We’re living through an intentionally stunning and erratic period of governance in North America that is having ripple effects across the world. Trying to plan through this can be challenging, and differences of opinion among leaders can make key decisions feel shaky.
Naming a chaotic experience can provide us ways for identifying what we can affect or change. One lens is VUCA, when social dynamics are characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Volatility indicates the intensity and erratic pace of change. Uncertainty points to our low or inability to gain clear and credible knowledge about these conditions. Complexity illustrates the interconnectedness of these issues and their unforeseen yet cascading impacts. All of this leads us to a condition of ambiguity, in which we are challenged to make sense of these conditions.
As overwhelming as these conditions feel, you are not simply at their mercy. Of these four, you can actively address ambiguity by supporting sense-making on your team with a few tools or thoughtful discussions.
Ambiguity is a major impediment to consensus and alignment, especially among senior and executive leaders. If there are strong disagreements about how to interpret dynamic social conditions, your group will be challenged to fully commit to decisions and move forward together.
Depending on how collaborative and consensus-driven your team is, you may benefit from using a quick tool to clarify your shared understanding of the context. Using the right tool can help you garner a “good enough” or sufficient scan of your position in a way that helps your team trust that everyone is considering the same factors and making sense of them in a recognizable way. The advantage of using a tool in this way? They provide a dashboard of intelligence that decision-makers can quickly scan together when locked in a disagreement or debate. It won’t erase disagreement but will offset the ambiguity of the information system you’re navigating together.
This may sound time intensive or laborious, but it needn’t be. This can happen in 1-2 hours if necessary. For example, a team can work though an Organizational Landscape Analysis relatively quickly in order to assess who else is active on an issue, in what ways, and how your pivots may impact broader advocacy efforts. You can customize TREC’s Organizational Landscape Analysis tool to be as narrow or issue-specific as needed, and also use one to gain an impression of how opposition may be positioned.
No matter what decisions or plans you make, your efforts will be limited by your team’s capacity. Leaders often make choices based on passion and imperative. However, the work actually is rooted in the real and lived resources of time, knowledge, focus, expertise, and coordination.
Once you make a decision about your action, it’s worth investing even 30 minutes with the team to reflect on their capacity together. The challenge in doing so is that capacity can feel ineffable or difficult to quantify. TREC’s Capacity Assessment Tool provides some shared frames for understanding capacity so that your team has a stronger foundation for delegation and managing their effort. No tool is a perfect depiction of reality; they provoke discussion to foster a shared, sufficient interpretation of what’s accessible for the work. Capacity is defined for the purposes of this tool with four categories:
- People and Money: what you directly invest
- Knowledge and Skills:the unique specialties you hold
- The special contributions your people bring with them that are inseparable from their time or effort
- Technical expertise and skills, insight, prior experience
- Influence: the leverage and attention you can muster
- Key Relationships: the access you have with key individuals & the influence you have over their decisions and actions
- Footprint: the number of supporters you can connect to this issue and their level of engagement
- Communications: your ability to broadcast relevant information to audiences clearly and quickly
- Assets: the things you can easily share that don’t require time or effort
This tool is imperfect in that individual capacity can widely vary depending on experience, personality traits, and individual tolerance for intensity and stress. However, when it comes to a collective effort this tool can give the team more confidence in what they can commit to and where adjustments for individual focus may need to be made.
We can’t change the facts of a crisis, but we can increase our alignment and collective initiative to address them. We can also step back from turning every pivot into a “white knuckling activity” where we call our teams to simply bear down, do more, and do it better. Taking the time to arrive at a reasonably-shared assessment of your position can radically increase your ability to move quickly together.
In solidarity,
– Juliette
Organizational Landscape Analysis
An Organizational Landscape Analysis is a way to develop a bird’s eye understanding of the major players in your sector and can be particularly helpful for strategic planning, campaigns, and programs.
Customize and fill out this chart to assess and compare other organizations’ focus areas and avenues for influence.
Capacity Assessment Activity
One of the key limiting factors for your work is your team’s collective capacity to carry things out. This tool is designed to provide definitions and a way to quickly assess collective capacity at the programmatic and team level. Different staff members may have varying perceptions around their individual capacity. This tool can help you articulate those perceptions and identify the shared strengths and needs that limit or define your work.
Strategic Planning in Turbulent Times
If your team has ever confronted an unpredicted threat, radical shift in resources, or urgent opportunity, then you know first-hand the struggle of balancing your long-term goals with necessary, responsive action. This webinar will orient you to a strength-based framework for assessing whether to nimbly revise your plans, root into a committed course of action, or develop a radically new path forward. You’ll be introduced to several easy-to-use tools and will leave with more confidence to help your team adapt, persist, and move resiliently with change.
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A streamlined job board and referral board for easier access to opportunities and connections. TREC’s newsletters will also be posted on our website blog, and most blog posts are open for your discussion!
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Juliette Lee
Senior Consultant
What lights you up in your role—what feels like “YES, this is my thing”?
I adore the complexity, deep listening, and necessary improvisation of
live group facilitation and helping teams toggle between concrete detail
and expansive vision. Seeing them come into alignment and work things
out in live time is incredibly rewarding in a job that tends to be
removed from experiencing the direct impact of our work.
What do you hope people feel after working with you?
I hope our client partners feel recognized, understood, respected, and
that they were able to move the needle on their challenges after working
with me. They’re doing noble work in ignoble times and I’m their
superfan!
If you could have any animal sidekick (real or mythical), who would it be and why?
Opossum. They’re ugly-cute, helpful, not for everyone but undeniable to the wise few. Also, as a sidekick, it’d be really fun to carry one around in a sling and share my meals with it. Lookit all those teeeeeeth!
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given (or ignored)?
I might be wrong. That’s always helpful to keep in mind!!!!