The psychology of Ambiguity 1: Cognitive Dissonance

How do you react when faced with something that you don't understand and appears to conflict with what you already believe or understand to be the case? 

I was recently working alongside some emergency service leaders during a live incident (live coaching). One leader (Silver) was faced with a sudden and unexpected crowd of people moving into an enclosed area within which an operation was was taking place. As far as everyone had been informed this area was secure and no one, let alone a crowd should have been able to access it.  The commander on the ground (Bronze) informed Silver (our leader) that approximately 40-50 youths had entered area without warning and the officers on the operation were facing public order situation on top of the existing operation that they were trying to execute. The Bronze commander asked Silver if they should abort the operation as they were heavily outnumbered. 

The Silver commander, who had planned the operation realised that if they withdrew they were unlikely to be able to go back at a later date and execute the operation. In short the operation would fail. 

He decided to order that the officers on the ground should continue as planned. 

This is a classic case of the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance occurring in an unexpected ambiguous situation.  

Cognitive dissonance occurs when there is a discrepancy between what a person believes, knows and or values and external evidence that is contrary or calls into question their internal beliefs, knowledge, experience or values.

This discrepancy between the internal and external state creates psychological and emotional discomfort, or dissonance. The mind then works to adjusts inorder to reduce the discrepancy and create order out of ambiguity. In many cases it does this by ignoring or reducing the importance of the external data and going with their existing beliefs, knowledge, experience or values as occurred in this situation. 

Such a reaction maintains the principal known as cognitive consistency and reduces the cognitive dissonance. This is a typical reaction to ambiguity, especially under stress. 

The outcome of the above situation is that the Bronze commander followed orders, the incident got out of hand, the operation failed badly and a number of officers and youths were injured, 4 seriously. 

Only one route?

Decisions and results

Everything we do is a decision, whether it is a conscious decison or not it is still a decision. Doing nothing or doing something else is also a decision.

Every decision we make whether it is conscious or by default, changes what is going to happen next and therefore is going to have an impact on whatever the outcome will be.

Complex? We have only just got started.

Now think about everybody else making decisions and how they interact and create emergent properties and situations. The current financial situation is one such emergent situation. No one (I hope) planned for this to be the outcome and yet it occurred - as a result of a complex matrix of decisions and actions people made.

What ever happens next will likewise emerge as a result of the complex interconnected web of decisions and actions we are all making right now.

The problem with most strategies

As you can imagine with this level of complexity it is impossible to really predict what is going to happen in three weeks time let alone three years time. Most strategies are made based on history and our current understandings of not only what is happening but how things work.

As we are finding out, how things work now is not how they used to work, just like what is happening now is not the same as what happened before. Sure we can see the similarities, but it is different.

And yet, most strategies are singular. This is what we want, this is how we will get there and this is likely what we need. One goal, one route, one strategy.

When I am working with clients I insist they do at least 5 strategies. One for the worst possible outcome and set of decisions/events. One for the best. One for average and two either side of the average, Quite good and quite poor.

It is amazing how more inclusive the strategies become. However much more importantly, people can see how day-to-day decisions and emergent and unforeseen events are tied to emergent futures. How one decision can set a business or enterprise off on a particular road. This starts to help businesses do three things that are the mantra of Special Forces around the world:

1. Adapt,
2. Improvise, and
3. Overcome.

Who really knows what is around the corner? It is the most adaptable, creative and resilient organisations and people that win in ambiguous times. Having a flexible and living strategy that allows people to improvise, innovate and make good decisions is vital.

