Dealing with ambiguity is the part of VUCA managers understand least and meet most often. Volatility they accept, since everyone agrees the world moves quickly. Uncertainty they have learned to live with. Complexity they are starting to handle by working in groups. Ambiguity brings the two things any administrator detests, which are confusion and contradiction.
Most explanations of ambiguity get it wrong in the same way, by treating it as a shortage of information. Gather more, they say, and the fog will lift.
The opposite is usually true. Ambiguity frequently arrives with a surplus of information, because more detail creates more plausible readings of the same situation. Ask for more data in an ambiguous setting and you often make the situation harder to read rather than easier.
The frame I use is what I call the world of AND. We used to live in a world of OR, where a thing was one way or the other. We now live in a world where a thing and its opposite are true at the same time, and a contradiction has stopped being a puzzle to solve. It has become a conclusion to work with.
This article completes the four letters. It follows VUCA and the management of complexity, and the reference page for the cluster is my pillar on VUCA leadership and where decisions are made.
| The definition | The mistake it invites | The reframe that makes it workable |
|---|---|---|
| Dealing with ambiguity, definedDealing with ambiguity means leading when a situation supports several legitimate readings at once. VUCA ambiguity is the difficulty of interpreting meaning where contextual cues are insufficient to settle it. Cultural blindness, cognitive bias and a limited perspective all widen the range of defensible interpretations available to a leadership team. | Asking for more informationAmbiguity is commonly treated as a shortage of data, which leads teams to request further analysis before deciding. Additional detail frequently multiplies the plausible readings rather than narrowing them, so the methods that reduce uncertainty, such as planning and risk analysis, do not reduce ambiguity. | The world of ANDContradictory statements can both hold at the same time, which turns a contradiction from a puzzle to be solved into a conclusion to be worked with. A labour market can be tight and underemployed together, and a colleague can value their job and be actively looking, and both pairs describe one situation rather than an error. |
What VUCA ambiguity actually means
VUCA ambiguity describes a specific kind of uncertainty that arises from differences in interpretation, where contextual cues are insufficient to settle what something means. At a strategic level, leaders can legitimately read the same events in several ways, and the probability of misreading is high. The word ambiguity is itself ambiguous, which tells you something.
That is close to the original working definition, and it is the one I consider to have aged least well of the four. Let me say why, because the disagreement is productive.
Ambiguity is more than a sub-species of uncertainty
The original definition treats ambiguity as a type of uncertainty caused by poor context. Thirty years of events later, that reading is too narrow. Ambiguity now regularly appears where the context is entirely clear and the information is abundant, because the situation genuinely supports opposite conclusions.
Take the difference precisely. Uncertainty concerns what is not yet determined, such as the strategy a competitor will choose next.
Ambiguity concerns things that can carry several meanings at once. Why has that competitor not changed strategy during a major disruption. Because they judge they do not need to, because they do not know what to do, or because both are true in different parts of their business.
With uncertainty an event has a chance of occurring. With ambiguity the event has a full chance of occurring and so does its opposite, which is a different category of problem entirely.
Uncertainty is linear and ambiguity is cyclical
Uncertainty behaves predictably over the life of a project. It is high at the start when the team is working from assumptions and estimates, and it falls steadily as real data arrives, until at the end there is none left. Project managers are well equipped for that shape.
Ambiguity behaves differently and catches the same people out. It falls each time a decision is made and rises again as new questions appear, so it cycles rather than declines.
Ambiguity also rises with the number of available choices. A more complex environment offers more possible interactions, which offers more options, which widens the field of defensible interpretations.
This is why people trained to make rational decisions and focus on performance struggle here. Ambiguity asks for intuitive judgement and sustained sense-making, and neither appears in a standard project methodology.
Where ambiguity comes from when context is poor
The original definition names three causes of a badly read context, and all three remain useful. Cultural blindness, cognitive bias and a limited perspective each widen the range of readings a person will consider defensible, and each one operates without the person noticing.
Cultural blindness is the inability to see how your own traditions and values look to someone from a different culture, through rigid adherence to your own frame. It can be involuntary, through a lack of exposure, or deliberate, where the majority expects the minority to do the adapting.
Cognitive biases lead people to weight identical facts differently, and they show up when paradoxes or errors appear in otherwise sound reasoning. Some come from mental shortcuts under limited time, and others from the desire to protect a positive self-image or avoid holding two incompatible beliefs.
A limited perspective is the simplest of the three. Through a lack of curiosity, exposure or empathy, a person reads every situation through their own interests, which produces confident interpretations with a very narrow base.
