Increasing the Ability to Deal with Ambiguity: A Case Study

Situation:

Our Asia-Pacific-based client organization is operating in a highly competitive, price-sensitive, emerging market, producing highly regulated medical devices used by surgeons in established and emerging healthcare facilities. Using assessments, their Human Resources team validated some of the challenges seen in those in client-facing roles: leaders need to make decisions to solve patient health concerns, while also managing hospital and clinic investments. During the business development cycle, individuals have access to limited data. They also need to demonstrate adaptability to changing priorities, showing a tolerance for ambiguity and ability to learn in a changing environment.

Desired Outcomes:

• Confidently make recommendations to meet client needs and achieve patient outcomes, sometimes with limited data and information.
• Increase sale of products while also achieving regulatory compliance, yielding improved patient outcomes and reduced healthcare capital expenditures and consumable expenses for clients.
• Improve abilities of leaders, sales professionals and others through experience and knowledge-sharing with colleagues; improve collective knowledge and skills.
• Reduce the turnaround time on decisions and recommendations for both internal and external decisions

Our Solution:

We designed an experiential, case-based workshop that required participants to work in small teams to respond directly to a realistic strategic business challenge. The data and insights that participants received pre-workshop changed during the experience, in order to simulate evolving data.

The workshop included a preparation task to review available data on the case, then, over two days of in-person facilitated sessions, participants created recommendations, researched additional data needed and managed changing customer priorities. After each working case round, participants discussed their insights, mindset, process and decisions.

Post-workshop, participants attended client-run learning circles and leveraged a Learning through Experience guide, reinforcement videos and developmental activities checklist created specifically for the client with curated resources.

Products and Services:

• Needs analysis and consultation services to create a design strategy that met client goals and resource budget
• Custom instructional design and development, including working with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to create detailed, data-rich cases
• Facilitation services, using experiential methodologies in cross-functional groups
• Performance support through toolkits, demonstration videos and checklists

Success Indicators

The Leading Through Ambiguity initiative employed a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to assess impact and ensure meaningful outcomes.

Key success indicators included:

• Baseline assessment of target skills (later used for comparison)
• Peer feedback in social learning settings
• Learning journal reflections about behavior change

Post-program evaluation results included:

• Content relevance to role: 3.81 of 4
• Learned new skills: 3.81 of 4
• Intent to apply skills: 3.69 of 4

Download the Increasing Leaders’ Ability to Lead Through Ambiguity case study.