The 10 most predominant attributes of Mode II people

In terms of population distribution by far the most frequent group of people are mode two or co-operative people. Approximately 55% of the population have a tendency towards a co-operative thinking system (What is a mode?).
So what are the attributes of a mode two logic system?
1. The first thing of note about mode two or cooperative people is that they see value in other people. There is a realisation here that two heads are better than one and you need to work with people, a) to get things done, and b) to make things better. What underpins this largely is the mediation of risk. There is safety in teams. "If I make a decision on my own and it is wrong there is only one person at fault. If I make a decision based on a collection of others ideas that they agree with and 'we' are wrong, then that is less of a personal risk to me.
2. Democracy is the usual method of decision making here. Everyone has a vote and the majority win - except when they don't! Co-operative leaders / managers will usually reserve the right to make the final decision. This will in all likely hood be similar to the majority view but not always.
3. There is usually a collective wish / need to reduce risks as much as possible. So you find lots of structures like competencies etc. in mode two organisations as well as other risk reduction behaviours / thinking.
4. There is a distinct focus on task here. In mode two organisations the task is the focus. There is a little emphasis in modal mode two on process in as far as it effects the task. What I mean by this is that things like 'team building' and the reduction of conflict are highlighted activities in mode two environments. This is to ensure as far as is possible that the task gets done with the minimum of friction.
5. Friction is usually defined in this logic system as being anything or anyone that is percieved to get in the way of or slow down the completion of the task.
6. Cooperative problem solving approaches are the big feature here. Two or more people working together to solve a problem. It does not matter what the people involved believe, indeed people in this system are largely expected to work regardless of their beliefs. The prevailing thinking is, you are paid to work so work. If the people working together don't believe in the task they are just expected to get on with it, unlike as you will see mode three systems.
7. Using others as resources is really the name of the game - cooperate to get the job done.
8. As mentioned above mode two people really don't like conflict. In the workplace great effort is taken to reduce interpersonal conflict or better still to stop it happening. Conflict is seen as unproductive and an unnessessary distraction. It also (importantly) doesn't feel good.
9. Emotional resilience in mode two is pretty low to average to say the least. More about this in a later post.
10. Ambiguity and uncertainty is to be reduced. A lot of effort and money is used (often unsuccessfully) to make things simple and clear especially in mode II organisations. Ambiguity is seen as the nemasis of productivity.

Mode one people - attributes

The first group of people I will look at as part of this series on followership and leadership are what is known as mode one or technical people.
The term technical leadership or followership comes from the thinking and subsequent approaches to problem solving that underpin and define this system.
Mode one individuals largely see the world as a series of technical issues that all have an answer. If you don't know the answer to a problem then someone else will. This is a world of experts and consultants, you just need to find the right expert to solve any problem. The view here is that everything has a well defined answer, you just need to find it. This approach is usually illustrated by 'flowchart decision making' with no shades of grey.
Mode one individuals (followers and leaders) tend not to entertain ambiguity and uncertainty easily if at all. The most frequent mode one reactions to ambiguity and uncertainty include:

• outright denial of the situation,
• create their own (usually imaginary) certainty / reality,
• displacement behaviour aka do something else (normally something comforting).

Mode one individuals (both followers and leaders) do not tolerate uncertainty and risk very well and operate to reduce these as much as possible, usually by resorting to methods of control.

Mode one leaders are autocrats. Mode one followers are largely passive and dependent people who want to be told what to do and they tend not vary from the script. Mode one leaders and followers go together well. However if a mode one follower is under a mode two, three or four leader, the leaders would do well to be very explicit about what is required of them. They will see people from other modes as increasingly unstructured and dangerous or a least unsafe. These are not great people in times of change as they will fight to get back to the old certainty or fool themselves that things have not or are not changing.

Mode one leaders in charge of organisations in times of change (like the current situation) are the number one candidates for loosing their business.

Mode one followers are the most difficult (but not impossible) to get to embrace change. Both mode one leaders and followers can embrace change if handled correctly.

