Decision-making and ambiguity

Recently, I've become really interested in how decisions are made. Not personal decisions, such as "shall I change career?" or "who should I marry?", but organisational decisions, such as "which project management tool should we use?" or "what should our strategy for the next three years be?"

Related to this, I think, is the "default operating system" of hierarchy. Within a hierarchy, you've got a structure for the decision-making process, with power relationships between participants. And then, ultimately, however democratic the process purports to be, it's ultimately the Highest Paid Person's Opinion (HiPPO) that counts.

With non-hierarchical forms of organising, even getting into the decision-making process requires two things to happen first:

• Codification of power relationships
• Agreement as to how a binding decision can be made by the group

What has this got to do with ambiguity, and more specifically, the continuum of ambiguity? I'd suggest that what is required is a way of organising that strikes a balance — one that is Productively Ambiguous.

Hierarchies are a form of organising that can work well in many situations: high-stakes situations, times when execution is more important than thought, and the military. For everything else, hierarchical organising can be a dead metaphor. It doesn't represent how things are on the ground, and doesn't allow any productive work to happen.

Far better to focus on the area of productive ambiguity: instead of hierarchy or unspoken assumptions, progress happens by following a path between over-specifying the approach, and allowing chaos to ensue. In practice, this often happens by one or a small number of people exerting moral authority on the group through having done this kind of thing before, being very organised and diligent, or having the kind of personality that puts everyone at ease.