Lindsay Swinton of Management For The Rest Of Us has an interesting article on working with ambiguity: Managing Ambiguity - dealing successfully with uncertain situations. It discusses how anxiety rises with the uncertainty and importance of a given situation, and also provides some tips on how to manage uncertain situations more effectively. Here's an excerpt: Managing ambiguity or uncertainty is a key life skill... 

Why is it thatsuccess depend on the nature of the challenge or is it more related to our personal approach? Our ability to deal effectively with uncertain situations or "managing ambiguity? is a life skill that is gaining recognition, mostly stemming from Daniel Goleman?s work on Emotional Intelligence. Let"s take a look at what managing ambiguity is all about. Go Ask A Fortune-Teller Every second of every day, someone, somewhere will be moving house, switching careers, or dealing with some other significant life change.

Even fortune-tellers can"t predict how things are going to turn out, so you have to get comfortable with not knowing precisely what is going to happen. That"s managing ambiguity! Handle challenges better by keeping your thinking crystal-clear  The problem is when we get anxious our ability to think clearly gets worse. So the key is to manage anxiety levels and have loads of spare mental capacity to deal with the unexpected. 

Take a moment to consider this relationship; ANXIETY = IMPORTANCE x UNCERTAINTY If something is very important to us, we will wish dearly for success and have some emotional attachment to the outcome of the challenge. If something is uncertain and the outcome not guaranteed, we lose sleep worrying about what is going to happen. Both of these are likely to give us more anxiety. Read more here:

http://www.mftrou.com/managing-ambiguity.html Project Managers in the tech sector certainly deal with a lot of ambiguity so learning to better manage uncertain elements of a project is a great skill to build. Thanks to Lyndsay and MFTROU for sharing this great info. Note that the article is also available as a PDF here: mftrou.com/support-files/managing-ambiguity.pdf posted by Raven at Raven's Brain under Management Tags: Management, Project Management, Ambiguity, Effective Management, Managing Uncertainty, Managing Ambiguity, Self Improvement, Advice Self Improvement, Think And Grow Rich Audio Book.