Ambiguity can be uncomfortable, but embracing it can spark your creative problem-solving genius, as well as lift your spirits, to drive positive change for your team or organization.

Innovation doesn’t have to be the iPhone or a Pet Rock. Transformative innovation often arises from tiny, incremental changes that lead to massive results. Tiny adaptations like a packaging change or process hack that together add up to amazing results.

When an organization is in disarray or faces looming changes, innovation can take a backseat. It’s hard to innovate and think of new solutions when a workforce is stressed and uncertain.  

This ambiguity of change can be a catalyst for creative problem-solving with the proper skills in place.

Building this skill, Tolerance of Ambiguity, will allow teams to stop reacting to change and instead ride the wave to find better and less obvious, innovative solutions.

Using our creativity influences all 9 dimensions of Tolerance of Ambiguity, according to The University of Queensland.

When we are more tolerant of ambiguity? We are more creative.

As delightful as a Dachsund chasing their tail, creativity and tolerance of ambiguity work together to build future-proof teams. 💡

TLDR; Embracing ambiguity is essential to creativity and innovation within a culture of experimentation, risk-taking, and learning.

Don’t believe me? Check out these examples:

Renewable Energy From Rotten Vegetables!? 🥗

As a student in the Philippines, Carvey Ehren Maigue wondered: How can we capture UV rays to create energy?

Traditional solar panels don’t work as well in cloudy weather. Carvey wondered how he might harness invisible but high-energy UV rays.

Carvey was inspired by the Aurora Borealis,  based on the idea that high-energy UV rays are converted to visible light by luminescent particles in the atmosphere.

With this concept in mind, he created a resin-like film using rotten fruits and vegetables with bioluminescent particles.

This flexible resin can be used to cover windows. When the invisible UV light hits the resin, the fruit particles create light, which then fuels solar cells.

But it wasn’t a straight shot to success. Carvey doubted his ideas for years and had to return to the drawing board time and time again.

His technology works on cloudy days, increasing energy production to about 50% of the time instead of 15-22% for standard solar panels.

If every building implemented this technology, how much further could we be on the path to sustainability? What other ideas will springboard from this clever concept of bioluminescent particles on windows?

Change is exhausting, and it can leave us feeling stuck, and unable to find a new way forward. But the world needs YOUR ideas!

Ideas are just imagination. Carvey applied creativity to take an idea, a glimmer of light in his mind, to spend time, investment and trial and error to create an innovation.

In 2020, the idea garnered the James Dyson Award for sustainability, worth $30,000.

What’s your “rotten fruit” idea?

Saving Wildlife From Plastic Rings 🍻

Have you heard of the Pacific Garbage Patch, a piece of the ocean filled with pieces of plastic from all over the supply chain that form a garbage soup?

These plastics are hazardous to ocean wildlife and toxic to the sea.

Heartbreaking images like:

🐢 A sea turtle with a deformed shell thanks to a constricting six-pack ring. While it fits around a young turtle shell, with growth, the ring becomes a shell-deforming belt (and not the fashionable kind).

🪿 Birds with plastic rings around their necks, starving because of their inability to swallow.

If these images don’t make you take out your scissors to demolish any plastic product with a hole in the middle, then you’re heartless IMO.

While some companies have switched to cardboard, Carlsberg came up with another unique solution for packaging their beers.

In a blend of customer user experience and function, they used a special glue that allows customers to easily peel off a can and recycle it afterward.

With this change, they reduced 100 MILLION plastic rings from just ONE brewery and saved 1200 tons of plastic from the ocean every year across its European market.

Saltwater Brewery developed E6pr, a wheat and barley-based ring product that biodegrades and feeds the ocean wildlife at the same time!

How can you experiment with tiny improvements today? Reduce the stress and pressure of making a mistake by choosing low-stakes ideas to try. Baby steps.

The Afterlife of Used Hotel Soaps 🧼

What do you do with the most commonly used hotel amenity?

Some of us take them home to linger as the hygiene item most ignored in a junk drawer (Maybe just my house? They’re great for camping!)

Others leave behind half-used bars that can’t be reused, with approximately 3.3 million bars of soap sliding into landfills every day.

Shawn Siepler spent 150 days on the road per year. One night, possibly while using 2% of that bar of soap before throwing it out, he wondered: what happens to all that discarded soap?

Shawn considered all the hotels around the world. After some quick mental math, he decided he didn’t like those odds. A soap posse was formed and they gathered used soap from 7 hotels.

The squeaky clean sidekicks sat in a single-car garage, hunched over garbage cans with potato peelers, pulverized the cleaned soap in a meat grinder, and melted them down to create new bars.

