Delicious Ambiguity

It’s a mixed bag.

The stock market in the United States is booming. Lockdowns or other restrictions remain in place around the world. Vaccines are rolling out and slowly, but surely, people are getting their shots. The service, travel, hospitality, and other industries continue to struggle. Children in many areas are going back to in-person schooling and social distancing is still necessary to help keep the pandemic at bay. Like I said, it's a mixed bag.

Many of us, even if we didn’t say it out loud, hoped that the New Year would provide some clarity. That somehow, the uncertainty would become less uncertain and that maybe, we would have more answers than questions... but that does not seem to be happening yet. To boot, a year’s worth of limited in person socialization has taken its toll, leaving many of us wondering how to make it through what is hopefully, the final stretch. 

Last year I talked to Kelly Goldsmith on my Disrupt Yourself Podcast. Kelly is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Vanderbilt University and earned her PhD from Yale. Kelly studies how people respond to uncertainty and scarcity, uncovering the seemingly paradoxical effects. Kelly's TEDx talk, How to make the most out of not having enough, has more than 120,000 views. And fun fact, she was a contestant on the third season of Survivor: Africa.

While we are still unpacking the emotional and immediate impacts of COVID-19, many of us feel like we don’t have enough. A quick note, I am not talking about poverty or food scarcity here. Both are very real issues that require different responses. I am talking about those who are grappling with the unknown, struggling to gauge the right amount of hope that they will allow themselves to feel.

There are two ways to look at this.

No. 1 - Subjective Scarcity

“Subjective scarcity comes from social comparisons, which have a huge influence on our belief about whether what we have is enough,” Kelly shared. “We also can compare ourselves to the standards or expectations that others have for us, or even the goals that we have for ourselves. Any time we come up lacking, we are going to experience a sense of subjective scarcity.”

She went on to explain that scarcity itself isn’t the issue, instead the problem derives from false hope, where one makes decisions that are maladaptive to the situation. If we know that something is truly gone—the boyfriend isn’t coming back, the money is lost, the layoff happened—we can mourn and process that loss, lean into the constraint that has been created and grow in a different direction. “If there is no hope and you believe there is no hope, people are very adaptive and don't just stand there and bash their head into the wall forever.”

That’s why as a business leader it’s important not to give hope when there isn’t any. Think about how often people say, “I wish they would just tell me what’s going on. I wish they would just tell me what’s happening.” If you know, then you move on. If you don’t know, you start to compensate to protect that hope and develop fears of scarcity in ways that might not be productive. The kind thing to do from a research perspective—if there is hope, let people feel hope. If there isn’t, don’t inadvertently create the scarcity. It’s not kind.

No. 2 - Embrace Your Constraints

A second way to look at scarcity is to draw upon the S Curve of Learning?, Guardrail #3: Embrace your Constraints. Kelly’s research found, “if you want to navigate constraints…thinking abstractly is what you have to do. You have to take that higher level perspective in order to find the unique way around the problem.”

So, in fact, a perceived scarcity can be exactly what you need to help you identify ingenious solutions and new innovations at work and / or home. Studies have shown that companies that are bootstrapping funding, often perform better than those that have greater resources. Why? Because the bootstrappers had to get creative to problem solve rather than simply throw money at the issue. Where's the creativity in that?

There is this beautiful quote by Gilda Radner, “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”

To move on from scarcity, you have to embrace it rather than resent it or feel like you are missing something. While the world will do what the world does—we need to understand this: we can’t control a pandemic or the countless other things that can and often do disrupt our lives. But, what we can do, is control how we respond to the situation and try to make the best of it.

?We can step into the delicious ambiguity.

If you'd like to do additional work on embracing the constraint that was 2020, download our Gaining Insights guide, turn the adversity of 2020 into a 2021 opportunity!

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Whitney Johnson is the CEO of human capital consultancy WLJ Advisors, an Inc. 5000 2020 fastest-growing private company in America. One of the 50 leading business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50, Whitney and her team are experts at helping high-growth organizations develop high-growth individuals. She is an award-winning author, world-class keynote speaker, frequent lecturer for Harvard Business School's Corporate Learning and an executive coach and advisor to CEOs. She is a popular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, has 1.8 million followers on LinkedIn, where she was selected as a Top Voice in 2018, and her course on Fundamentals of Entrepreneurship has been viewed more than 1 million times. In 2017, she was selected from more than 16,000 candidates as a “Top 15 Coach” by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith.