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Hey Jason,
I informally follow the 4MAT system in structuring those sorts of learning experiences. That way you make sure you address each learning style so participants don’t get frustrated, yet you still allow for the real learning and application to occur. You can google “4MAT for instructional design” and find enough information on it to see how it flows. It has defintely helped me make sure I achieve that balance, no matter what the topic. Hope that helps…