I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why people get frustrated with each other. There are infinitely many reasons this can happen, but a specific dynamic I’ve noticed in the kinds of projects I work on is the friction between people that thrive on context and people that thrive on direction. I think this friction appears especially often in situations with high ambiguity or high uncertainty – and those are different things – so let’s talk through what happens, why it happens, and better ways to navigate it.
Step 1: Understand the Nature of The Problem
Uncertainty and ambiguity are words that I hear people use interchangeably, but I think they’re different in important ways. For our purposes, we’ll define them as follows:
Uncertainty is when you’re operating without full knowledge of a plan or vision, or operating while knowing that your constraints are going to change but not exactly how. This can happen when there is no plan, a plan that lives in someone’s head and is poorly communicated, when you know some kind of change (organizational change, layoffs, strategic pivots, etc) is coming but aren’t sure when, or when change happens and is poorly managed by leaders.
Ambiguity is when there’s an open-ended problem space without obvious precedent or a “right” answer. Ambiguity is often found in new businesses, new technology exploration, or research and development work on yet-unsolved problems.
Ambiguity can be fun. Uncertainty, less so.
Step 2: Know Thyself, And Thy Team
Now let’s talk about Context people and Direction people.
Context people thrive on working backward from a big picture. They want autonomy, and influence over turning the ambiguity into clarity. Their coping mechanisms may include six page narratives, spreadsheets, and backup plans.
Direction people get overwhelmed by context and want focus, and confidence that they’re working on the right thing. Coping mechanisms may include executive decisions and the dopamine hits of delivering.
A mismatch in type between leaders and their teams can be a problem.
You might have a Context person leading a team of Direction people. When there’s uncertainty, that Context leader may intuitively frame up multiple possible futures and expect their team to independently figure out how to work backwards from those different futures, identifying all the right priorities and paths forward. The team ends up overwhelmed, unfocused, and anxious that they’re working on the wrong things.
In ambiguity situations, the Context leader may provide vague marching orders, expecting their team to be comfortably along for the ride in methodically uncovering unknowns and narrowing focus bit by bit. Meanwhile, the team gets nothing done while they wait for clearer direction.
Or you might have a Direction person as a leader on a team full of Context people. When they’re dealing with uncertainty, the Direction leader may default to lots of executive decisions for the sake of having a decision made, while the team struggles with not understanding how decisions were made and pushes back constantly trying to understand the context. The leader can feel disrespected and undermined, while the team lacks trust in their leader’s decisions.
When navigating ambiguity, a Direction leader may also default to executive decisionmaking for the sake of narrowing the solution space, and their Context team feels frustrated that they don’t have the chance to contribute to direction or that they lack the freedom to innovate.
None of this makes for progress!
Step 3: Navigate the Friction Successfully
These mismatches do not spell doom! You just have to think through what’s going on and figure out the right way to cut through the confusion and conflict.
Once you understand what kind of situation you’re in – uncertainty or ambiguity – you can assess whether or not you can “fix” that situation.
In an uncertainty scenario, you probably can’t. Chances are that uncertainty exists because of leadership decisions further up the chain that you can’t meaningfully influence. In that case, your problem to solve is how to keep yourself and your team productive until the uncertainty is resolved.
In an ambiguity scenario, if you’re the leader, then it’s literally your job to fix it. The work is doing the exploratory work to move from a highly ambiguous wide-open solution space to a narrowed problem statement that’s easier to work to. Your problem to solve is how to do the right work to answer the right questions that allow for a clearly defined path forward.
When you need to move forward in uncertainty, you can:
- identify the things that will always be true
- identify what changes whenever constraints change
- set decision points to reassess direction based on whatever new information is available
- log “uncertainty debt” the way you log technology debt
And when you need to move forward in ambiguity, you can:
- identify the known unknowns
- collaborate on driving those to resolution
- document assumptions and make use of straw man proposals — “how we’ll operate until we know better”
- check-in with the team each time a decision or new piece of information narrows the trade space
But to figure out how best to do that, you need to understand yourself and your team. Who’s a Direction person? Who’s a Context person? Is there a mismatch on what you each need from each other?
When you’re a Context leader with a team of Direction people, the most important thing you can do is shield your team from the multiverse. You might enjoy contemplating all the different directions, but it will overwhelm them. Pick one future, by whatever criteria speak to you, and decompose it into discrete steps forward. Get everyone moving on some well-defined work that will answer some questions, and when you know better, manage the pivot carefully with open communication and transparency.
When you’re a Direction leader with a team of Context people, you need to communicate. Be open about when you’ve made an executive decision for the sake of progress, versus when a decision is driven by actual data. Be clear about when you’re open to pushback or new information that might change the path, and when you’re not. Keep everyone equally informed.
Talk it Through, As A Crew
I wasn’t kidding about this being a great leadership lesson from the Our Flag Means Death. Really, y’all, watch the silly pirate show.
But seriously. Communication is key. You have to talk openly and transparently about the things that help the team move forward. What do we know, and what’s still unknown? What can the team do about any unknowns? What is open for negotiation and pushback, and what isn’t? When will assumptions be revisited? What happens if we guess wrong at any point?
Being communicative like this means your team has better insight not just into the problem you’re trying to solve together, but also into you as a leader. It can help them figure out how to better work with your style even if it’s not theirs. It can give them greater ownership and autonomy in their work, which makes them more engaged and usually results in better output. When you’re open and communicative, it encourages your team to communicate more as well, which means you’ll find out faster when a style mismatch is causing friction and give you a chance to recover the vibes before that friction becomes a real problem. I am terribly sorry to inform you of this in the age of sophisticated LLM-powered tools, but you do actually need to talk to other humans regularly to make hard things happen.
There is nothing “good” or “bad” about being a Direction person versus a Context person. It does, truly, take all types. But when the chaos hits, a little self-awareness and introspection can go a long way to ensuring you and your team navigate it as successfully as possible.
(this is the blog post version of a talk I gave in May. thank you to everyone who listened to that one, asked great questions, and gave me feedback to roll in here!)
