Chapter 13 – Learn How to Fight Through Ambiguity

Demanding perfect clarity on a project before you get started greatly diminishes your value and your potential.

If you create a scenario where you can’t possibly begin your design work until you have:

• Every user story
• Style guide
• UI framework
• User-flow breakdown
• Kickoff meeting
• Kanban setup

 

. . . then you’ve taken a large step toward getting your job outsourced and done for cheaper.

Why? Because anybody can output a UI if they have a complete recipe. With every ingredient arranged and prepared, it does not take a lot of talent to combine and prepare them.

Instead, what is much more valuable and career-vaulting is being able to thrive amongst ambiguity. To be relied upon to get into the trenches of a difficult problem and actively come up with solutions using your design talents shows your ability to help your team and that you do not believe your work is overly precious. Rather, you can put in the exploratory work to help discover the answers while helping the company and the team from your unique vantage point. Imagine how such an approach exponentially increases your value. Not just being someone who can play the six notes on the page, but the enterprising teammate who can tease out the missing pieces to the symphony.

You are perfectly suited for this work! As a designer you are in an excellent position to assist with clarifying solutions to problems that a product, website, or design may have. You can make ideas visible and concepts tangible for evaluations. It can be astonishingly difficult for people to articulate and understand solutions without seeing them. You are creative and empathetic, able to understand the user, which gives you tremendous insight into what solutions to a problem may be best.

If you can begin to place yourself in the discovery process before the requirements are decided upon, you can greatly increase your circle of influence. As opposed to the designer, who is assigned specific tasks and outputs specific things, you are now engaged with stakeholders, clients, and coworkers in ideation. If you gain the reputation as a contributing and hard-working problem-solver, you’ll be sought after to help resolve stalemates and flex your creativity.

One mental mistake many designers make while fighting ambiguity is their concept of “wasting their time.” The idea that if they have to redo elements of the design or throw away layouts that ended up not required, they have had their hours cast away recklessly.

Consider a useful analogy: You may have heard of how some forms of gold prospecting works where multiple holes are drilled until hitting “pay dirt.” When they eventually hit gold, do the miners think they wasted their time digging the previous barren holes? Each and every non-gold hole was all in the service of that gold discovery, making each attempt at discovery a useful part of the process.

If things are unclear and the team needs help in arriving where they need to be, think of any effort you put in as progress to provide clarity. Do not be overly protective with your work and think it is so cherished that it can’t be gainfully employed to help discover the solution. You should strive to have your work be sought after to crystalize the requirement, not just output its artifacts.

Use your empathy to ask probing questions and design mock-ups of “what if’s” to help discover options, solutions, and potential pitfalls for a project. Use your creativity to imagine “what could be.” What interesting approaches or combinations can be used to solve the problem presented?

In many ways, this work can be some of the most challenging and rewarding that you’ll do—grinding out solutions with your team in a cloud of ambiguity as everything tries to arrive at a point of clarity and understanding. Use your craft to help steer solutions to where they could go, even though all the answers are not provided.

Do not be stingy with your work. Put in the time even if the output will be thrown out when things become more apparent. This adds value to your output as it becomes a method of problem-solving and product-building rather than just pretty answers to simple questions.

Learn how to fight through ambiguity.