A nice summary of mode one people:

Good at

• Following ‘characterised’ procedures
• Making incremental changes
• Postponing reward
• Staying safe
• Standardising procedures
• Leading from the front
• Detail
  

Struggles with

• Risk & Ambiguity
• Innovation
• Diversity
• Non standard thinking
• Empathy and emotional intelligence / resilience (they can appear very resilient but this is only due to denial and displacement)
  
• Co-operation and collaboration
• Strategic concepts (big picture)

Here is a video example of mode one behaviour when faced with something different from a previous blog.

Here are the distributions of modes in the leadership population.


Next I will look at mode two leaders and followers.

Too busy to lead III - The draw of certainty & ambiguity aversion

This series of blogs about leaders being too busy to lead appear, from the emails I have received, to have struck a cord with quite a lot of people. The emails can roughly be divided into three categories:

1. About 20% from leaders who recognise their situation and have emailed for help to change the situation, which we are busy dealing with,


2. About 60% saying 'this is so true' from people complaining that their bosses don't lead and spend most of their time micromanaging, interfering in their work and that they spend more time covering their backs and supplying 'urgent data' to the leader rather than being productive.


3. The rest (about 20%) were from leaders saying words to the effect that they would love to get on with leading only "My staff are incompetent so I have to manage them".

The emails were interesting on their own, however being a researcher at heart I decided to investigate a bit further so I started to ask some questions. I wanted first of all to know what the email writers (251 in all) thought the issues were that led to this situation.
In order of popularity of answer:

1. Leaders doing what they are comfortable with / used to doing
2. Role ambiguity between leadership and management
   
3. Lack of trust on behalf of the leader
   
4. Fear of the risk of something going wrong (Similar to but different from no 2)
5. Incompetent staff (guess which group this answer wholly came from)
6. Lack of confidence on behalf of the leader
7. Lack of training for the leaders and others
8. Incompetent leaders

It would appear, if this is correct, that the number one reason for the lack of leadership behaviour from leaders is the safety of doing what the leaders know best - what they used to do. Of the 20% of emails I got from leaders asking for help all of them agreed with the statement that tended to behave in ways that were consistent with their old roles particularly under pressure and revert to management activities rather than maintaining a leadership presence.

Last year (2007) Science published an article about the role ambiguity and certainty plays in our brains based on an experiment Camerer did based on the Ellsberg Paradox which I talked about earlier:

Camerer's experiment revolved around a decision making game known as the Ellsberg paradox. Camerer imaged the brains of people while they placed bets on whether the next card drawn from a deck of twenty cards would be red or black. At first, the players were told how many red cards and black cards were in the deck, so that they could calculate the probability of the next card being a certain color. The next gamble was trickier: subjects were only told the total number of cards in the deck. They had no idea how many red or black cards the deck contained.

The first gamble corresponds to the theoretical ideal of economics: investors face a set of known risks, and are able to make a decision based upon a few simple mathematical calculations. We know what we don't know, and can easily compensate for our uncertainty. As expected, this wager led to the "rational" parts of the brain becoming active, as subjects computed the odds. Unfortunately, this isn't how the real world works. In reality, our gambles are clouded by ignorance and ambiguity; we know something about what might happen, but not very much. (For example, it's now clear just how little we actually knew about Iraq pre-invasion.) When Camerer played this more realistic gambling game, the subjects' brains reacted very differently. With less information to go on, the players exhibited substantially more activity in the amygdala and in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is believed to modulate activity in the amygdala. In other words, we filled in the gaps of our knowledge with fear. This fear creates our bias for certainty, since we always try to minimize our feelings of fear. As a result, we pretend that we have better intelligence about Iraqi WMD than we actually do; we selectively interpret the facts until the uncertainty is removed.

Camerer also tested patients with lesioned orbitofrontal cortices. (These patients are unable to generate and detect emotions.) Sure enough, because these patients couldn't feel fear, their brains treated both decks equally. Their amygdalas weren't excited by ambiguity, and didn't lead them astray. Because of their debilitating brain injury, these patients behaved perfectly rationally. They exhibited no bias for certainty.

