Chicago Booth Review Podcast Challenge Your Assumptions, and Embrace Ambiguity

Hal Weitzman: What’s so scary about uncertainty and ambiguity? Could it be that they’re unnerving because they threaten to upend our understanding of the world? And might letting go of your assumptions help you to navigate through uncertain times?

Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I’m Hal Weitzman.

This week we hear from one of Booth’s leadership experts, clinical professor Linda Ginzel. In two essays for Chicago Booth Review, Ginzel offered her insights and advice on these critical topics for leaders.

First, challenging your assumptions. Entrenched assumptions are at the heart of many business failings. Best practices can lead to stale thinking. Right fit might exclude hiring unconventional candidates. Assumptions about target audiences may lead us to ignore opportunities for growth.

So are you depending too much on your assumptions? In this essay from 2017, Ginzel reflected on how to replace your assumptions with your own personal frameworks. The essay was titled, “Identify and Rise above Load-Bearing Assumptions,” and it’s read for us by the author.

Linda Ginzel: In 1872, a 28-year-old apprentice draftsman named Daniel Burnham opened an architecture firm with his good friend, John Root. Burnham and Root would soon become one of the finest architectural firms in Chicago.

Among the firm’s best work is the Monadnock Building, in Chicago’s Loop, at the corner of Dearborn and Jackson. If you have time, or when you tour Chicago, I hope that you will see this building. There’s a very good coffee shop there, and a hat shop, and a great, old shoe-repair business. If you go to visit, pay particular attention to the walls. They are 6 feet thick, almost 2 meters, at the base. They had to be that wide to support the weight of the 16-story-high building.

For thousands of years, buildings had to have thick walls because the walls carried the weight of the entire structure. The higher the building, the thicker the walls had to be. The Monadnock Building represented an amazing architectural achievement: it was the tallest load-bearing building ever built, and it was the tallest office building in the world. John Root called this building his “Jumbo.” It was his last project because he died suddenly of pneumonia while it was under construction.

But the Monadnock Building was a great achievement that also represented the limits of an age-old concept. It made sense that the walls had to be heavy and strong in order to hold the weight of the building. But with load-bearing walls, a building can only go so high. As the ambitions of city planners and residents rose, so did the desires of architects and their clients to build even higher. But how could you build a really, really tall building without building really, really thick walls?

A man named William Le Baron Jenney came up with the answer. Jenney is widely recognized as the father of the American skyscraper, and according to Chicago lore, he had a breakthrough idea when he observed his wife placing a very heavy book on top of a tall metal birdcage. The cage not only supported the weight of the book, Jenney could see that it could have easily supported a whole stack of books. A stack of books piled high and balancing on a birdcage—what an image.

Jenney introduced the idea of a complete, steel skeleton, and he built the first fully metal-framed skyscraper in Chicago in 1884. Just as his wife used a birdcage to support the weight of a very big book, Jenney used metal columns and beams to support his building from the inside.

With Jenney’s new framework, limits on the height of buildings changed. Walls became more like hanging curtains made of glass, and columns within the buildings bore the structure’s weight across the foundation. Buildings began rising to impressive new heights, and together with the development of plumbing, electricity, and elevators, and most importantly with the invention of the elevator braking system, the sky was literally the limit.

The strength of an inner framework

If you go to the top of the Willis Tower (the old Sears Tower) or any other famous skyscraper on a tour of Chicago, you will see much more than an extraordinary view. You will see the power of abandoning long-held assumptions.

The assumption that walls held up a building dominated for many years and limited architects’ progress. Their load-bearing assumptions quite literally served as an upper bound to the height of the buildings they could design. Jenney’s vision to use metal-frame-core construction was brilliant. It represented a completely new way of thinking about the source of strength—the strength of an inner framework.

This story demonstrates the combined power of shedding a default assumption that weighed people down with making a major conceptual shift, which, in this case, provided architects the strength they needed to build higher.

Many of us face load-bearing assumptions, perhaps about management, strategy, finance, or leadership. For example, you may assume that the economic world is a zero-sum game. Or that some people can systematically beat the market without any inside information. Or that debt is a cheaper form of finance because it is less risky. Or that issuing equity is bad because it dilutes earnings. You may even assume that some people are natural-born leaders while others are not, as opposed to holding the view that leadership is a choice.

Shedding assumptions is not an easy task because many have served you well in the past, and there is risk in abandoning them. Yet one of the most important skills that you can acquire is a willingness to question your load-bearing assumptions and make a different choice, when necessary.

Now, there is a second thing that is important for you to notice about skyscrapers. In my classroom, we speak often about the frameworks that allow us to think more complexly about business issues across industries, economies, and geographies. When I teach leadership, I emphasize building our own personal frameworks. When we create our own structures, and reduce our reliance on externally provided ones, we increase our ability to handle ambiguity.

Creating our own frameworks can help us to be wiser, younger, and to learn more from everyday experience—and what we learn can better inform our choices. Frameworks can help each of us create a better future.

Just as a skyscraper’s strength comes from its core, the clarity, vision, and support for your own framework must come from your core. There is no blueprint for your future.

In architecture, structural integrity is established during the planning phase and built into the foundation. William Le Baron Jenney taught us to build up by building from within.

You need that same kind of structural integrity. Build from within. Build your frame with strong values. Build with unselfishness, kindness, and curiosity. Build with open-mindedness to new ideas, with compassion, and with a sense of fairness. Your own inner framework will determine how high you can go. I hope you will continue to rise above your load-bearing assumptions, and keep building a strong, inner framework to ensure the integrity of all you do.

