Strategic Ambiguity: When Clarity Becomes the Enemy of Strategy
The Clarity Trap
“We need more clarity.”
It is the most common refrain in strategy reviews, boardrooms, and leadership off-sites. Clarity of vision. Clarity of priorities. Clarity of execution. In stable, knowable environments, this instinct makes sense. In a world wrapped in what Clausewitz called “the fog of greater or lesser uncertainty,” the relentless pursuit of clarity can become strategic self-harm.
What if the problem is not that we lack clarity, but that we try to impose it where it does not belong?
This is not an argument for woolly thinking or strategic drift. It is an argument for precision about where we need sharpness and where we need controlled ambiguity. In complex, fast-moving environments, over-specification does not create alignment; it creates fragility. It locks in assumptions that will be wrong within weeks. It forces the organisation to defend a story about the future instead of updating in response to reality.
Strategic ambiguity, done well, is not confusion. It is a disciplined way of creating freedom of action at the edges while preserving coherence at the centre. It is how you stay nimble without becoming incoherent.
What Strategic Ambiguity Actually Is
Strategic ambiguity is often misunderstood, so it is worth being precise.
Strategic ambiguity is not:
A lack of direction
An excuse to avoid hard decisions
Leaders who genuinely do not know what they are doing
Vibes-based leadership
Strategic ambiguity is:
Clarity of intent combined with looseness of specification about means
Deliberate incompleteness that preserves optionality
Creating unpredictability for adversaries while maintaining coherence for allies
John Boyd, who gave us the OODA loop, put it this way: “The key is to obscure your intentions and make them unpredictable to your adversaries while making yourself more predictable to your allies”.
That is the core insight. Strategic ambiguity creates bounded autonomy, a space where people can adapt, improvise, and respond to emerging reality without waiting for the centre to update the plan.
The alternative, total clarity and total specification, creates the illusion of control. Illusions shatter when they meet reality.
From Destination to Direction: Strategy as Trajectory
Traditional strategy thinks in terms of destinations: fixed end states you can plan backwards from. Define the goal, plot the route, assign resources, and execute.
This works in stable, complicated contexts in which cause and effect are knowable, and the terrain does not shift underneath you. Most organisations today are not operating in that world. They are navigating complexity: small changes cascade unpredictably, multiple forces interact in ways you cannot model, and the act of executing your strategy changes the landscape you are trying to navigate.
In complexity, strategy needs to be a trajectory, not a fixed endpoint:
A direction, where we are heading
A thrust level, how hard we are pushing
No illusion that the route will match the map
Henry Mintzberg drew an important distinction between deliberate strategy, what leaders intend, and emergent strategy, the pattern that shows up in a stream of decisions over time. Real strategy is always some interplay between the two. You need intent, but you also need to let patterns emerge through contact with reality.
Rita McGrath pushed this further with work on transient competitive advantage. In volatile markets, sustainable advantage is a myth. What matters is your ability to place options, run cheap tests, amplify what works, and pivot when the thesis breaks. Discovery-driven planning treats strategy as a set of assumptions to test, not a fixed commitment.
That is what strategic ambiguity enables. You hold the trajectory firm, the shift in where and how you intend to play, but you keep the business model, the exact customer focus, and even the product roadmap negotiable. Ambiguity protects the space to pivot without turning every adjustment into an admission that the strategy was wrong. The organisation was never told “this is the plan.” It was told, “This is the hypothesis we are running against reality.”
The trajectory holds. The route adapts.
Adjacent Possibles and Why You Cannot Pre-State the Future
There is a deeper reason why fixed end states are a bad fit for complex environments. Stuart Kauffman’s work on the adjacent possible is helpful here.
Kauffman’s basic point is simple and uncomfortable: at any given moment, a system sits in a state that makes a particular set of next moves possible, the adjacent possible. As elements recombine, the space of possible moves itself expands. Over time, new capabilities and configurations emerge that could not be fully listed in advance.
Applied to strategy, that means:
You cannot pre-state all the valuable moves your organisation will have available three or five years from now.
The opportunity space is not fixed; it continuously expands and reshapes as you and others act.
