Theodore Adorno and colleagues wrote The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. One of Adorno’s most pervasive quotes comes from that influential work: “Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.1”
In typical efforts identifying boundary objects, researchers try to find common ground between two entities that allow ease of collaboration or provide strategies for conflict resolution, or, indeed, simply open communication between two or more static conceptions of an organization. By promoting ambiguity tolerance, however, the foundations of any conflict can be disassembled and reorganized into a knowledge structure that can be more acceptable to all involved participants. Adorno’s work has been criticized for its methodology by subsequent scholars,2but the identification of a personality type that is particularly uncomfortable with uncertainty, has been useful in studies involving problem-solving.3
Without evoking the politically-charged term “authoritarian,” it is more useful in this instance to describe individuals as being more or less comfortable with uncertainty and therefore more or less rigid about not changing existing structures.
Much of the professional and academic worlds assume conflicts are ultimately resolved within a dialectical model resulting in some form of synthesis or understanding. The presumption in any dialectical description is that the two concepts in question are pure, complete and independent of each other because they are defined as such. However, by identifying ambiguity as a boundary object, one can redefine the conditions upon which any knowledge structure is based; therefore, the definitions that serve to describe any structure—those ideas upon which rigid defenders of the structure hold tightest—can be viewed with less certainty, allowing transformation.
The Ambiguity Model in Negotiation
The assumption of the Ambiguity Model is that the basic nature of reality is ambiguous. Certainty does not exist until we define it as such. Even so, certainty as we understand it is illusory, an intellectual grid of definitions placed on top of our existential reality. As Alfred Korsybski warned in Science and Sanity, “Do not mistake the map for the territory.4” The first step in establishing a boundary object between two or more “silos,” (to use the academic nomenclature,) is to have participants agree to operate with that assumption—whether they believe it to be “true” or not. It is a transparent tactic to be considered as part of the process. The second step is to propose that intellectual structures are inherently arbitrary, regardless of the authority granted them. If the defined structures are arbitrary, a multiplicity of definitions can be used to describe the same structural processes. Those definitions must be equally considered. Subsequently, silo boundaries can be reconsidered. A number of possibilities then manifest. Ultimately, a decision is made to either maintain the status quo, alter the silos in various ways (the Yin/Yang symbol is useful in this regard), or to create something entirely different. Tolerance to ambiguity is an encouragement to be creative and a discouragement to be so fearful of uncertainty that one will not take a step unless reassured the future is defined by the steps taken in the past.
