Have you ever found yourself deep in the weeds. You look at the clock after a period of time blindness and realize that 3 hours have passed? This happened to me yesterday.

I received a request from our sales team to fix a data error on a flyer. I’m NOT in marketing, I’m a product manager, but I take in marketing projects when needed.

I got this request, added it to my To Do list and didn’t think about it. It seemed easy, push the “easy button” on the task, ESPECIALLY since I’d already worked out some ambiguity previously with a similar task. I thought I’d just knock this out. So I went digging for the right data. I was using the data my boss gave me, I found some data that I thought was the source of truth, but it was devastating.

HOW CAN DATA BE DEVASTATING???!!

Well, data can be devastating when you realize that what you’ve been telling people is embarrassingly wrong, the trend is completely opposite.

So I toddled over to our Engineering Director with a naive frustration, thinking, “Oh, he’ll have the answer. My frustration will be gone.” Never did it occur to me that I’d be muddled in a grey space of permanent ambiguity. Ewwww. Nooo, there was no clean answer. There were three possible reason for the discrepancy and his hands were tied about it too. It’s like walking into a small stream and getting tricked by the foot of mud you actually stepped in.

As I was caught in the fray, I talked to our Sales director and it slid off his back. I felt a little stupid. While I preach about flexibility, THERE IS SUCH A THING AS TOO FLEXIBLE. It hit me that, it’s true that people need to hold the line. I’ve worked soooo hard to build flexibility into my perspective. Buy caught in my own rigidity point (eg. DATA that is SUPPOSED TO BE ACCURATE) and feel justified in being rigid about, I find the struggle.

Ok, so what am I struggling with? Decision making in ambiguity, the fight between good and evil, risk versus reward (aka making the customer happy).

I know I needed perspective to get out of my mire. It was crazy to get a completely off the wall flexibility, that still leaves me uncomfortable. I guess I CAN reduce my anxiety about it, by using perspective. For instance I have to think about the time factor. But it still leaves me feeling icky AND my hyper independent self hates that I had to go to others to get that perspective.

I’ll file this away. It will help me deal with ambiguity better. I just need to do these two things, even if it goes against my ick factor:

1. Get perspective and put away the hyper independence
2. Acknowledge the anxiety reducing factors to ease your conscience
3. Adapt with your bad self, friend (aka being your own artificial intelligence and adjusting where needed)