Have you ever been faced with a puzzling pattern of events, been stuck in a confusing situation, or felt trapped by your own routine thinking patterns? Or have you wondered about how you think and make decisions during messy and unexpected situations? In The Business of Ambiguity, Dr. Debbie Sutherland guides you to implement five key thinking and behavior strategies to explore business uncertainties and build an ambiguity mindset—the cognitive and behavioral capacity to untangle and understand the nuances of ambiguous situations. Using research and powerful real-life stories from dozens of executives whose roles involve a high degree of ambiguity, Dr. Sutherland provides you with the tools, resources, and insights to help you increase your comfort with the unknowns. If you are a business leader who wants to expand your thinking and leadership capacity, someone who wants to explore a knowing gap in life or business, or someone who has felt that it might be time to understand your biases and assumptions on a deeper level, this book is for you.

A thought-provoking guide to help you lean in to the discomfort of the unknown to turn creative opportunities into intentional design, from Stanford University's world-renowned d.school. “Navigating Ambiguity reminds us not to run from uncertainty but rather see it as a defining moment of opportunity.”—Yves Béhar, Founder and CEO, fuseproject A design process presents a series of steps, but in real life, it rarely plays out this neatly. Navigating Ambiguity underscores how the creative process isn’t formulaic. This book shows you how to surrender control by being adaptable, curious, and unbiased as well as resourceful, tenacious, and courageous. Designers and educators Andrea Small and Kelly Schmutte use humor and clear steps to help you embrace uncertainty as you approach a creative project. First, they explain how the brain works and why it defaults to certainty. Then they show you how to let go of the need for control and instead employ a flexible strategy that relies on the balance between acting and adapting, and the give-and-take between opposing approaches to make your way to your goal. Beautiful cut-paper artwork illustrations offer ways to rethink creative work without hitting the usual roadblocks. The result is a more open and satisfying journey from assignment or idea to finished product.

Examines seven types of ambiguity, providing examples of it in the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot.

In the Western imagination, Islamic cultures are dominated by dogmatic religious norms that permit no nuance. Those fighting such stereotypes have countered with a portrait of Islam’s medieval “Golden Age,” marked by rationality, tolerance, and even proto-secularism. How can we understand Islamic history, culture, and thought beyond this dichotomy? In this magisterial cultural and intellectual history, Thomas Bauer reconsiders classical and modern Islam by tracing differing attitudes toward ambiguity. Over a span of many centuries, he explores the tension between one strand that aspires to annihilate all uncertainties and establish absolute, uncontestable truths and another, competing tendency that looks for ways to live with ambiguity and accept complexity. Bauer ranges across cultural and linguistic ambiguities, considering premodern Islamic textual and cultural forms from law to Quranic exegesis to literary genres alongside attitudes toward religious minorities and foreigners. He emphasizes the relative absence of conflict between religious and secular discourses in classical Islamic culture, which stands in striking contrast to both present-day fundamentalism and much of European history. Bauer shows how Islam’s encounter with the modern West and its demand for certainty helped bring about both Islamicist and secular liberal ideologies that in their own ways rejected ambiguity—and therefore also their own cultural traditions. Awarded the prestigious Leibniz Prize, A Culture of Ambiguity not only reframes a vast range of Islamic history but also offers an interdisciplinary model for investigating the tolerance of ambiguity across cultures and eras.

Tolerating Ambiguity for Leadership and Professional Effectiveness focuses on an underaEUR"publicized success factor in work and personal life. As the world of work has become more uncertain and rapidly changing, the ability to tolerate ambiguity as well as thrive from it has gained in importance as a trait and behavior for leaders, managers, and individual contributors. The purpose of the book is to enhance the reader's tolerance for ambiguity as a method of fortifying his or her leadership and professional effectiveness. The book describes relevant research and opinion about many aspects of tolerating ambiguity. Each chapter contains a few ideas for dealing better with ambiguity, and the final chapter presents a comprehensive list of suggestions for becoming more effective at dealing with ambiguity. SelfaEUR"quizzes are presented in ten chapters to help you personalize the major chapter theme under consideration. All key points throughout the book are illustrated with examples, including references to identified individuals and business organizations. The major contribution of the book is its systematic presentation of applied information related to tolerating ambiguity, such as the payoffs from tolerating ambiguity, the attributes and actions of people who tolerate ambiguity, enhancing leadership effectiveness, and the facilitation of creativity and innovation. The book also includes a master plan for applying the information about ambiguity tolerance to serve as a guideline toward action.

From the groundbreaking author of The Second Sex comes a radical argument for ethical responsibility and freedom. In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of “ways of being” (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.

This new work shows that a key factor for great leadership is the ability to recognize, explore and profit from ambiguous situations. Drawing upon his own research and including compelling international cases, the author reveals how to lead others through times of uncertainty so as to create opportunity, innovation and competitive advantage.