The Business of Ambiguity

Demystify the Unknown with Five Key Thinking and Behavior Strategies

Dr. Debbie Sutherland

Have you ever been faced with a puzzling pattern of events, been stuck in a confusing situation, or felt trapped by your own routine thinking patterns? Or have you wondered about how you think and make decisions during messy and unexpected situations?

In The Business of Ambiguity, Dr. Debbie Sutherland guides you to implement five key thinking and behavior strategies to explore business uncertainties and build an ambiguity mindset—the cognitive and behavioral capacity to untangle and understand the nuances of ambiguous situations. Using research and powerful real-life stories from dozens of executives whose roles involve a high degree of ambiguity, Dr. Sutherland provides you with the tools, resources, and insights to help you increase your comfort with the unknowns. If you are a business leader who wants to expand your thinking and leadership capacity, someone who wants to explore a knowing gap in life or business, or someone who has felt that it might be time to understand your biases and assumptions on a deeper level, this book is for you.

Dr. Debbie Sutherland is an academic executive with over twenty years of global work experiences in Canada, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. She is continually learning about the dynamics and hidden power of adult learning, organizational behaviors, and systems thinking through the business lens. She has worked in a variety of centralized roles in complex adaptive systems and international start-up organizations and is currently living and working as an executive in the UAE. She specializes in setting up the ideal structure, culture, and people-centric programs to enable leaders to thrive in the workplace. Debbie has completed her doctorate of education in adult and organizational learning and an executive master’s degree in socio-organizational psychology, each from Columbia University, and is a certified executive coach.