Sunday, February 24, 2008

Ambiguity Blogs


I have just done a Google search on the term Ambiguity Blog with interesting results. The top blog is one called 'Revel in Ambiguity' subtitled 'glory in the gaps', which I got quite excited about, until I opened the blog. To be fair it does indeed provide a lot of ambiguity - there isn't any! It is a blog of a newly married young woman who appears to be cooking her way to domestic bliss.
The next site 'Making sense of it all - Meow, doesn't appear as far as I can tell, to mention ambiguity or anything vaguely related to it. It contains the musings of a marketing guy who by the looks of his linkedin and face book profiles on the blog spends a fair amount of his life networking (well at the very least making links with a pile of other people). Surely networking is more than a million internet links to other peoples profiles. You are not even networking with the actual people. There is a guy who linked with my profile on Linked in when I had just started. When I looked at his profile he had over a million links! Networking? I think not, it's more like notworking.
Then comes a blog entitled Deliberate Ambiguity which sounded really interesting. It is sub titled ...'musings about philosophy, marketing and even the occasional taxidermy.' Oh Oh - another marketing bod - this time in braces and a tie. This blog is marketing first, marketing second and marketing third. My definition of philosophy must be way out of date.
The comes the Ambiguity Advantage blog - about ambiguity oddly.

That's it!

From there on in (in google) all the rest of the entries are from individual blog writings that mention the word ambiguity in some way, usually as a synonym for being uncertain.
May be people like the idea of ambiguity without having too much of it about. It might also say something about the ambiguity people feel in their lives and that the blogs are a way of disambiguating their lives. It's all a little vague, which isn't a bad place for it to be, maybe.

1 comment:

Bigbluesky said...

Hi there,

I have done the same search on the net, thats how i found your blog. I have to agree that there are very limited resource on this topic.

I dont know if you have heard many organisation which use ambiguity as a competency for a job or candidate selection criteria.The organization i work for certainly has a big focus on ambiguity in management and recruitment aspects.

While its important for staff to be ambiguous in certain situations, i found that management often mis-understood it and mis-used it, or used it as an excuse to avoid providing job clarification, target setting.It then lead to very low morale in the team.

I also think that too much focus on hiring staff base on biased opinion on whether a candidate is ambiguous isn't a healthy practice.

In terms of management, I do not believe that a company can tell customers to be ambiguous about future changes in service requirement or pricing. It happens though. The end result? Very unhappy customers.

I think though, ambiguity needs to be teamed with good communications for it to work. Somehow people will need to walk out of ambiguous situations by acquiring information to make an informed decision.

I am hoping what I wrote make sense to you.Its definitely nice to see someone out there is researching on this topic.I am quite sick of people quoting ambiguity instead of admitting their poor management practice!