The four levels of residual uncertainty that lead to real ambiguity
Residual uncertainty, the part that survives your best analysis, comes in four levels. A clear enough future, a set of alternative futures, a range of possibles, and true ambiguity. Each level supports a different strategy and a different process for building one, so identifying your level is the first practical act.
Most leadership teams assume they are at level one and behave accordingly, which is where the damage starts.
Levels one and two, a clear future and alternative futures
At level one a single view of the future is precise enough to build a strategy on, and the residual uncertainty does not prevent a decision. At level two, analysis cannot determine which of several distinct outcomes will occur, although it can attach probabilities to each.
A level one example is straightforward. A digital competitor enters your category, and you will either lose a segment or lose customers by missing the shift, so the options are visible even if the choice is hard.
Level two arrives with regulatory, legislative or competitive change. Anyone whose model depends on another organisation’s platform, licence or interface is at level two permanently, since their future rests on a strategy that belongs to somebody else.
At level two the important work is identifying the trigger events that signal which branch the industry is taking, so you know what to watch rather than what to predict.
Level three, a range of possibles
At level three there are no discrete scenarios, only a range of outcomes too broad to prepare for individually. This is the typical position of an organisation entering a market it has never operated in, where the best available research produces a wide band and no obvious point inside it.
Introducing a genuinely new product or service does the same thing, because latent demand cannot be measured before the thing exists to be wanted.
The analysis resembles level two, with one difference that matters. Building useful scenarios is much harder, since possible outcomes are easy to imagine and rarely provide concrete guidance for a decision you have to make this month.
Three rules keep it usable. Develop a small number of scenarios, since juggling more than four or five obstructs the decision rather than informing it. Make sure each scenario has genuinely distinct implications rather than describing the same world twice. And cover the likely range rather than the entire range of the conceivable.
Level four, true ambiguity
At level four the dimensions of uncertainty interact to create an environment that cannot be forecast at all. The range of potential outcomes cannot be identified, let alone the scenarios inside it, and it may not even be possible to name the variables that will define the future.
Analysis here is qualitative, and the temptation is to abandon it entirely and act on instinct. That is the wrong move, and it is the overestimation error I describe in the uncertainty article.
What leaders should do instead is catalogue what they know and what is knowable, and then keep looking. The specific danger at level four is stopping the search after identifying one clear trend, because a genuinely ambiguous environment usually contains the opposite trend running alongside it.
The same applies to explanations. Finding one good reason for a trend is not a reason to stop looking for the second one, which will often contradict the first and be equally true.
The world of AND, where a contradiction is a conclusion
The world of AND is my shorthand for an environment where a statement and its opposite both hold. We used to operate in a world of OR, where things were one way or the other. Recognising the shift changes what a contradiction means, turning it from a puzzle awaiting resolution into a finding you can plan around.
This is the single most useful idea I have to offer on ambiguity, and it takes about a minute to explain and a year to fully absorb.
What the world of AND looks like at work
Once you have the frame, examples appear everywhere in Australian working life. Each pair below would once have been an either or, and each pair now describes a single situation that two departments are usually managing separately without realising they are looking at the same thing.
- Employers report skills shortages, and capable people report struggling to find suitable work.
- Someone can hold a permanent job, and run their own small enterprise on the side.
- A person can be permanently connected, and disconnected from what is actually happening.
- A colleague can value the work, respect the manager and enjoy the organisation, and be actively looking elsewhere.
- Two businesses can compete hard in one market, and collaborate in another through a shared alliance.
Customers produce the same shape. They can expect a deeply personalised experience, and demand that their data be tightly protected, and both requests are entirely sincere.
I call that one the burger and diet soft drink order. It is not going to balance out, and treating it as an inconsistency to be corrected misses that the customer means both halves.
Why dealing with ambiguity breaks either or management
Management practice is built to resolve. Identify the problem, weigh the options, select one and commit. That sequence assumes the options are mutually exclusive, and in the world of AND they frequently are not, which turns the selection step into a false choice made confidently.
The consequence shows up as strategic thrashing. An organisation picks personalisation, gets criticised on privacy, picks privacy, gets criticised on relevance, and concludes that customers are irrational.
The alternative is prioritising and balancing rather than choosing. Which of these two do we lead with, by how much, for which segment, and what do we do to soften the cost to the other side.
That conversation is harder and slower than a decision, and it produces something a decision cannot, which is a position that survives contact with a contradictory market.
Trusting a single source becomes untenable
Three consequences follow from the world of AND, and this is the third. No single source of information and no single point of view can be relied on, because any one of them will capture one half of a two-sided situation and present it as the whole.