Obviously, it's difficult to reduce something as amorphous as "uncertainty" to a few isolated brain regions. But I think Camerer is right to argue that his "data suggests a general neural circuit responding to degrees of uncertainty, contrary to decision theory."

It would appear that our response (aversion) to ambiguity may have a neuronal explanation (not an excuse mind you), which may in turn explain why only about 2% of leaders are mode 4 leaders and are naturally comfortable, or more accurately have a greater ability to mediate their discomfort with uncertainty (emotional resilience).

Leaders or followers?

Leadership is a difficult activity: You have to work out what the reality of the environment is; try to predict what will happen over the coming period; decide what possibilities exist or what latitude for action exists; work out where you want to take the company, organisation or country; articulate the same in a way that everyone understands and can buy into; decide the appropriate time scale; methods and so on.

It's a difficult job even in the best of times. However when the environment starts to change or become volatile leading gets really tough. Things are made considerably harder when leaders find it difficult to separate reality from perception. Harder still when emotions start to alter our view of reality.

The research (press release here) I referred to in the last blog has showed that whilst just about all leaders say that they make decisions based on the data, 4 out of every 5 leaders recognise that these decisions , especially in uncertain situations, usually have a heavy emotional basis.

My question is how do leaders learn to make decisions in difficult and uncertain situations?
The answer appears to be not through any formal process. One leader told me:

"A university education is a good start and an MBA helps however it never prepares you for dealing with uncertainty. In fact it makes things worse.You tend to leave thinking that the answers are in the data. In hard times all the data in the world won't help you a jot. It's how you see things and how you fool yourself, and we all do, that counts. Their way of thinking is great for stable times but if you follow their guidance when things are less stable you are going to end up in a lot of trouble."

Another leader stated:

"It is important that people believe I know what I am doing. I have to admit that like many people, when things are foggy you can't in all honesty say I do know what I am doing. I think we all just trust to luck a bit and cast about and see what others are doing. I know it's not satisfactory but what can you do when things are changing so fast?"

.

"What I have learned since taking control of the service is that all the research and models you get fed in training and from college are historical. Not one of them tells you what to do when things have changed or when they are changing. New situations need new thinking, not old research and education. I would place the ability to make good decisions in the face of ambiguity and to be able to think new thoughts in new situations as the number one leadership attributes these days, not the degree someone has." Reported a CEO

Agile Leadership is the ability to be able to lead well in difficult and ambiguous situations, the very circumstances others are clueless in. There is precious little formal preparation for leadership in uncertain times anywhere in the world, which is why leaders are increasingly looking to each others for answers. We run Agile Leadership programs and modules (PDF version)designed to fit in with existing leadership training or as stand alone packages, that develop these attributes. The growing popularity of these events is testimony to the need for something different in formal education and training. I am not saying what is going on now is wrong. It is useful and has it's place. It just doesn't equip people for difficult times, dealing with uncertainty and rapid change where they need to solve problems, make good decisions and lead when everyone else is sat around wondering what to do next; just waiting to see what everyone else is doing (just like the current economic situation where rumour and volatility are rampant). That is being a follower not a leader.

Ambiguity Competencies

The comment Christine left was on the last blog was really interesting. It raises some very important and practical issues about using ambiguity for development in organisations.

Oddly when I ran a department at Cranfield University I used to research and teach competency development as one of my areas of interest. I have come across a couple of competencies for ambiguity I would agree with you that just about all of them miss the point or help others like managers to miss the point!

For me there are a couple of important issues here which broadly fall under four broad headings:

1. Creating ambiguity for advantage
2. Dealing with ambiguous situations to gain the advantage
3. Leading others in times of ambiguity
4. Developing ambiguity tolerance / resilience in organisations
   

1. Creating ambiguity for advantage

The first is that creating ambiguity works in certain situations, mainly those where there is an advantage to be gained from doing so. This requires excellent decision making capabilities, or the ability to know exactly when to create ambiguity and when to create clarity, both of which are different but connected cognitive skill sets. There is then the question about how to create differing levels of ambiguity or clarity for the effect required.

