February 15, 2023

Accepting Ambiguity

This week we submitted our initial reports and sent our babies off to the mentors for feedback. As we wait in anticipation to hear if our ideas have merit or will be torn apart, I’ve been reflecting a lot about the whole process we’ve gone through for our GCIL project. The process I’m referring to is working through activities to generate a solution to a problem. While the class itself has provided a lot of resources and guidance about different processes to follow and things to keep in mind, I felt that we still had a huge amount of freedom to choose our own path, which initially really scared me. I felt not only pressure from the inherent time crunch of the program and from simultaneously defining our organization project, but also pressure to perform. We only have one trip to India, and while we have a second chance to develop a solution while we’re here, I want my time here to count towards something of worth. I’m someone that thrives on structure and definition, and the ambiguity in the first stage of the program was killing me. But luckily, one of the resources I read from the resource grid relayed that ambiguity is actually good at this stage. Just because something isn’t fully defined doesn’t mean it should be rushed to become so. As we’ve moved through each day, I think I’ve been getting better and better at accepting the inherent ambiguity of the process, and I’ve felt that the pressure I put on myself has been slowly melting away. During the past week’s brainstorming and mapping sessions, I’ve felt more engagement than pressure. Now when I think of our experiences developing this project, I’m not thinking of it as disappointing from not making a great project, but really as an awesome journey where I get to try anything and fail and move on unscathed.

Accepting this ambiguity also comes from following the process all the way through to completion. Instead of cutting an idea short when a roadblock is hit, I’ve learned that it’s important to get a different angle of the problem and keep working towards the end goal instead. For example, many tiny details for our project solution wouldn’t have been discovered by our group if we hadn’t committed to a solution and run with it. When I discovered some of these small details while working on a systems map of our solution, I was actually able to transition my thoughts from, “This is impossible; we should do something else,” to, “Wait a minute; maybe I just need to commit more time to this area, and I can find a workaround,” which I eventually did.

I’ve also realized that the process really can be different for different people. Our group struggled with this a bit at first when we needed to decide how to divide our time between tasks and define our projects and solutions. Since each person brings a different perspective, naturally some people will want to focus on certain aspects of the process more than others. But I’ve come to realize through reflection that without these types of disagreements and discussions, our ideas wouldn’t have evolved into what they are today. In the end, I’m truly grateful for my teammates and for the experiences that the program has been able to facilitate for me, and I’m excited to see what this next chapter of the program holds for us.

By Margot