Learning to Love Confusion

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.