When we are working in organisations we concentrate on developing 6 areas of capability that all contribute to the ability to use ambiguity well:

1. Emotional Resilience
   
2. Decision Making
   
3. Problem Solving
4. Critical Thinking
5. Creative Thinking
6. Development of Autonomy
   

2. Dealing with ambiguous situations to gain the advantage

The second is that the major skill in dealing with ambiguous situations is to find the advantage inherent such circumstances, especially when just about everyone else is heading for the hills or a bunker somewhere nice and safe.
This requires a good level of emotional resilience. This is different from emotional intelligence which is also required. One of the things we do know about ambiguous situations is that with the exception of mode four individuals (See Modes of Leadership) they almost always bring about a change in people's emotional state. Heightened emotional states almost always reduce the effectiveness of cognitive operations (thinking). Therefore what happens is that when a person feels that things are ambiguous they will respond in one of a number of ways. These responses can range from total denial, construction of a new reality, attention being placed less ambiguous items, displacement behaviour and so on. Therefore competency frameworks need to look at emotional resilience as a separate (but linked) skill set from emotional intelligence. Interestingly this is where a lot of our work comes from. Helping organisations develop the thinking and skills to profit from ambiguity and part of that is developing emotional resilience.

As a side note here we discovered that skills or competency development programmes have greater impact when the cognitive side of things are addressed. In other words the thinking needs to develop with the skill which is one of our USP's and is based on the idea of modes of thinking which is embeded in the Modes of Leadership model. The reason being is that the system of logic we apply to any situation changes the way we see things and consequently behave or react, which is inextricably linked with our emotional responses. Which is why when we engage people in our Agile Leadership Programme (pdf) we develop all six skill sets at the:

1. Behavioural,
   
2. Cognitive
   
3. Belief / attitudinal, and
   
4. Emotional levels together.

This holistic approach accelerates the development process and means that graduates of the programme can deal with any situation that occurs, make good decisions are creative and critical and can stand on their own two feet in any situation.

In terms of recruiting similar issues abound.

I will answer issues 3 & 4 later

The Ellsberg Paradox - Ambiguity Aversion

A great explanatory video of the Ellsberg Paradox has been posted over on the Curious Website. This describes Daniel Ellsberg's (left) famous ambiguity aversion experiment. As I describe in 'The Ambiguity Advantage' most people shy away from ambiguous situations. The masters of ambiguity (Mode Four individuals) on the other hand are very comfortable with and explore ambiguous situations - the very conditions (as the video shows) most others steer away from. In part just being one of a small number of players in any (ambiguous) situation gives an advantage on it's own. However there are specific techniques and more importantly frames of thinking the 'Masters of Ambiguity use. Mode four thinkers rarely fall victim to the decision making and problem solving biases we are currently exploring on the Ambiguity Advantage blog. How come? Stay tuned and all will be relieved.

Illusion of Control

Last week at the Medical Sciences Division (Oxford University) one of the subjects we explored follows on nicely from the last blog, illusions of control. In 1995 Langer wrote a paper in which he showed that many people tend to believe that they can control and change events that are in fact beyond their control. Even during truly random events like the lottery, rolling dice etc. people often believe that they have the skills and attributes to change or influence the events. Such a belief is not confined to individuals. Teams also fall foul of this decision making bias, which because others are involved in the bias, usually removes all doubt of the entire group that they can in fact influence events that when examined somewhat more objectively are beyond the control of the individuals and teams concerned.

The question, as I frequently ask lecture and workshop participants, is; So What?

When you think about the decisions governments, boards and committees make for example, you don’t need to go too far to see the effect of ‘illusion of control’ playing out. That some policy or other actions can do things like reduce crime, increase educational attainment, solve market related issues and so on. This does not mean that I am not a believer in action, only that many actions we take and assume have solved whatever the problem is, have not in themselves been the solution. It has often rather been some other effect like regression fallacy etc.

