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The Ambiguity Factor

2020-3-UK01-KA105-0941942020Youth mobilityfinalized
Countries: UK|LV|ES|DK|HU|TR|RO|NL|NO · Grant: €30,820.4
Integration of refugeesLabour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemploymentMigrants' issues

Objectives

Through our project we trained. 32 people from 8 programme countries ; Hungary, Denmark, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Turkey and the UK. The competence to deal with ambiguity and change becomes a more and more important competence for everybody to have. More than ever we live in a world constantly in change with covid 19. The complexity around us is increasing and we have to find out every day again that simple answers don’t work anymore. There are many answers to different problems and challenges and answers can be out-dated very fast. We have access to an enormous amount of information that easily can confuse us. For example it is easy to have large amounts of information about the economical crises, but the answer or solution is not available. It is hard to predict what will be the consequences for our own lives. We have to deal with that uncertainty. On the one hand the endless variety of choices that are offered to us seems to give us a lot of freedom, but on the other hand people feel more and more incapable of making the ‘right’ decision. We are living in multi-cultural societies where ‘normality’ is an inconvenient concept. We have to live with different values, norms and truths. We have to accept situations in which our own ideas and expectations don’t work. The new role of learners in the Life Long Learning context brings ambiguity with it. People are expected to be life long learners and plan their own learning. Deciding about what, how and when to learn. And then deciding what is the best way to use what has been learned, to have gainful employment, be an entrepreneur, or in some other way use the learning to improve one's life. The time of being able to rely on clearly defined learning and working paths is over. There is a huge amount of possibilities and many choices can be made. Maybe the biggest challenge is to define your own path and meet your own needs, which can easily lead to confusion and uncertainty; ambiguity. Ambiguity is associated to situations, states and relationships, where information can be perceived, understood or interpreted in more than one way. Our ability to deal with uncertainty can also be named “dealing with ambiguity”. Feeling comfortable in situations that one cannot fully understand, taking a decision without knowing everything and taking responsibility for it, and then evaluating the outcomes and changing the course of action if necessary, that is dealing constructively with ambiguity. Dealing with ambiguity empowers individuals and supports us in dealing with complexity. The first logical step of managing ambiguity is to reduce ambiguity itself. Knowledge supports reducing uncertainty. However, we do not always have the necessary knowledge, or are open to taking the time to analyze all the facts objectively. As a result "extreme" actions are taken that do not actually resolve the problem, but rather provide a false sense of certainty and safety to those who cannot deal with ambiguity. This behavior can be clearly seen in current political decisions that bar, hurt or alienate entire populations of countries from where there is a perception of danger. These decisions or "easy solutions" do not solve the problem, but rather create new problems for those who made those assumptions and especially those about whom those assumptions were made. According to Geert Hofstede's model of cultural dimensions (see T-Kit Intercultural Learning, pp.20), uncertainty avoidance is one of the four basic dimensions of cultures' differentiation. According to Hofstede, uncertainty avoidance indicates the extent to which a society feels threatened by ambiguous situations and tries to avoid them by providing rules or other means of security. Considering the above project details we wanted to build capacity of our partner organisation by training youth workers and youth leaders. In this frame we set up following objectives: 1. Becoming aware of the ambiguity factor and its different forms; 2. Developing an open attitude towards change; 3. Developing a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset; 4. Increasing the ability to take on new roles; 5. Developing the ability to critically reflect about and take distance from one's own perceptions and stereotypical constructions of reality; 6. Being able to tolerate situations where one is not able to implement his/her own ideas and expectations; 7. Accepting things that make one feel insecure; 8. Taking up new/other ideas coming from other perspectives/cultural backgrounds; 9. Creating a "method to the madness", having a strategy that can be implemented to solve ambiguous situations.

Project partners (9)