Thoughts on "ambiguity"

Why "ambiguous" and "vague" are not the same

Some words have taken a life of their own in our industry once they become popular, with each person creating their own working definitions and running with it. Agile is one that comes to mind. Ambiguity is another. David Kelly of IDEO did help popularise the role of ambiguity for creative work, but I could find surprisingly little written about how to be intentional with making ambiguity helpful and preventing its sinister cousin– vagueness.

I once had a product leader request design support for “customizing [xyz] for different segments”, with no information at all about the business or behavioral insight driving the request. When asked for, they said “I think we should embrace the ambiguity of this work– we don’t always have the answers”. Except, in this case, it felt like we had prematurely arrived at an answer (customize xyz) without having defined the problem (why are we customizing xyz, and why is that the best thing to do towards our objective).

While both are flavours of uncertainty, a key difference is that ambiguity is open to more than one interpretation, explanation or meaning.. while vagueness is something which is unclear or ill-defined.

Now, I’m all for embracing ambiguity. Ambiguity is the creative space between what is and what can be. And in that sense, it is pretty much a fuel for innovation. In this case though, ambiguity was not proving helpful. So this conversation left me confused about our differences in understanding of the term.

Employ ambiguity meaningfully

I believe uncertainty can be made useful or not– while ambiguity should be utilised meaningfully, we should fight vague like the plague. Vagueness, especially without being aware of it, can obfuscate or even distract you from defining your problem space.

Ambiguity is the state in which more than one interpretations or possibilities are plausible. It carries a certain mandate to stay open or non-prescriptive, helping stretch our imaginations to those that aren't immediately obvious. On the other hand, vague is the state where we are lacking important information to allow sense-making, and often, we are unaware of it! Neglecting to be curious, learn, examine, frame and reframe the problem meaningfully can have cascading effects on everything downstream of it, and this is why it’s such an important part of the process.

There is a direct relationship between framing and the meaningful creation of ambiguity. Too ill or loose a definition, the problem space is vague and missing structural integrity. Too specific a definition and you’ve lost ambiguity to narrow, sub-optimal and potentially, misplaced solutions.