There are a couple of interesting things here worth mentioning:

The first is that the cognitive bias we develop called the ‘illusion of control’ is frequently a response to ambiguity. Disambiguating something beyond our control appears to help emotionally. Ok it doesn’t lead to good decisions but we feel a whole lot better. A nice example of this is the difference between being passenger on a plane and the varying degrees of ill-ease felt say compared to the pilots who have a sense of control. A smaller effect can be felt often driving your own car or being a passenger in someone else’s. Yesterday I flew to Riyadh (where I am now) and was asleep when the plane hit a patch of really bad turbulence. I found myself sitting up and becoming alert, just in case. In case of what??? I found myself reasoning that we were 37,000 feet up flying at 550 MPH. If anything went wrong what was I going to do about it? Sod all really apart from probably scream and even then for what purpose? It just felt better to be alert and have the illusion of control even though in reality I had zero control over the situation. I was just trying to disambiguate the situation and (this is an important point) feel better – the emotional connection again. Once I realised what I was doing I relaxed, gave myself up to the uncertainty of the situation, stopped disambiguating and fell asleep!

The second is something called activity bias. More of which next blog. Oh and we will cover the recency effect as well!

Filling in ambiguity to find a mate

In a recent article entitled Ambiguity Promotes Liking for the New York Times, Marina Krakovsky reported on a piece of research conducted by Michael Norton at Harvard Business School. The research examined perceptions of attraction between people on online dating sites. What Norton and his colleagues did was to have people who were arranging dates via an online dating site to rate the attractiveness of the other individual before the date and then do the same thing post date.
What they discovered was that people are much more likely to assume that people are attractive and similar to us online in anticipation of the date as opposed to the reality of the first date, on which the team discovered daters were much more likely to down rate their dates considerably where as before they had a fairly rosy view of them from the largely ambiguous data provided online.
Norton explains what is happening “People are so motivated to find somebody they like that they read things into the profiles” creating their own reality from ambiguous data. The example given in the article is that if a man writes that he likes the outdoors, his would-be mate imagines her perfect skiing companion, but when she learns more, she discovers “the outdoors” refers to nude beaches.
This is a beautiful example of a typical mode one and two response to ambiguity - ignoring the ambiguity and creating their own reality and expectations, in other words filling in the gaps with their own model of the world.
Whilst this is just an irritation for people trying to find a partner, when it comes to political issues like taking a nation to war over ambiguous data or ignoring ambiguous data on the flight deck of Florida flight 90 which plunged into the Potomac in Washington killing 75 people, or ignoring ambiguous market data and plunging a company headlong into disaster, things are more serious.
Part of the problem is that we train people to plan for the things that they can see. We don't teach them how to spot ambiguities and know when they are making assumptions.

Emotional Inteligence 2 - Resilience part one

A series of studies in the early 2000's concentrated on the role of human emotional resilience as a useful set of abilities when dealing with crisis and ambiguous situations.
The higher the level of emotional resilience an individual has the better they are likely to handle disadvantageous and ambiguous situations. Emotional resilience is also a strong indicator of a number of attributes, including:

• a person's ability to solve problems in emotionally charged and ambiguous situations,
  
• their level of persistence, especially in difficult circumstances,
  
• their latitude towards diversity, both of other people and differing situations
  
• confidence,
• the ability to analyse, weigh up and take risks,
  
• the ability to collaborate,
• as well as an individuals level of autonomy.