This is why I push clients towards primary sources and towards deliberately opposed readings of the same evidence. A second source that agrees with the first adds confidence without adding information.
It is also why mixed groups matter so much under ambiguity. A room where everyone shares a professional background will converge on one reading quickly and mistake that speed for clarity.
Put someone in the room whose job gives them a reason to see it differently, and protect their right to say so. The discomfort is the point.
The four sources of ambiguity in an organisation
Ambiguous situations come from four distinguishable sources. Ambiguity of goals, of mental models, of motives and of outcomes. Naming which one you are in matters, because each has a different remedy, and all four ultimately come from an inability to step back and see the situation whole.
I use these four as a diagnostic in workshops, and most teams recognise their own situation inside about ninety seconds.
Ambiguity of goals and of mental models
Ambiguity of goals comes from an organisation holding multiple targets at once, some functional and some political. Different people prioritise differently, driven by institutional imperatives such as growth and by personal ones such as advancement, and the result is a situation nobody can read cleanly.
This is the hardest of the four, and it is the one that most often masquerades as poor communication. Getting outside the organisation to talk to customers or outside experts helps, and it is easier to recommend than to schedule.
Ambiguity of mental models is different. It arises when you lack the frames needed to interpret what you are looking at, and it is invisible from the inside because you cannot miss what you have never had.
I have been caught by this personally, and expensively. Building a service offer while missing an entire body of knowledge about what competitors were already selling meant I could see my own product perfectly and could not see where it sat.
Ambiguity of motives and of outcomes
Ambiguity of motives comes from not knowing why the other parties are acting as they are. A lack of clarity about the motivations of stakeholders, from your own team through to your customers, produces significant dissonance, and it compounds badly when it sits on top of unclear goals.
The remedy is unglamorous. Ask directly and often, and treat the answer as provisional, since motives shift with circumstances and rarely get announced when they do.
Ambiguity of outcomes is the state where the range of possible results is unknown. It is closely associated with fear, and once fear enters an ambiguous situation, rationality departs and the situation deteriorates further.
That sequence is worth watching for as a manager, because it is observable. When people start defending positions rather than examining them, the ambiguity has stopped being intellectual and become emotional.
Novelty, the fifth source worth adding
To confusion and contradiction I add novelty, which is what happens when you meet a situation for the first time and no precedent exists to decide from. The absence of experience and comparable data removes any possibility of a logical prediction, so the decision has to be made on something else entirely.
That something else is the part many organisations still treat as unserious. Creativity, imagination and intuition get described as soft, unprofessional or unsuitable for a board paper.
Under genuine novelty they are the only instruments available, since analysis requires a prior case and there is not one. A leadership culture that refuses to legitimise them will simply delay until the situation stops being novel, which usually means until a competitor has defined it.
The practical move is to name the source out loud in the room. Saying that this is a genuinely new situation, so the usual evidence will not arrive, gives everyone permission to reason differently rather than to keep asking for a business case that cannot be built.
It also protects the people in the room. A team told to be rigorous about something unprecedented will conclude that it is failing, when what it is actually meeting is a source of ambiguity nobody named.
Field note
A good answer to a bad question
When I launched my recruitment and engagement consultancy in Sydney, I went months without a single client. I had a clear proposition, I could present it well, and nothing happened. Then I met the human resources director of an electronics manufacturer, who listened to the whole pitch patiently and said one sentence I have never forgotten. You are bringing a good answer to a bad question.
It took me a while to work out what he meant, because I was in confusion rather than disagreement. He did not want curricula vitae built on past experience to fill empty chairs. He wanted people prepared to question themselves and support a culture of continuous innovation. I was offering skills, and he was asking for something considerably more ambiguous to find, which was a mindset. The contradiction sat inside his own organisation too, since his recruitment process screened for demonstrated experience while his strategy needed people who wanted to do something they had not done before.
When a well-built offer keeps failing, check whether you are answering the question that was asked. Ambiguity of mental models is invisible from inside, so the fastest way to find it is to let someone outside your organisation tell you what you are missing, and to resist explaining why they are wrong.
What ambiguity does to managers, and the duty that now attaches in Australia
Ambiguity puts managers in a position they were never trained for, holding confusion and contradiction at once while being expected to provide clarity to others. Low role clarity is a named psychosocial hazard under Australian work health and safety law, which means unresolved ambiguity has stopped being purely a leadership challenge and become a regulated risk.
Take the two components separately, because they hurt differently.
Confusion, and management by fog
Confusion comes from the manager’s own change of posture, moving from commander to facilitator while nobody has told them what is coming next. Executives themselves are often navigating by sight, so the information arrives late, partial and subject to revision, and the manager passes that experience downwards.
