Can You Timebox Clarity? Holding Ambiguity With A Steadier Hand
You already know. Or, you know how you can know.
Think of all the things we want to know:
- why someone still hasn’t responded;
- whether your money-related concern is astute or needless;
- whether the support you offered was helpful to the person you offered it to;
- whether something is taking more time than it’s worth…
Often, we haven’t even arrived at wanting to know, at wondering: we are still just dimly aware of a feeling. It may feel like worry. If we are lucky, we notice, and now we can proceed to wondering.
And here is where it gets interesting.
We all have a set of orientations, circumstances, experiences, beliefs and competencies that influence how we are going to wonder, in that moment.
- Does it feel ok to you to not know?
- Do you feel permission or even encouragement to wonder?
- Are both of those ideas true in theory, but in practice, the clock and the budget dominate?
Let’s name, and then set aside the likelihood that you don’t actually need to know some of the things that you think you do. Let’s just talk about the many situations in which it truly would be good to know. Now let’s talk about what we mean by “know”. Many times, we are pursuing certainty, when what we would benefit more from is a pursuit of clarity.
Clarity is one of the four paths Brook and I choose to focus on, as helpful to making work feel better. Gaining clarity on how and why you are making particular choices – around initiatives or hires or paces or indicators – helps to improve your choices over time. It builds cogency and synergy into your plans. It helps your learning.
Clarity is hard to timebox.
Clarity is inherently contemplative. Hard to timebox. Always a pursuit, only occasionally a destination. How often do we experience the moment of “figuring it out” versus all the moments of seeking that lead up to that?
Here’s the great news about that: there is deep value in the process itself. For all of the time I spend guiding work around purpose and “north stars”, the larger truth is that that’s just the birthplace of clarity. The beginning of a long and illustrious life that clarity can have in your worlds. It’s a way of being, not a box to check.
But now for some realness. It may not surprise you to learn that I spend a lot of time struggling to practice what I preach. The systems I am, or have been, shaped by – economic, educational, professional – don’t always reward wondering. They reward deliverables. Expertise. Acceptance. Even our emotional responses – impatience, frustration, appeasement – are shaped by these systems.
Here’s where I like to bring in that juicy theme we’ve built two seasons of our Ripples and Rumbles conversations around so far: subversion. Subvert these systems to serve you! Since you are accustomed to seeking evidence and proving value, go ahead and seek evidence that there is value in taking the time clarity requires.
Count it.
Label it.
Define it.
For example, in assessing an investment you’ve made into a particular tool, consider how you pursued clarity as you made the decision to invest, and document that, right alongside your documentation of how the tool is performing so far. You can evaluate clarity just as you would any other aspect of your operation:
Did we plan for clarity in this choice? Did we follow the plan? Did following the plan create a sense of clarity?
Over time, you can look for patterns in how clarity is interacting with your choices, and where that’s showing up in your organization, what it’s affecting.
When we make the effects of clarity legible to ourselves in this way, we set a reminder that we might later perceive, the next time we feel the need for quick results.
You already know.
What supports this? I began with what I believe is the answer: that you already know – or at the very least, you know how you might begin to find out.
Humans have always turned toward questions like these. Quaker Clearness Committees, for example, offer a space of shared discernment, where clarity is invited through curiosity, listening and presence. In both Yoga and Buddhism, clarity is cultivated through practices of stillness, reflection, and sustained attention—ways of quieting the noise so the real can emerge. Indigenous traditions often root clarity in relationship: listening with the land. Clarity arising from kinship, with all our relations.
You may know of some organizational practices that would be at home here, for instance separating deliberation activity from decision-making activity, by a time period that allows for some clarity to arise.
I recently guided some silence in a group we convene, after chatting about some of Tricia Hersey’s thinking about rest, how it differs from activities which may be considered restful, like meditation. Neuroscientists connect diffuse thinking (roughly speaking, daydreaming) to creativity and sensemaking. And so on.
Just go ahead and start.
If I’m honest, I should reintroduce some more of my personal tricky realities at this point. The ones that get in the way of the intentions.
For instance, something I know to be supportive for my clarity is walking. Yet it very often feels like a luxury to untether from the computer and appear in the outdoors. Never mind that I unquestioningly spend an equivalent amount of time scrolling LinkedIn or Medium or Substack.
I sometimes enjoy a solution to this, that I’m familiar with from many “good for me” activities, which is to simply begin. Just commit to begin. Start the activity that’s getting squeezed by the time scarcity vice. Override the resistance, and begin. Almost always, the resistance gives way to the felt sense of “oh yeah, this is so obviously helpful, I don’t understand why I keep resisting”.
Still, we will always spend much more time seeking clarity than holding it. And this is fine. What matters is not reaching some final, gleaming insight, but practicing how we meet the in-between. Holding ambiguity with a steadier hand. Making a little more room for the not-yet-clear, that flicker that arrives more often when we stop chasing and start listening.