The first rule of soap club? Tell everyone about the soap club.

With these recycled bars, he launched Clean the World, which supplies basic hygiene products where they are needed around the world.

It might seem like good clean fun, but check out these impressive results: a 60% reduction in diarrhea-related deaths in children, helped by Clean the World and their recycled soap bars.

But the story doesn’t squeak to a sudsy end. To launch Clean the World, Shawn had to scale his operation and finding funds was a daunting task.

In all of his imaginative thinking, he applied for a grant, imagining the donor would walk up his driveway and hand him a $1M check. Instead, he found a rejection notice in his email and a note not to apply again for 3 years.

With the economy in a bad spot, if Shawn didn’t figure out a solution, the whole idea would come to an end.

After their rejection, the squeaky clean soap team implemented a model where hotels pay a small fee and in return, they get bragging rights about the environmental and social impact to their stakeholders and the public.

Clean the World continues to supply those in need with soap, a luxury most of us take for granted.

Ready to Innovate in Your Own Workplace?

Here are some simple practices to try to help you build tolerance of ambiguity (and ergo, creativity).

• Practice mindfulness: Mindfulness and relaxation techniques can enhance emotional intelligence and creativity. How to start? Be present in the moment and observe your reactions to uncertainty without judgment, and notice how it allows you to consider other possibilities instead of just reacting immediately. Journaling, affirmations and building awareness contribute to the skill of paying attention to the present moment.

• Reframe negative thoughts: Instead of seeing ambiguity as a threat, try to see it as an opportunity for growth and learning. Recognize that it’s okay not to know all the answers. Practice saying “I don’t know” or “let me think about it”. When I find myself reacting to an unusual idea, I buy my nervous system time to avoid reacting negatively to new ideas. I say, “Tell me more”, and that gives my brain time to catch up to my instincts.

• Assess the risks when you’re trying something new (The prompts I use below)
  • Am I going to die?
  • Is someone else going to die if I take this risk?
  • What’s the worst that can happen?
  • And if the risk is too great, how can I scale back the idea to implement a smaller test option?

• Step outside your comfort zone: Seek out new experiences, take on challenging projects, and embrace new perspectives. This will help you build confidence in your ability to try new things and face the unknown. How do you get better at feeling uncomfortable? Practice! Start a new hobby or do anything creative. In that place of feeling unsure and incompetent, you will start feeling more comfortable with being a beginner again..
  • If you’re looking for inspiration, my book goes through the 5-step DANCE framework for simple habits you can implement in just 5 minutes a day to expand your comfort zone.

 If you’re the captain of the ship (aka a leader), here are a few extra bonus actions:

• Practice what you preach: Leaders need to model the behaviours that they want to see. Share and show examples of moving forward in ambiguity, and allow time for reflection on ideas.
  • Bite your tongue when you feel the words “that will never work” or “we don’t have the budget” are about to come out of your mouth. Use my tip: Say “tell me more” while you take deep breaths to hijack your instinctive negative reaction.
  • Learn how to explore new ideas
  • Allow your team to take small risks to use their creativity
  • Provide necessary resources and support.

• Focus on Emotional Intelligence: Individuals who are emotionally intelligent and empowered recognize their feelings, can reason through complex concepts, and more effectively express their emotional states to others. Help your teams develop their emotional intelligence through training and open communication. You can build your Emotional Intelligence by building your tolerance of ambiguity.

You don’t have to do it all, just take one tiny action every week.

If you’re ready to leverage ambiguity to cultivate creativity for innovation in your workplace, pick one of these techniques, and try it today.

Bonus points? I happen to be looking for beta testers for my new 6-week Creativity Course, which explores 5 habits to expand your comfort zone.

Each week, you’ll receive one small action to practice these habits in just a few minutes a day. The first habit is the same one that helped Shawn and Carvey dream up their ideas for world-changing innovations: Daydream.

Uncertainty and constant change are inevitable. By cultivating our Tolerance of Ambiguity, we not only reduce our stress and anxiety but amplify our creative potential for innovation and perform better at work.

It’s time to see ambiguity not as a roadblock 🚧 but as a pathway to wellbeing and success 🚀

Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know!!! I hear this in my dad’s voice with an image of him making jazz hands as teen me fumes impatiently as I wait for…. Well, anything.

No, Rome was not built in a day. Rome was built with small, incremental changes over time that built the seat of culture and wisdom.

Think of Rome when you’re trying to make a change in your life or business. Think of small adaptations – like a packaging change or process hack – that can add up over time to a massive change.

Are you up for it?