An illustrative conversation about productive ambiguity

A story using characters to represent different parts of the continuum of ambiguity.

Imagine the situation: there's a business meeting with five people present:

• Vague Vera
• Generative Gerald
• Creative Chitundu
• Productive Parvati
• Dead Dave

These are all supposed to represent various parts of a continuum. Dave is speaking in clichés (aka 'dead metaphors') again. "What we need to do is synergise our verticals" he says. Parvati rolls her eyes; Dave's been spending too much time on LinkedIn.

"Dave, I don't think you understand our strategic business direction" says Vera. "We're aiming to integrate new technologies to enable growth!" Everyone nods their heads, but no-one really understands what she means by this.

As I argued in a paper I (self-)published with my thesis supervisor, if something is Vague, then the person expressing the idea doesn't really know what they're talking about. When it comes to Generative ambiguity, an individual gives a name to a nebulous collection of thoughts and ideas. It might make some sense to them, but it can't really be conveyed well to others.

Creative ambiguity is where one aspect of a term is fixed. Whilst a level of agreement can exist here, it nevertheless remains highly contextual. I would argue that Productive ambiguity is where real innovative work happens. Finally, we have Dead metaphors which happen when people want to remove all wiggle room from a term. Terms and the ideas behind them become formulaic and unproductive.

My reason for continually talking about ambiguity is that I believe there is a sweet spot in all areas of life. The interesting work happens when there's an idea or concept that kind of makes sense to people with similar backgrounds, experience, and/or interests. If it's left there, though, it's not useful enough. The idea or concept needs to be worked on further so that it can be applied more widely.