Strategy in this world is less like plotting a route across a known landscape and more like positioning yourself at the edge of your adjacent possible, where the next set of valuable moves is most likely to appear, then probing into that space.
Strategic ambiguity earns its keep here. If the adjacent possible cannot be fully known in advance, insisting on complete clarity about the end state and path is not discipline; it is denial. Better to be clear about direction and constraints, then let emerging possibilities at the edge inform what you actually do next.
OODA, Orientation and the Power of Not Over Specifying
Most people who cite Boyd’s OODA loop reduce it to “move faster than the enemy.” That is not wrong, but it is shallow. The real power is in orientation.
OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Boyd was explicit: orientation is the pivot point. It is the continuously updated mental model through which you interpret everything you observe. Orientation shapes what you see, what options you consider, and how quickly you can adapt.
Over-specified strategies lock orientation. They hard-code one story about the world and make it politically and psychologically expensive to question it. When reality diverges, and it will, the organisation spends energy defending the plan instead of updating it.
Strategic ambiguity prevents your view of the world from hardening. It gives teams room to update their understanding of the situation and how the intent plays out in practice as new information comes in. That is not chaos. It is adaptive coherence.
Tempo matters. If your organisation can observe, reorient, and act faster than competitors, their picture of you becomes outdated. Strategic ambiguity about your precise moves stretches their OODA loop while you tighten yours. Internal clarity about intent and doctrine keeps your own people moving in sync.
You become more predictable to allies and less predictable to adversaries. That asymmetry is a strategic asset.
Mission Command: The Execution Architecture for Ambiguity
The most mature expression of strategic ambiguity in action is mission command, the doctrine that emerged from Prussian and later German military thinking and now underpins much of NATO doctrine.
Mission command rests on a few principles:
Commander’s intent: a concise statement of what we are trying to achieve and why it matters, not how to do it
Mission-type orders: specify outcomes, not methods
Decentralised initiative: subordinates are expected to adapt, improvise, or even depart from the plan to fulfil the intent
Back briefing: subordinates restate the intent in their own words and explain how they will approach it, to ensure mutual understanding
This is not soft. It is harder than top-down control, because it requires:
Leaders who can articulate intent unambiguously
Teams capable of independent judgment
A culture where deviation in service of intent is rewarded, not punished
Translate this to corporate strategy:
Strategic intent: “We intend to move from chasing one-off contracts to becoming the default partner governments and regulators rely on when reshaping policy and regulatory frameworks.”
Deliberately ambiguous:
The specific service mix and offers we lead with in each context
The organisational structure that will emerge around this role
The engagement models we use with different governments and regulators
Explicit constraints:
Risk appetite and ethical guardrails for advisory and influence work
Capital and capacity limits for how many major programmes we support at once
A small set of non-negotiable priorities for where we will and will not play
Expectations about tempo, how fast we expect to learn and adapt in each cycle
Ambiguity is not a vacuum. It is bounded autonomy, a space where smart people can act decisively without waiting for permission, because they understand what matters and what does not.
The British Army used this doctrine shift to improve adaptability in counterinsurgency. Amazon uses working backwards to set intent with a future press release without dictating the path. Netflix invests in context sharing so people can make good decisions within loosely held frames. In each case, there is no ambiguity about what matters, only flexibility in how to respond.
Living with Darkness: Uncertainty, Constraints and Emergence
One reason leaders chase clarity is that uncertainty feels dangerous. But not all uncertainty is the same, and trying to eliminate it entirely is both impossible and counterproductive.
Three types are worth distinguishing:
Risk: you can assign probabilities. Actuarial tables, expected value calculations. Here, clarity and precision are assets.
Uncertainty, Knightian: the distribution itself is unknown. You know the space of possibilities but not their likelihoods. Most strategic decisions sit here.
Deep uncertainty: actors cannot even agree on the model, the parameters, or the set of plausible futures. Climate adaptation, AI transformation, and geopolitical disruption sit here.
Strategic ambiguity is a response to uncertainty and deep uncertainty, not to risk. When you can calculate, be precise. When you cannot, design for robustness, optionality, and learning.
