The Ambiguity Opportunity

At many points over the course of a career in higher education, we all will be asked to exist in times of transition. Whether we are leaving graduate prep programs charged with embarking in our profession as agents of change, tapped by our Dean to lead a department “struggling with transition,” or coaching a student through the ephemeral spaces of learning that takes place between the gaps of the vectors/stages/modes of the current theory du jour, we will all quickly realize that often the only static state of being in our work is that it is ever changing. It’s difficult to locate a single moment in my 20 years in the field when transition hasn’t been at the forefront of my day to day, and yet too often I wonder, when are we working toward change for change sake and when are we taking time to reflect in order to turn times of transition into times of transformation? We’ve recently wrapped a professional search process on my campus, during which I was struck by how many times candidates were asked, “How do you deal with working in an environment that can be ambiguous? ” I cringed a little bit every time worried that our visitors would be concerned about lack of direction, confusion, or that we weren’t operating as the perfectly collaborative team of their dreams. I’d send them to lunch with some students and start thinking about how I would help them process their interview in our wrap up meeting. People hate the feeling of uncertainty; if not managed or addressed properly, it can lead to confusion, frustration, or worse—and that is a bad thing. Equally bad, however, is running from ambiguity, leaping to solution based on assumption, and failing to take the time to explore what is unknown and learning to be comfortable in, and taking the time to reflect, when presented with the opportunities of ambiguity afforded us during times of transition. In the Fall of 2000, I was in my first year of my master’s program around the time that Susan Komives’s piece “Inhabit the Gap” was published in this journal. In that article, she referenced Lee Burdette Williams’s astute observation that “our job as student educators is to inhabit [the] gap”—the liminal space where individuals move between “knowing something to being able to use that that knowledge to inform their own attitudes and behaviors” (Komives, 2000). I would argue that times of transition are similar “gaps” and opportunities in space and time for professional and institutional growth, but when was the last time you felt the phrase “in the interim” was a charge to investigate and develop best practice instead of a dull holding pattern devoid of activity and thought? Often we talk about transitions—especially if they involve budget cuts, reduction in force, or crisis—in terms of regrouping, refocusing, and redefining. These times can often be heavily monitored, focused on quality markers that can be quantified, reported on, and translated into consumable data by trustees, donors, and the public. This can limit our ability and our interest in thinking big and taking risks. I wonder what could be accomplished if we focused on times of transition in terms of reflection, challenge, and transformation, and believe if we spent more time immersed in the liminal spaces between transition points we would