How to motivate your team and increase agility while navigating the unknown

Melinda Starkweather
March 24, 2021

Ambiguity can be the spike-strips on the road to productivity—especially if you’re running something as complicated, uncertain and expensive as an enterprise technology adoption.

Ambiguity intolerance is a common personality trait that increases fear and resistance in uncertain situations. If people don’t know the next step or series of steps, they hit the brakes.

The greater the need for cognitive closure (appropriate knowledge for the situation), the more stress the individual experiences (Iannelo, Mottini, Tirelli, 2017). This combination of discomfort, stress and fear can lead to more issues, including: decreased productivity, procrastination, passing the buck and inattention to details. Most people experience different degrees of intolerance to uncertainty – it’s just how we are built.

Keep your team rolling through uncertain patches by providing the information that you have. If a previously dependable activity becomes undependable, create the clarity you can. Update expectations, resources, roles, KPIs , responsibilities, tools or timelines.

Consider the type of uncertainty. It could be:

1. A completely novel situation.
2. A very complex situation with a confusing number of variables.
3. A seemingly unsolvable situation.

You may face a situation that is a combination of the above.

When providing clarifying information, use images to make next-steps more memorable and clear. People are much better at remembering images than words. Smaller, frequent updates are better than data dumps that are too big to follow.

If you don’t have information, let your staff know when to expect updates, and the types of information that will be clarified first. Situations with unknown variables are part of life, but by teaching yourself and your team some skills to handle these issues, you’ll create a more agile team that can motivate itself through ambiguity.

Your organization can minimize the negative influences of ambiguity intolerance by focusing on knowledge management as a tool for productivity. (Athanasios N. Tsirikas, 2012) Our Cirrus Change Team Readiness Assessment tool gathers analytics on several change-blockers, including ambiguity intolerance. Communication is almost always cited as an issue in previous technology adoptions that were handled poorly. When asked to elaborate, staff frequently complain that communication was insufficient and not specific enough.

As you plan your technology adoption, take the time to plan the information your team will need. Think about issues of knowledge capture, sharing, use, and review. Yes, it takes a little time and thought, but compared to decreased productivity, procrastination, passing the buck and inattention to details that can derail the project, it’s time well spent.

Melinda Starkweather is co-founder of Starkweather Association Services and developed the Cirrus Change Readiness platform. She is a coach and speaker on change management.