You know I talk a lot about clarity – strategic clarity – and how it’s essential to the impact your organization can have, as well as the health of your organizational culture. So why would I recommend a crush on confusion?

Because confusion is actually the first step to clarity. Or rather, it can be: if you can recognize that there’s confusion present in a group. Because sometimes we don’t even realize that we’re confused. We see what’s happening – no confusion! The trouble is we don’t see why it’s happening. Maybe there’s conflict, and we see it as a communication styles issue to work out and that’s that. Or maybe there’s great collaboration happening but we never quite make our targets, so we blame the market or we change the targets and that’s that. Meanwhile, maybe the conflict is fuelled by confusion around reporting relationships, but we don’t notice that, so we apply the communication fix only to discover further disagreement brewing just a couple weeks later. Maybe the underperformance is rooted in ambiguous language around goals and targets, with many different understandings of ideas like “excellence” or “priority”. So there’s actually no problem in the market, no need to modify targets, but oops too late that’s what we did because we didn’t check for confusion.

Even if you have recognized confusion, you might not feel crushy about it! OK you don’t actually need to crush, but you do want to celebrate your identification that confusion is present. Before you cultivate this kind of relationship to confusion, you might think of it as a state you can’t risk operating in for long, so you move quickly to sweep it away, to clear that fog. You might introduce a protocol, a new role or reporting relationship, a new meeting. You don’t take the time, or allow the spaciousness, for more careful consideration. But the thing is, confusion is … well … confusing! The likelihood that the quickest fix is also the true fix – that it’s accurately diagnosed the deeper truths in the situation – it’s not great likelihood, a lot of the time. Another meeting won’t help if you haven’t figured out that there’s a power dynamic keeping important input from being shared. A new role or reporting relationship can’t help a team whose problem is actually not fully understanding the specific contribution a project is making to a key strategic objective. 

So let’s talk about how to recognize confusion in a group, and how to embrace it.

 

Recognizing confusion: an incomplete list of clues

Really this section should be called Recognizing POTENTIAL Confusion, since none of these clues automatically mean that confusion is present. Think of them as conditions that could have confusion as a contributing factor.

1. Conflict
2. Reduced enthusiasm or commitment
3. Disappointment (they’re disappointing you; you’re disappointing them)
4. Analysis and discussion meant to lead to action routinely doesn’t lead there
5. Abdication of responsibility
6. Underperformance
7. Revisiting decisions; decisions that don’t stick
8. Duplication of effort

 

These kinds of signals could also be rooted in low psychological safety, skill or resource gaps, burnout, or broken trust, among other factors. And this is one reason I advocate for confusion crushes: most of those other factors are harder to work through. Starting from checking for confusion is a hopeful thing to do. 

How is it done? Through curiosity and inquiry, and thoughtful choice of process for that inquiry. What do you need to know, and how could you best learn that? For instance, if there is conflict, your process may involve one-on-one conversations and an anonymous survey, to start. In a situation of healthy collaborative activity, but with other symptoms of confusion present, it may be valuable to guide a group discussion. It’s often prudent to have specialist support in either of these approaches (we can say confidently, as specialists regularly called to provide this support).

However you are approaching your inquiry, some angles that are often useful to work from are:  knowns and unknowns, surprises and disappointments, and agency versus constraint. This could sound like the following questions, as just a few examples:

• Knowns and unknowns: What do we know that is central to this work we are doing? What are the main categories of information we are using to move the work along? And what do we know that we don’t know? (That we have identified as important unknowns?)
• Surprises and disappointments: What has been a pleasant surprise to you as this work is progressing? What has been an unpleasant surprise? What has been disappointing but not surprising?
• Agency vs. constraint: What could you/I/we have seen that was important, but “out of our hands”, in terms of authority/permissions/roles, or perhaps timelines or resources?

 

How to embrace confusion

Well, I’ve already offered a great starting place for warming up to confusion and its usefulness:  it’s often easier to address than other factors that tend to contribute to the same symptoms. Beyond this, you can try to create favourable conditions for realizing the potential in this powerful outlook. 

Spread the good word with those who influence your work’s design and pace

Wherever you encounter direction, advice or advocacy about conditions that you recognize may be confusion, note it with thanks, and add that you may have a fairly straightforward approach to the situation that you’d like to explore (with them, if applicable) and bring back into the conversation. Then explore it, transparently, and report results transparently, highlighting the benefits as well as the potential misdiagnoses averted (as described earlier). 

Structure practices and systems to support comfort with confusion

What are the structural or cultural elements of our work which influence how we approach unsolved problems? This is where we will feel comfortable or supported to postpone certainty and second-guess quick clarity, to seek better quality understanding, which is usually where we’ll find confusion. Reporting requirements. Metrics like KPIs. Collaborative mechanisms like meetings.  Urgency culture.  Certainty.  How can you embed your new confusion lens into these structures, norms and practices? Values is a great location: to allow room to consider confusion when sensemaking, values like open-mindedness, curiosity, and humility can be great touchstones. How does your organization activate and live its values? Are they baked into the design of roles and projects, and then evaluated retrospectively? Are their artifacts (choices, behaviours, communication) assessed periodically in individual and team performance?

 

Full circle wrap up

And now after so many words on confusion, I want to return to our starting point, to emphasize that I haven’t lost sight of the Joy of Clarity. Probably you’ve gleaned throughout the article that we’re basically taking a thoughtful look at clarity’s “negative space”. Studying the negative space of a thing gives us a fuller understanding of it. Perhaps you know the famous Tao Te Ching verse “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” Humans engaging in collaborative work is a complex scenario, every time. Anything that helps us see more angles, or understand more nuances, is our friend. 

 

Why am I writing about this?

I’ve been a part of many different types of organizations, in many different roles, for many years now.  In past roles involving organizational change, I saw lots of confusion and only occasional clarity, but I didn’t always have sufficient agency to shift things from those insights. In more recent roles, leading small non-profits, I enjoyed greater agency but learned how tricky it can still be, in the thick of it, to begin and continue the needed shifts. Now, with Big Waves, I can engage with more organizations than I did when working with one at a time, AND with even more of you through these articles! If you ever want to talk about any of it, I’ll be a very enthusiastic, albeit nerdy, participant in that chat 🙂 Do it!!