In today’s NY Times Maureen Dowd was musing about the shifting sense of American identity. She cited Ben Domenech (without attribution) about Millennial’s awareness of living and working precariously:

It heightens the level of uncertainty, anxiety and risk aversion, to know that you’re only a bad day and half a dozen tweets from being fired.

But that is only a heightening of the background level of uncertainty and ambiguity that we all experience in the new economy, the postnormal, and the level of uncertainty and ambiguity is increasing.

People have different levels of tolerance to uncertainty, but even those most likely to tolerate chaos have limits. And once people are pushed past their limits, they tend to become anxious and frustrated, and to freeze. In the corporate setting this leads to unwillingness to take risks, try new things, and use new approaches.

My theory is that disengagement is not some isolated phenomenon, it is built into the machinery of today’s business (see Disengagement is not a flaw: It’s built into the system). And businesses are embedded in a world of uncertainty, so people at work are confronted with the need to tolerate uncertainty rather than attempting to ‘fix it’ with an intensification of techniques that work in situations of higher certainty. This is the source of  the frustration and anxiety, and if the organizational culture amplifies the stresses of uncertainty, disengagement happens.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was close to this when he wrote,

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

Perhaps, today, we have to go even further.

Cultures differ widely in their avoidance of uncertainty. Scandinavian countries, for example, are among those with the lowest uncertainty avoidance measures, meaning the cultures there have effective mechanisms for tolerating uncertainty, such as the reliance on more ‘informal, unstructured, and fluid roles and behaviors’, while those with low uncertainty tolerance rely more on rules and rigid hierarchies [Wikipedia].

So, the most critical step a company can take to accept uncertainty is to relax the cultural norms: to become more fluid, egalitarian, and informal. And at the personal level, we should aspire to Fitzgerald’s claim of a first-rate intelligence, only more so.

And how does someone with tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity act? They rely on connections to others to openly discuss the uncertainties and ambiguities that confront them. They experiment with ways to move forward even when they may have insufficient information or unreliable information: they seek to take action rather than freeze. They accept the fact that they don’t have all the answers. And they are aware that sometimes problems are actually dilemmas that cannot be solved.

As I wrote some time ago, in the characterization of the new way of work, which I call leanership,

Leanership values experimentation over execution, places agility above process, and puts learning ahead of knowing.

Those are the companion attributes of a healthy tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.