Hal Weitzman: Letting go of your assumptions could be a valuable tool in uncertain times. Financial markets famously hate uncertainty. When a political outcome is unclear, or a conflict threatens the status quo, it threatens their careful models and projections. Not to mention that ambiguity can be unnerving. But could the ability to embrace ambiguity, to build models that thrive in uncertain times, make you a better leader?

In this 2023 essay, Ginzel writes about how reflecting on the lessons of experience and thinking about what structures you can use to interpret and understand the situation can give you a sense of control, calm, and help you to navigate through.

The essay appeared under the headline, “In a Changing World, Embrace Ambiguity.” It’s read for us by the author.

Linda Ginzel: The geopolitical landscape is volatile. Climate change and armed conflicts are wreaking destruction. The pace of inflation has confounded most everyone, including the experts tasked with anticipating it. Artificial intelligence is transforming the labor market.

This is the age of uncertainty, and there are now dozens of indexes tracking that uncertainty in various facets. Chicago Booth Review has run a number of articles about how uncertainty in economic policy, climate policy, and trade policy affects the economy and markets.

All this uncertainty calls for a specific skill: the ability to embrace ambiguity.

That skill is highly valued by businesses around the world. Karen Greenbaum, CEO of the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants (and a former student of mine), shares that AESC in 2022 surveyed nearly 1,000 global business leaders, who identified agility and adaptability as critical factors for success. These same leaders also said they need to hire people who can drive change.

Dealing with ambiguity is important to being a successful leader who can make a positive impact. Businesses need people who are willing to try new things, learn on the job, and adapt to new information. This description would seem to apply to many people, including entrepreneurs and small-business owners, and yet AESC’s survey suggests that these sought-after skills are in short supply.

That demand outstrips supply is good news for anyone with this skill set to offer. But in my experience teaching leadership to thousands of executives, I find that the ability to deal with ambiguity is often underappreciated by my students and ignored by the leadership industry.

All executives should develop this skill—if they haven’t already. Greenbaum suggests that you demonstrate it, and highlight it in your professional brand, through specific examples.

Foundational principles of social psychology teach that leadership can be more about a situation than it is about a person. When a situation is evolving, executives need to evolve too. Start by centering yourself in this moment of change. What skills do you have that have proven helpful? What has inspired you, and what inspires you now?

Then develop your ability to learn from new information. Most people I encounter are high achievers and extremely good at learning new information—yet they can struggle when it comes to learning from new information. In an environment of change, it’s well and good to have a foundation of information on which to build, but you must be able to continue learning throughout your life, and much of that learning comes from the lessons of your own and others’ experiences. A student of leadership can turn just about anything into a personal development opportunity. You can learn from novels, movies, and observations of other people’s lives.

Sometimes such reflection happens spontaneously, but it helps to create a structure for collecting, organizing, and making sense of the information you take in from these experiences. To guide people toward this, I developed an exercise called the vicarious learning framework. It prompts people to create a framework through which they will filter incoming data. My leadership students have used this activity to learn life lessons by observing the behaviors and habits of successful athletes, entrepreneurs, and friends. They have also focused on vicarious learning to develop their skills in taking risks on the job, collaborating in their community, parenting teenagers, and balancing career and family.

The instructions are purposefully ambiguous, and many students initially struggle with them. You might too. In class, I show students examples of previously created frameworks to reinforce the idea that a structure resulting from this exercise can take any number of forms—a journal, a spreadsheet, a flowchart, an image, or something else entirely. Part of the challenge of this assignment is to recognize the ambiguity involved and put some parameters in place that ultimately give you focus.

The exercise also requires accepting that no one sees or understands the world exactly like you do, so this isn’t work that you can expect anyone other than you to do. You are responsible for your own learning, and that means understanding and somehow explaining (even if only to yourself) how you take in and process information. When faced with an assignment that provides murky direction and no obvious conclusion, where do you turn? Inward. It’s up to you to make the situation clearer and concrete, and you must create this structure on your own terms.

Ambiguous times call for structure. Think of forecasters of all ilks, who predict everything from weather conditions to asset returns. Charting an unknown future, they create a model for what it might look like and use that model to guide decision-making. Structure helps organize information. Accountants are creating the framework through which we measure the costs of climate change. In medicine, scientists are creating vaccines, devices, and practices to help society confront an ever-changing set of public-health challenges.

We know from a large body of research that people want closure. If you dread ambiguity, navigating an uncertain situation for years on end can be exhausting. “Staying in the question,” as I sometimes call this, can provoke anxiety. But that tension can be productive. The Zeigarnik effect, named for the late psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, holds that people remember an unfinished task more than a finished one.

A person who embraces ambiguity can find it exhilarating. To be successful, however you define it, you need to see that big opportunities are in the unanswered questions, not just in the answers we already have. Once you truly learn to learn, you understand that there’s no straight line to success—only a path forward, and you use the information you take in to determine your next step. That’s why it’s so important to embrace these changing times. Use what you know to confront what you don’t.

Hal Weitzman: To learn more about Linda Ginzel's approach to leadership, and to apply it to your own career, find her master class on leadership capital at chicagobooth.edu/review. There's seven lessons there that will help you lead more effectively.

That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, which was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, and please do leave us a five-star review. I'm Hal Weitzman. Until next time, thanks for listening. Goodbye.