Tolerating Ambiguity

The following is an excerpt from the book: The Art of Creative Thinking by John Adair. It is essentially a chapter from a book that deals how to be innovative and develop great ideas. When I saw the title of the book, the immediate skeptical thought that sprung into my mind was, how could someone teach how to be innovative; Innovation after all, is about being original and new. But this book is not teaching. It is a compilation of the characteristics of great thinkers and innovators. It does not teach you something new. It creates an awareness of what similarities that the common man has with these great people. It is about being informed.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. - Henry Adams

'Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.' These words of the poet John Keats point to an important attribute. It was, he felt, the supreme gift of William Shakespeare as a creative thinker. It is important, he adds, for all creative thinkers to be able 'to remain content with half-knowledge'. Keats' contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, said much the same. He spoke of 'that willing suspension of belief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith'.

Some people by temperament find any sort of ambiguity uncomfortable and even stressful. They jump to certainties - any certainties - just to escape from the unpleasant state of not knowing. They are like the young man who will not wait to meet the right girl, however long the waiting, but marries, simply in order to escape from the state of being unmarried.

Thinking sometimes leads you up to a locked door. You are denied entry, however hard you knock. There seems to be some insurmountable barrier, a refusal to give you what you are seeking. Yet you sense something is there. You feel as if you are in a state of suspended animation; you are wandering around in the dark. All you have are unanswered or half-answered questions, doubts, uncertainties and contradictions. You are like a person who suspects there is something gravely wrong with their health and is awaiting the results of medical tests. The temptation to anxiety or fear is overwhelming. Anxiety is diffused fear, for the object of it is not known clearly or visibly. If you are in a jungle and see a tiger coming towards you, you are afraid; if there is no tiger and you still feel afraid, you are suffering from anxiety.

In the health analogy what the person needs is courage. Courage does not mean the absence of anxiety of fear - we would be inhuman not to experience them. It means the ability to contain, control or manage anxiety, so that it does not freeze us into inaction.

More creative thinkers have a higer threshold of tolerance to uncertainty, complexity and apparent disorder than others. For these are conditions that often produce the best results. They do not feel a need to reach out and pluck a premature conclusion or unripe solution. That abstinence requires an intellectual form of courage. For you have to be able to put up with doubt, obscutiry and ambiguity for a long time, and these are negative states within the kingdom of the positive.

The negative and the positive are always at each other's throats, so you are condemned to an inner tension.

The great American pioneer Daniel Boone, famous for his journeys into the trackless forests of the Western Frontier in the region we now call Kentucky, was once asked if he was ever lost. 'I can't say I was ever lost,' he replied slowly, after some reflection, 'but I was once sure bewildered for three days.' As a creative thinker you may never feel quite lost, but you will certainly be bewildered for long stretches of time. 'Ambiguity' comes from a Latin verb meaning 'to wander around'. When your mind does not know where it is going, it has to wander around.

Courage and perseverance are cousins. 'I think and think, for months, for years', said Einstein. 'Ninety nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.' Creative thinking often - not always - does require an untiring patience. Secrets are not yielded easily. You have to be willing, if necessary, to persist in your particular enterprise of thought, despite counter-influences, opposition or discouragement.

When you feel that being persistent is a difficult task, think of the bee. A red clover blossom contains less that one-eighth of a grain of sugar: 7,000 grains are required to make 1 pound of honey. A bee, flitting here and there for sweetness, must visit 56,000 clover heads for 1 pound of honey: and there are about 60 flower tubes to each clover head. When a bee performs that operation 60 times 56,000 or 3,360,000 times, it secures enough sweetness for only 1 pound of honey!

Keypoints

• Negative Capability is your capacity to live with doubt and uncertainty over a sustained period of time. 'One doesn't discover new lands', said French novelist Andre Gide, 'without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time'.
• 'Doubt is not a pleasant mental state', said Voltaire, 'but certainty is a ridiculous one'.
• It is part of a wider tolerance of ambiguity that we all need to develop as people. For life ultimately is not clearly understandable. It is riven with mystery. The area of the inexplicable increases as we grow older. 'A man without patience is a lamp without oil', said Andres Segovia. Creative thinking is a form of active energetic patience. Wait for order to emerge out of chaos. It nees a midwife when its time has come.
• 'Take care that the nectar does not remain within you in the same state as when you gathered it', wrote Petrarch, 'Bees would have no credit unless they transformed it into something different and better'.
• The last key in the bunch is often the one to open the lock.

There must be a beginning of any great matter but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory. - Sir Francis Drake