A lot of work was conducted in the Australia and the UK in the early 2000's around Bernard's You Can Do It! educational ideas aimed at improving children's attitudes towards life in general. Based on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Bernard developed a series of educational interventions which increased positive attitudes to education and problems solving in deprived areas.
Simultaneously similar work was being carried out by the author in 2002 - 6 whilst training disaster managers in a number of countries around the globe. The aim was to develop a system to improve the reactions and problem solving abilities of individuals and teams given the job of managing and leading in natural disaster and post terrorist attack incidents. These are situations which by definition are high in ambiguity, emotional stress and often personal physical danger. Not the ideal environment for high quality problem solving, however one in which such quality is required as people's lives often depend on the solutions.

The importance of emotional resilience in problem solving, especially when any solutions derived are critical to an individual, company or group, can not be understated.

Emotional resilience comprises of

• Emotional Regulation - the ability to recognise and control (reduce or increase) our emotions at will, (yes it is possible!)
  
• Behavioural Control - the level of ability to be able to determine and regulate our outward behaviours especially when we are in a heightened emotional state,
• Emotional - Cognitive Switching (ECS) - the ability and speed at which we can move from our awareness of and concentration on internal emotional events to engaging with logical, cognitive (thinking) and meta-cognitive processes.

Our Ambiguity Advantage Practitioner Workshops develop emotional resilience and exquisite problem solving skills for all.

Something is missing

I was working with a group of senior leaders in a very large national institution last week. For 90% of the 2 day long meeting the leaders were all working on the problem of how to develop better leadership underneath them and create a more agile and ambiguity tolerant workforce.
The main problem they mused was that people were following orders blindly, not challenging and that there was a total lack of creativity in the workforce.
Solutions abounded about how to fix 'them' and what should be done to solve the problem.

When asked what it is they are doing to increase their own tolerance to ambiguity, develop their own creativity and challenge people in a developmental way there was silence. Indeed if any of us honestly ask ourselves what we are doing to increase our own tolerance to ambiguity and increase our creativity and critical thinking we would draw a blank.
The first issue probably is that we just hadn't thought about it. Once you do start to think about it the second issue then naturally comes forth - just how on earth do you develop your tolerance to ambiguity? Over the next few blogs I will be exploring just that. How can we all get better at dealing with ambiguity?

Back to the meeting - we explored the effects and affects of emotions on problem solving, ambiguity, perceptions of us and them and critical thinking - evidence based thought. It was widely agreed that the key to al of this was understanding our own emotions and the effects they have on our reactions and thinking; emotional intelligence if you like.

So 90% of the meeting was talking about leadership and how to create a more agile, ambiguity tolerant leadership below the board. The other 10% of the time was spent at the end of the meeting reacting to the news that the responsibility for training of new recruits was being removed from this group and was being given to a central agency.

"Our founder would turn in his grave if he knew what was happening"

"We need to stop this before it goes any further"

"They need to be shown the red card"

"This is outrageous how can we indoctrinate them with the right culture if we are not doing it - we need to do something about this now."

The next blog will concentrate on emotional intelligence - what is it and what does it do for us?

Risky business, ambiguity

Risky business asking for an Ambiguity Advantage workshop it would appear.
I thought that you might like this. I have been asked to provide a workshop to help develop a bit more tolerance to Ambiguity in a large organisation in London. I agreed and the job of arranging it fell to the organisational HR department.
I was asked by them to provide:

• A full rationale for doing the workshop
• A list of all the outcomes of the workshop
• A full by the minute breakdown of the programme 'so we know what to expect'.
• A risk analysis of everything that could go wrong and a statement of what I would do to prevent each item.
• The total cost and a statement of the value this would bring to the company
• A list of all the resources used and why each would be used
  
• A chapter and verse briefing for the participants including a full breakdown of every exercise so that 'there were no nasty surprises'.
• A full CV and a statement of expertise
• Details of indemnity insurance in case 'anything goes wrong'.
• Details of any first aid / medical qualifications I hold
• Details of how to evaluate the outcome to 'ensure compliance' after the event.

I could see the conflict on their faces as I pointed out the dichotomy. The answer was that they would have to go and seek higher authority to make a decision. Talk about disempowerment.