Disordered Action Better Than No Action

The hardest tests are the ones in which every answer is “none of the above.”

Q. In your last column you talked about the importance of preserving perplexity in the workplace in order to encourage creativity. I agree that a bit of uncertainty encourages productive experimentation. But, my problem is that I frequently find two or more answers to every problem, neither of which offer much promise in the face of the other. What’s the best way to resolve such contradictions? Flip a coin?

A. That sometimes works, particularly where no clearly “wrong” approach emerges. However, don’t be put off by an environment in which problems often have two or more contradictory “right answers.” Efforts to definitively resolve such contradictions or “paradoxes” and to find the right answer are not only futile, but they tend to frustrate productive risk-taking and postpone needed action.

A paradox, the dictionary tells us, is a statement or sentiment that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet perhaps true in fact.

The entrepreneur thrives in the face of these kinds of apparent contradictions because it prompts him or her to think, explore, and cope with the entirety of the situation.

By accepting paradoxes, engaging them, using them to search for opportunity, and making decisions for action despite an apparent inability to “resolve” them, you’ll be able to tap huge innovative potential within your firm. Your challenge is to accept these divergent pressures and still act productively. This capacity for integrating complexity, for assimilating contrary alternatives, and still acting in a meaningful way, can give your enterprise an unparalleled edge.

Most prevailing business practices, however, are geared to reducing ambiguity, to minimizing the risk of error. This approach inclines “good” managers to act in familiar ways that will produce predicable outcomes. The result: not much new.

Too often, good managers will throw up their hands in despair in the face of apparently irresolvable conundrums. Such resignation can have disastrous results.

In the 1940s and 1950s, retail giant Montgomery Ward was faced with the fact that most shopping was taking place in downtown retail districts, while the buying public was accelerating its move to homes in the suburbs. The paradox: Merchants selling successfully downtown; consumers shifting residences to the boondocks.

Sewell Avery, the leader of Ward’s, was unable to act in the face of this paradox. His lack of decisiveness in a period where there was no readily apparent “right” answer tripped the company into a decline from which it never recovered. During this period of uncertainty, he rejected the counsel of his more adventurous, action-oriented executives who wanted to risk curbing growth in the “sure thing” territory of the past in favor of expansion in the new retail arenas which offered promise for the future.

During his fatal period of vacillation, he fired scores of his restive vice presidents, precluding the action that could have vouchsafed the future of his chain. Successful managers - like Wal-Mart’s Sam Walton - relish ambiguity. It gives them the freedom to explore and experiment, to find novel approaches, Promethean paths of progress.

In his book, “The Social Psychology of Organizing,” Karl E. Weick extols the benefits of deliberately striving for uncertain accomplishment amidst rampant change, and the chaos and the paradoxes it produces. “Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction,” he advises. Weick tells us to learn, adapt, change and evolve, but don’t ever expect to know fully where you are going.

“It’s OK to not know where you are going,” he says, “as long as you are going somewhere. Sooner or later, you’ll find out where that somewhere is.”

This might be a little too loosey-goosey for most people. But Weick’s fundamental thesis - learn to accept the wisdom of concurrently learning and acting in the face of not knowing - is difficult to rebut in a world assailed by rampant change.

Your job as a boss is to create a milieu in which your followers will learn how to intelligently confront the uncertainty created by dichotomies and still act swiftly and productively.