Sometimes there’s no clear way forward on projects. Despite what the project plans and Gantt charts say. Aren’t we drawn to the feeling of certainty from our plans? This certainty shows where and when pieces of the puzzle neatly fall into place. But what about missing puzzle pieces?
- Unclear or conflicting understandings of how things currently work (the current state)
- Difficulty on getting data for change impact assessments
- No future state system to provide an assuring, tangible concept
- Subject matter experts reluctant to help out.
- Impending deadlines
- Unrealistic or contradictory expectations from project sponsor or other decision-makers
- Inter-team conflict or intra-team conflict
- Shifting deadlines
- Evolving deployment strategies
- Uncertainty about funding and resourcing
- Slow or little progress — on completed deliverables, decisions made, feelings of team accomplishment
Two longer-term ambiguity busters
Build your ambiguity-tolerance ‘muscles’ with graded exposure
Some people cope better than others with ambiguity on projects. Others have an Achille’s Heel — one form of ambiguity which hits a nerve. Others have become battle-hardened to these loose ends. They may have cultivated their sense of humour and laugh at yet another ambiguity. Others may have a character suited to (or oblivious to) loose ends. Yet a few others have had an apprenticeship in learning to let go. Can you let go of needing to know the outcome for everything? Are you comfortable with making decisions in the face of complete, structured data?
I had the pleasure of learning from a Program Director in a Change community gathering one day. This accomplished leader told our group, “The higher up you go, the more you need to let go.”
Are these “loose ends” stressful? Maybe not. Stress can be positive and may spur us to action. But strain is the damage caused by prolonged levels of distress. At work, this distress can result from boredom or a crushing workload. But what about strain from your difficulty in coping with loose ends or problems? Your feeling of strain is likely to sap your energy and resolve. With low energy and resolve, will you want to stay on your project? Will the experience sap your professional confidence? So how do we manage strain from uncertainty?
Graded exposure is one way forward.
Think of graded exposure as a cycle.
- Make a deliberate choice to expose yourself to increasingly difficult and ambiguous situations.
- Celebrate your accomplishments once you manage or overcome each challenge.
- Don’t beat yourself up if you run from a challenge or fall back into previous habits.
- Be cool with failure.
- Try to rest between challenges.
It takes time to build character, and graded exposure is work.
Your graded exposure cycle is a virtuous circle. Each completed cycle builds your resistance to feelings of strain from ambiguity. It’s not easy, and you need to tolerate discomfort. Is your discomfort during each cycle more painful as not trying at all?
“People learn that when they are exposed to a particular stimulus, they feel fearful and their anxiety rises. If they allow themselves to accept this feeling, despite exposure to the fearful stimulus their anxiety will eventually subside and they will feel better. It involves incremental exposure.” ¹
Adam Ferrier, Consumer Psychologist and author of The Advertising Effect: How to Change Behaviour, pg. 182.
How do we know if we have overcome a challenge within our graded exposure? You will find yourself at peace with the challenge. Or you don’t care what others think — not in an arrogant and rigid way, but a more peaceful, flexible way. Something that seemed insurmountable becomes a little more comfortable. Some challenges are foisted upon us. Great — one less challenge you need to seek out, or plan for.
Challenges vary in intensity and are personal. You will grow from each on-the-job challenge. Treat each as an experiment — a short-term discomfort, but durable learning experience.
For some of us, this might have been delivering that presentation. Disciplining or terminating a direct report. Supporting mercurial, even abusive leadership. Operating for months with funding uncertainty. Weeks of pressure - go-live activity, all on your shoulders. Creating a complex “change system” of several employees and software applications. Testing your “change system” with thousands of people. Waiting for a union decision which may break the resources you have to support a change. Navigating complex political situations in a crummy project environment. What challenges faced by change professionals are the hardest to face? It may be the challenges of a Change Director role for a major program. Or particular working environments or operating tempos?
Graded exposure has a strong scientific basis. But there’s an unseen brilliance even before your first graded exposure. Even thinking about your deliberate choice of challenges instils a sense of purpose.
Your mastery of career-related challenges will build your confidence, along with your purpose. Some unexpected problems can be seen as this — challenges, not threats. What you can tolerate and adapt to is amazing. People are more adaptable than they give themselves credit for! You can operate in projects with an incredible amount of stressors, strains and “loose ends”. With experience and confidence, you might see these problems as something interesting to occupy your mind. All without undue duress. An interesting configuration of chess pieces on the latest project “chess board”. And change professionals should be comfortable with change, right?
Take out your compass to navigate
As I write this, my son is on a Scouts camp where he is learning survival skills. I think of this as I’m about to discuss using a compass to help you navigate. Sure, a compass is useful when we are in the bush and can’t for the life of us find our way back to civilisation. You have a compass (of sorts) at work. Your principles and values. What do you stand for? What convictions do you have which are strong and clear enough? Are you prepared to make enemies, or make a stand, for these principles and values?
For a change professional, your values may be intertwined with your personal strengths. For example, your strength may be a love of learning and helping others. This might translate into your change practice: distilling complex concepts for others. Another strength may be kindness, or bravery. These may translate into values like going the extra mile to support employees. Or by taking a stand and speaking out when others might not. Scratch that last one — that may not be a strength.. it might be stupidity.
