ISSUE #031 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN
If you read our last issue, you know I ended up in emergency surgery.
I'm doing better. I'm healing well. But my life has changed, and here's the strange part - I'm not entirely sure how much.
Not because nobody's told me anything. Everybody has an opinion.
Some people treat it like a footnote. "You'll forget this ever happened in a few months. Life goes right back to normal." Others treat it like something closer to a permanent shift, a new set of limits I'll be living inside from now on, whether I notice them day to day or not.
Same surgery. Same person. Same week. And the people closest to me can't agree on how big a deal this actually is.
That's not me lacking information. If anything, I have too much of it, coming from too many directions, pointing in different places. That's something else.
Ambiguity Is Not Uncertainty's Weaker Cousin
This is the fourth and final issue in our series on VUCA - Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. We've covered a lot of ground: the volatility of a world that won't sit still, the uncertainty of not knowing what's coming, the complexity of systems where everything touches everything else.
Ambiguity is the trickiest of the four, because most leaders treat it like a weaker cousin of uncertainty. Something more information will eventually clear up.
Here's the distinction worth holding onto: uncertainty means you understand the situation, you just can't predict the outcome. You know the rules, you just don't know which way the coin will land.
Ambiguity is different. It's not that you don't know what's coming, it's that you don't even understand the full picture and two different people can interpret it two different ways. Same information. Multiple possibilities. That's part of what's happening with the opinions about my own recovery. Some of it, honestly, is just people who didn't do their homework or didn't explain it well. But even setting that aside, the people who did know what they were talking about still didn't agree.
Most leaders think ambiguity is a fog that more research will eventually burn off. Sometimes that's true; enough good information can turn a genuinely ambiguous situation into a clearer one.
But the real issue is that some ambiguity doesn't resolve with more data, at least not in any reasonable time frame. At some point, you have to resolve it with a decision instead. And waiting for clarity that isn't coming anytime soon is its own kind of failure as a leader.
The Shape in the Fog
Here in Northern California, we get a particular kind of fog that settles in the valley. It gets thick enough that you can lose sight of the road twenty feet ahead of you.
Picture driving through it. Up ahead, there's a shape. It could be a stalled car. It could be a mailbox. It could be a deer standing still, or it could be nothing at all, just your own headlights, bouncing back off the mist. That's actually why fog lights exist. They're mounted low and aimed down, so they light the road right in front of you instead of shining up into the fog and reflecting straight back at you the way regular headlights do. They don't help you see further ahead, they just stop your own lights from working against you. And in intense fog, they mostly exist so oncoming traffic can see you before they can see your car.
On a curvy road, it gets worse. The fog hides the curve right along with everything else. A shape that's actually sitting off to the side - a mailbox, a deer at the edge of the road - can look like it's parked dead center in your lane because you can't see the road bending away from it. You brace and swerve for something that was never really in your path. Or it goes the other way: something that looks safely off to the side turns out to be exactly where the road curves back toward it.
You and the passenger sitting next to you are looking at the exact same shape. And you might call it two different things.
That's ambiguity. Not "I don't know what's around the next bend" - that's uncertainty, and every driver on that road has some of that too. Ambiguity is standing right in front of the same shape as someone else and walking away with a genuinely different read on what it is.
A Live Example: The AI Regulation Mess
If you think this is just a driving analogy, look at what's happening in AI regulation right now.
A federal bill aimed at setting one national standard for AI collapsed this summer, partly because it would have overridden state law. Meanwhile, states have passed AI regulations of their own, over a hundred of them, across more than half the country. Colorado's law technically took effect at the end of June. And the federal government has simultaneously directed its own justice department to challenge those state laws as unconstitutional, laws that remain enforceable on paper, until a court says otherwise.
If you're a business owner using AI tools right now, ask yourself a simple question: which rule applies to you?
There isn't a clean answer. Not because nobody's done their homework, but because two legitimate authorities are both claiming the same ground, and no amount of research produces a single correct answer to stand on.
That's not a research problem. More Googling won't fix it. It's ambiguity, sitting right in the middle of your compliance obligations, and it isn't going away on its own.
A Simple Test - Not an Iron-Clad Law
So how do you tell the difference, in your own leadership, between uncertainty and ambiguity? Here's a rule of thumb - not an iron-clad law, but a reliable enough test to run before you decide how to respond.
