(Perhaps a missed opportunity to title it “Staring into the void,” or perhaps that was considered and considered far too obvious.)
Ambiguity is a structural feature of complex systems, distinct from uncertainty in that it involves interpretative openness rather than probabilistic unknowns. It is inherent to open and adaptive systems, where unknown unknowns abound.
Recognising this clarifies that attempting to navigate only uncertainty assumes an omniscient and omnivident perspective—one suited to a mechanistic, deterministic, and teleological reality, rather than the entangled complexity we actually inhabit.
Ergo, savvy strategists, complexity practitioners and sense-makers seek to compliment scenario planning and the management of uncertainty by developing the sensibilities that allow for apt way-making amidst ambiguity.
Later:
When working amidst the emergent—particularly when attempting to articulate the ineffable, or phenomena at higher orders of complexity—it’s quite understandable that you may come across as vague. You might even contradict yourself. And that’s okay! If you have patient companions to sense-make with, meaning and insight may yet be realised and conveyed.
…Perhaps part of what I seek is to avoid the temptations of reification, or ‘misplaced concreteness’. Perhaps I seek to help folks see that, even as we provisionally embrace illusions of certainty and clarity, we do so whilst also acknowledging nebulosity—”the insubstantial, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous nature of meaningness” (as David Chapmen so eloquently writes).
Then the really good stuff starts, with many links out to interesting sources that I still must read, so you must at least go read this. Or listen to it. I started by listening to it, then read it, and I found that combination in that order rather good.
I include the link in the last quoted paragraph to remain honest to the source. I stumbled across meaningness.com some time ago, and it acted as an antimeme (as discussed in the not-quoted portion of the above-linked podcast/article) to me. Or perhaps I understood that I would have to spend some time with it, so I stuffed it away in my memex for later, never to return to it. [I see now that an entry in my “Reading List” database for it was entered on September 7, 2020 at 1:08 PM, however it’s possible that is when it was moved into the reading list database.]