Do you set behavioural change objectives for stakeholders involved in your change? Even if there are hundreds or thousands of them? A concrete goal helps ground your thinking despite delays, surprises and other ambiguities. These behavioural objectives can be your “true north”. Your change objectives should stand firm. They shouldn’t bend to the whims of changing project circumstances.
One form of ambiguity may be rounds of useless meetings. Or administrivia which serves no purpose at all. In the face of another meeting request, be ruthless. Will the time spent translate to you achieving your objectives? Will it help make change easier for your hundreds or thousands of people you are serving? Does the time help your project team? No? There is an answer to this seemingly benign form of ambiguity. Busywork and non-critical path activities are a distraction. You might take on work that benefits both your project team and your objectives. In this case, by all means, go for it if you have the time.
Does the act of establishing behavioural change objectives provide you a greater sense of purpose?
Enhanced your purpose, and reduced your feeling of ambiguity? Good.
Attend to many spinning plates
One of the greatest things about being a change professional is the variety. So you have cleared your mind about a particular ambiguity? With a clearer mind, attend to the variety of tasks (or “spinning plates”) in your change practice. Depending on your seniority, you may be responsible for some or all aspects of your project’s change practice. This may include:
- Training needs analysis
- Stakeholder “hearts and minds” work
- Playing with a new system training environment (for those of us in system implementations)
- Benefits realization analysis
- Delivering training
- Updating project deliverable status reports
- Change planning and assessment
- Conducting user experience research
- Drafting communications for an intranet site
And if you’re moving between these tasks, always ask yourself:
How is this effort moving me closer to my behavioural change objectives?
It doesn’t matter what you’re working on, or changes to your circumstance you’ve got something to work towards. A sense of purpose — and progress — helps put back the mental equilibrium you need to overcome strain from ambiguity.
Ask dumb questions, and explore assumptions
Another way to deal with ambiguity is to clearly define what you know and what you don’t know.
Write your assumptions as a first step to parking loose ends floating around in your mind. You can then systematically investigate a lot of these assumptions. Check your understanding of these loose ends with your team. No doubt your project team’s risks and issues register could be updated as a result!
Once each “loose end” has a place, does this step remove some of your feelings of ambiguity? The act of “asking dumb questions” can help cement your team’s direction. This is especially the case if you all feel you’re losing your way.
And what if you still feel you have lost your way?
Spend time with the employees and customers you serve. Going “back to basics” with employees and customers can help transform your project team’s mindset. Project professionals are often guilty of spending most of their time away from the customers and employees they serve. Or they interact with a small subset of the community they serve — usually people at “Head Office”. At the very least, excursions like this might help you confirm your change objectives through exposure to “the real world”.
Examining your project from yet another angle may identify causes of ambiguity. Boston Consulting Group consultants derived a useful Change Management metric: the DICE score ².
Our initial 225-company study revealed a consistent correlation between the outcomes (success or failure) of change programs and four hard factors: project duration, particularly the time between project reviews; performance integrity, or the capabilities of project teams; the commitment of both senior executives and the staff whom the change will affect the most; and the additional effort that employees must make to cope with the change. We called these variables the DICE factors because we could load them in favor of projects’ success.
- Harold Sirkin, Perry Keenan and Alan Jackson, The hard side of Change Management, Harvard Business Review
Sirkin, Keenan and Jackson then applied the DICE model to over one thousand change initiatives ². DICE may help predict project outcomes. Using a framework like DICE it may remove some of your feeling of ambiguity. Do you have low DICE scores in certain areas of your project? Low DICE scores may confirm your suspicions. Quantifying these aspects may attract support from project leadership. The DICE score is one of many change-related metrics available. PROSCI have tools to help you break down project-related factors ³. Change readiness assessment data may also be helpful.
Recap
Gradual exposure to increasingly ambiguous project situations is uncomfortable. Tolerating this discomfort can be a useful part of your professional development.
A sense of the unknown or lack of inspiration may be overwhelming or draining. Regaining your sense of focus and purpose help diminish any resulting feelings of strain or discomfort . Deliberate practice can pay off here. You can grow to be more “at peace” with loose ends. Curious, rather than stressed out about conflicting situations. And adaptable to projects operating at an uncomfortable tempo. Learning to let go of unhelpful, yet comforting habits and mindsets release you to strive for more responsibilities in projects… or enhanced quality of your working life.
Set your “change goals” for your stakeholders. Use these goals as your compass, helping set a stronger sense of purpose in you and your team.
With a renewed purpose, attend to the many spinning plates of your change practice. Take the initiative and investigate many assumptions about your project with your team. You could take things a step further by conducting project-wide research. Providing quantified areas of improvement may wield greater influence with project decision-makers.
Your call to action
Which of these steps you have learned resonate with you? Why?
Can you apply these ambiguity-reducing methods in your current project, or add to your change “toolkit”?
My book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out my online course on Change Management.
References
1. Ferrier A. The Advertising Effect. South Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Oxford University Press; 2014.
2. Sirkin HL, Keenan P, Jackson A. The Hard Side of Change Management. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2005/10/the-hard-side-of-change-management?referral=03758&cm_vc=rr_item_page.top_right. Published 2005. Accessed October 31, 2020.
3. Project Change Triangle Model (PCT) Overview. Prosci.com. https://www.prosci.com/resources/articles/project-change-triangle-overview. Accessed November 30, 2020.