Resolving Ambiguity

Many leaders fail badly at this responsibility, announcing ambitious goals without resolving a good chunk of ambiguity about the specific obstacles to overcome.  

A good proximate objectives feasibility does wonders for organizational energy and focus.  One of the most vexing problems facing the team considering putting man on the moon was not knowing what the lunar surface was made of.   The moon might be soft powdery residue from eons of meteoric bombardment or it might be a made of needle sharp crystals or a jumble of large boulders.  All of these possibilities created a difficult time for the engineers creating the design for the landing craft.

Phyllis Buwalda who directed Future Mission Studies described the surface as hard and grainy with slopes of no more than fifteen degrees based on her intuition that the smoother parts of the earth were like that, so it was a good guess that the moon would be similar.  Even though she really didn't know what the surface was like, she realized the engineers could not work without a specification.  Her specification was a strategically chosen proximate objective that helped the engineers move the project along.  Her specification helped absorb much of the ambiguity in the situation, passing on to the designers a simpler problem. 

Phyllis's insight that the engineers can't work without a specification applies to most organized human effort.  Every organization faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting.  An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passing on to the organization a simpler problem--one that is solvable.  Many leaders fail badly at this responsibility, announcing ambitious goals without resolving a good chunk of ambiguity about the specific obstacles to overcome.  

ACTION POINT: To take responsibility is more than a willingness to accept the blame.  It is setting proximate objectives and handing the organization a problem it can actually solve.