Ask yourself two questions.
1. Do I know what the possible outcomes are, I just don't know which one is coming? If yes, you're likely dealing with uncertainty. It can be reduced with data, research, and time.
2. Could a reasonable, informed person look at the exact same information I have right now and walk away with a genuinely different, valid read on it? If yes, you're dealing with ambiguity. And more information usually won't fix it because the people disagreeing already have the information. They're just reading it differently.
Get this distinction wrong, and you'll spend months gathering data to solve a problem that was never about data in the first place.
Where Leaders Get Into Trouble
Here's where most leaders get into trouble. When the fog rolls in, the instinct isn't to slow down. It's to keep driving the same speed you always have.
Plenty of drivers do the smart thing and slow way down. But the number who don't is remarkable. They know this road. They've driven it a hundred times. They trust their own reflexes enough to keep running close to the same speed they'd run on a clear day, right up until the moment that trust turns out to be misplaced.
I've noticed there are two kinds of hurry that show up here. One is the frantic kind - always behind, always reacting, always a half-step from losing control. This is the person who feels like they're supposed to already be somewhere else - running late, playing catch-up, behind before the day even starts.
The other is quieter but just as dangerous: the hurry that comes from a self-imposed timeline. I should be further along than this by now. That kind of hurry doesn't look like panic. It looks like an unhealthy kind of ambition. The belief that you deserve to already be further along than you are, and an impatience with how long things actually take. This person doesn't feel frantic, they feel entitled to move faster than the fog allows. But it produces the same impaired judgment.
Both kinds of hurry do the same thing to a leader that they do to a driver in fog. They push you to keep the old speed in new conditions.
The leaders who navigate ambiguity well aren't the ones who move fastest. They're the ones who understand that slowing down isn't losing ground, it's buying margin. Margin to actually see the shape ahead before you decide what it is. Margin to make a real decision instead of a reactive one.
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. That's not a contradiction. That's the whole point.
What a Non-Anxious Presence Actually Is
Emotions are contagious. Sit next to someone who's anxious long enough and you'll likely start feeling some of it yourself. Walk into a room where one person is genuinely settled, and the room tends to settle with them. Any leader who's watched a team's mood shift the second they walked in already knows this firsthand.
Here's why it matters in ambiguity specifically. Anxiety doesn't just feel bad, it narrows you down to fight or flight. It shrinks your ability to think clearly and make a wise call, right when you need both the most. And if you're the leader, your anxiety doesn't stay contained to you, it moves through the room. It also undermines people's trust in your decisions, even the right ones, because they can feel how rattled you are while you're making them.
A non-anxious presence isn't pretending the stress isn't there. That’s actually unhealthy and unnecessary with very few exceptions. A genuinely non-anxious leader has developed enough capacity to feel the full weight of the moment without being run by it - staying composed now and dealing honestly with the emotion later, instead of either exploding in the moment or pretending there was nothing to feel in the first place.
That composure is what keeps you from overreacting because you're running behind, or because you're impatient with how long the fog is taking to clear. It's what lets you meet the actual moment instead of your emotional reaction to it. And your team is watching. Most people rarely get to see someone stay steady under real pressure. When you do, you're not just managing the moment, you're also teaching them something almost nobody gets the chance to learn any other way.
The Fog Doesn't Lift Because You Waited
The fog I'm describing doesn't lift because you waited long enough.
I've coached leaders whose biggest struggle isn't laziness or fear of hard work. It's this exact pattern. They want to be sure before they move. They want to be safe. So they keep waiting for one more piece of information, one more confirmation, before they'll commit to a direction, and most of them already know the waiting is the problem, and still can't quite stop doing it.
Here's the test worth running on yourself at that moment. If what you're facing is genuine ambiguity - if reasonable, informed people already have the same information you do and are reading it differently - then waiting isn't buying you certainty. It's just costing you the decision you already had enough to make.
Sometimes the fog lifts because you decided to move through it. You chose a definition, picked a direction, acted on a value instead of a guarantee. And sometimes it doesn't lift at all. You just get better at seeing the shape for what it probably is, make your best call, and keep driving.
Where in your business right now are you waiting for clarity that isn't actually coming?
Until next time,
Keep learning.
Keep growing.
And God bless,
Michael Redman
Half a Bubble Out (HaBO)
Business Consulting | Leadership Coaching