There is a recognised bad practice that looks identical from the outside, sometimes called management by confusion. A team is kept in the dark, responsibilities are left undefined, information is released at the last minute and priorities change several times a week.
The difference matters. That behaviour used to be a deliberate style, on the old logic that holding information meant holding power.
Today the same symptoms are usually produced by the environment rather than by the manager, which changes the remedy entirely. Punishing the manager for the fog achieves nothing when the fog is arriving from outside the building.
Contradiction, and the paradoxical instructions it produces
Contradiction leaves managers unable to choose cleanly between the imperatives of their role, because the job has stopped being about choosing and become about prioritising and balancing missions that appear incompatible. The instructions that result are genuinely paradoxical, and they are experienced daily by people who assume the problem is them.
The familiar set will be recognisable to any Australian manager. Build a collective and manage individual needs. Conform to the culture and encourage initiative. Show empathy and be obeyed. Be innovative and stay aligned. And be stable inside constant change.
Two structural problems make it worse. Many managers are appointed without initial or ongoing training, so they meet these paradoxes with no framework at all.
And managerial techniques accumulate in layers, since a new style arrives without the previous ones departing. Managers end up holding practices from several eras at once, some of which no longer match the organisation’s stated values.
Role clarity as a regulated duty
Australian work health and safety law names low role clarity among the psychosocial hazards a business must manage, meaning unclear responsibilities and conflicting expectations. Ambiguity in the environment is not a hazard, and ambiguity left unmanaged inside role design and instructions is, which is a distinction leaders can act on.
Safe Work Australia’s model code requires businesses to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, applying the same risk management steps used for physical hazards.
Read against everything above, this produces a workable line for a leadership team. You are not required to remove ambiguity from the market, and you are required to make sure your own instructions, priorities and responsibilities do not add to it.
Two things must therefore never be ambiguous, whatever the environment does. Your values and their translation into managerial behaviour, and the immediate objectives and priorities of each person in the team.
The biases that stop a manager acting
Managerial audacity means committing without holding all the information, and accepting in advance that the decision may fail. Several well-documented cognitive biases work against it, and naming them is useful, because a manager who can name the bias operating on them has already weakened it.
Four appear most often in the rooms I work in.
- Self-serving bias, the tendency to claim credit for successes and attribute failures to unfavourable external factors.
- Hindsight bias, the tendency to overstate how predictable an event was once it has happened.
- Conformity bias, the tendency to think and act the way the people around you do.
- The illusion of control, the tendency to believe you have more influence over a situation than you actually hold.
Hindsight bias does the most organisational damage, because it is applied to other people. A decision that looks obviously wrong afterwards was rarely obvious at the time, and reviewing it as though it were teaches everyone watching to wait longer next time.
So review decisions on the information available when they were made rather than on the outcome. It costs nothing, it takes one sentence at the start of the review, and it is the single most effective thing I know for building the confidence to act under ambiguity.
Write the intent that settles the contradiction
Want your team to resolve a paradoxical instruction without escalating it? Use my method for writing an intent that names what may be sacrificed, set out step by step in the pillar article on VUCA leadership, and give your managers something to decide with.
Clarity, scenarios or managerial audacity, what to invest in against ambiguity
Three investments get made against ambiguity and they address different layers. Clarity work removes the ambiguity you generate yourself, scenario planning handles the ambiguity that comes from the outside, and building managerial audacity develops the capacity to act while the ambiguity remains. Most organisations need the first and buy the third.
The table below is written for someone deciding where a budget goes rather than for someone building a theory.
Comparing the three investments on explicit criteria
Start from the symptom column and be honest about which one your people would name if asked anonymously. The maturity column matters here more than in the other letters, because audacity cannot be trained into an organisation that punishes reversible mistakes.
| Investment | What it changes | Symptom it fits | Managerial maturity required | What it leaves unfixed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity of intent, roles and priorities | Removes the ambiguity the organisation generates about itself | Contradictory instructions, unclear ownership and constant escalation | Medium, needs executives willing to name what may be sacrificed | External ambiguity, which continues exactly as before |
| Scenario planning and trigger watching | Turns an unreadable environment into a small set of watchable branches | Every external shift is argued about and nothing is decided | Medium to high, needs discipline to revisit scenarios when triggers fire | Level four situations, where the outcomes cannot be listed at all |
| Managerial audacity and decision confidence | Builds the capacity to commit while the ambiguity remains | Capable managers freeze until complete information arrives | High, and it fails outright where reversible mistakes are punished | Nothing about the underlying contradictions, which stay in place |
One caution about the third row. Encouraging audacity in an organisation that has not made mistakes survivable produces a small number of brave people who get burned publicly, after which nobody volunteers again.
The signals that tell you which one to fund first
Ask one question of your managers. When you received contradictory priorities last month, what did you do. If they escalated, fund clarity. If they argued about which external scenario was coming, fund scenario work. And if they knew what to do and waited anyway, fund the conditions for audacity rather than the training.
Notice the wording of the third case, because it is deliberate. Audacity is rarely a skills gap.
It is usually a correct reading of the incentives, since a manager who has watched a colleague penalised for a reasonable decision that went wrong is behaving rationally by waiting.
So change what happens after a reversible mistake before you send anyone on a course about confidence. The demonstration is worth more than the curriculum.
How I can help you manage VUCA ambiguity
I work with executive teams, boards and manager communities on leading through ambiguity, in English and in French. Each format below is designed around the same idea, which is that the useful work is naming the contradictions plainly rather than pretending a clean answer exists and will arrive shortly.
Keynotes on leading in the world of AND
I speak on VUCA ambiguity at conferences, leadership offsites and industry summits, built around the world of AND because audiences recognise their own situation in it immediately. The talk lands best when it closes with each table writing the contradiction they have been trying to resolve and have not been able to.
Sessions run from a short keynote to a half day with facilitated work between segments, and details sit on my page on managing in a VUCA world.
Workshops on intent, role clarity and decision confidence
Over a half day or two days we write the intent statement that settles your live contradictions, map where role clarity has quietly degraded, and rehearse decisions taken with deliberately incomplete information. Teams leave with a written intent that names what may be sacrificed.
The unlearning work runs alongside it, since holding two true opposites requires letting go of the belief that one of them must be wrong. That thread continues in my work on unlearning what we know.
Diagnostics and manager communities
For organisations where managers are visibly carrying the contradictions on behalf of everyone else, I run a short diagnostic on where ambiguity is being generated internally and where it genuinely arrives from outside. The output separates the two and puts an owner against the first list.
I then support the manager community through the change, because these are the people most exposed and least likely to say so. Cross-functional range helps them hold several readings at once, which is the argument behind the T-shaped expert generalist.
Conclusion: dealing with ambiguity means moving before the fog lifts
Ambiguity rests on the gap between imprecise expectations and contradictory demands, and the trap is waiting for the situation to clarify itself. It will not. Moving into the fog is how you find out what is in it.
Notice that the tools built to reduce uncertainty will not help you here. Work breakdown structures, planning and risk analysis all assume that more detail brings more clarity, and under ambiguity more detail frequently produces another defensible reading.
So the practice is different. Understand the field of ambiguity around you, hold enough confidence to avoid transmitting your own doubt to everyone else, and accept that saying you do not know yet is a stronger position than a confident answer that turns out to be half of a two-sided truth.
Then protect the two things that must stay clear. Your values translated into behaviour, and each person’s immediate objectives, responsibilities and priorities. Those are inside your control, and in Australia keeping them clear is part of a regulated duty rather than a nicety.
Everything else can stay contradictory, and it probably will. Learning to work with two opposite truths at the same time, rather than waiting for one of them to lose, is the whole practice of dealing with ambiguity.
Frequently asked questions about dealing with ambiguity
What does the A in VUCA stand for?
The A stands for ambiguity, meaning the difficulty of interpreting what something means when the context supports several legitimate readings. VUCA ambiguity is the last letter of the acronym because it depends on the other three, arriving once volatility, uncertainty and complexity have blurred the picture.
What is the difference between ambiguity and uncertainty?
Uncertainty means an event has a chance of happening. Ambiguity means the event and its opposite can both be true at once. Uncertainty falls as information arrives, while ambiguity can rise with more information, since additional detail creates additional plausible interpretations.
How do you manage ambiguity as a leader?
Dealing with ambiguity starts by prioritising between the two halves of a contradiction rather than trying to resolve it. Write an intent that states what may be sacrificed when objectives collide, keep values and individual priorities unambiguous, and accept that saying you do not know yet is stronger than a confident half answer.
Why does more information sometimes make things worse?
In a complex setting, requesting more information can add complexity rather than clarity, because each additional input can be read several ways. This is why planning, work breakdown and risk analysis reduce uncertainty effectively and do very little for ambiguity.
Is unclear role definition a legal issue in Australia?
Low role clarity, meaning unclear responsibilities and conflicting expectations, is a named psychosocial hazard under Australian work health and safety law. Businesses must eliminate or minimise those risks so far as is reasonably practicable, which places internally generated ambiguity inside a regulated duty.