There is also a distinction between:
Aleatory uncertainty: inherent randomness you cannot eliminate, such as market volatility and customer behaviour noise
Epistemic uncertainty: lack of knowledge that you can reduce through sensing and learning
For leaders, the question becomes:
Where is uncertainty irreducible, so we build flexibility and options?
Where is it reducible, so we invest in sensing, testing, and learning?
Strategic ambiguity creates the space for that learning. Local teams can try different approaches without being judged as off-strategy.
This leads to what we call the darkness principle: in any complex system, there will always be more going on than you can see or model. Attempts to fully illuminate and specify the system are not only futile but also counterproductive.
You must act before you fully understand. Your actions will change the system. The role of strategy is less to eliminate darkness and more to:
Decide where to shine the torch, where you will invest in sensing
Decide where to accept darkness and build resilience instead
Decide what not to know in advance, so you do not pre-empt discovery at the edge
Constraints, Not Control
The usual objection at this point is, “If we are ambiguous, do we not get chaos?”
Not if you understand constraints.
In complex systems, what matters is not control but constraints. Three types are useful:
Governing constraints: hard limits. Red lines. Capital thresholds, regulatory boundaries, safety limits. Non-negotiable.
Enabling constraints: structures that channel behaviour without fully specifying it. Design principles, decision rights, API contracts, budget envelopes, timeboxes.
Scaffolding: temporary structures that support learning and can be removed once new capabilities stabilise. War rooms, experimental budgets, time-bound cross-functional teams.
Work in complexity and philosophy of action, including Alicia Juarrero’s analysis of context-sensitive constraints, shows that constraints in complex systems do not just restrict; they shape what becomes possible by altering which moves are available and likely.
Strategic ambiguity works when:
Intent and constraints are sharp
Plans and structures are treated as provisional scaffolding
You are not abdicating leadership. You are placing decisions at the right level in the system and sequencing them in the right order.
Practices for Leading with Strategic Ambiguity
So what does this look like in execution?
1. Intent and Tensions, Not Targets and Tasks
Instead of cascading a list of goals, define:
A strategic intent, direction, and why
A small set of structural tensions:
Then ask teams to make those tensions concrete in their context and make their trade-offs explicit in back briefs. You are not giving answers. You are inviting systems thinking.
2. Hypothesis Driven Execution Loops
Treat each strategic thrust as a hypothesis:
“If we invest in capability A for segment B, we will see behaviour C within timeframe D.”
Design minimal viable missions to test it. Expect teams to pivot while staying within the intent. Link this to OODA:
Observe signals
Orient, update belief about the hypothesis.
Decide, persevere, pivot, or kill
Act, reallocate and iterate
Strategic ambiguity protects pivot space. If you have promised a detailed roadmap to the board and the whole organisation, changing course looks like failure. If you have promised a direction and a learning journey, changing the route demonstrates competence.
3. Narrative as Sense Making, Not Propaganda
In complex environments, the strategic narrative is not “here is the plan.” It is:
“Here is how we see the world”
“Here is what we are trying to achieve in it”
“Here is what we are noticing, changing, and letting go of”
Ambiguity operates at two levels:
Externally, where you may keep aspects of your intent or thresholds deliberately fuzzy to competitors.
Internally, where you use narrative to hold multiple possible futures open long enough to learn which affordances are real.
Where Strategic Ambiguity Fails
To keep this honest, it is worth naming the failure modes.
Ambiguity without intent: everything is “emerging,” nothing is decided. People fill the vacuum driven by personal motives. You get drift, not adaptation.
Ambiguity without constraints: local optimisation, fragmentation, brand and capability drift.
Ambiguity without feedback: the centre cannot tell what is working at the edge. The edge cannot see how its learning changes the whole. You lose coherence.
Ambiguity as avoidance: leaders refuse to make uncomfortable trade-offs, so ambiguity becomes an excuse not to prioritise. That is cowardice, not strategy.
Strategic ambiguity is not avoiding decisions. It is sequencing decisions and placing them at the right level in the organisation. It is harder than clarity theatre because it requires:
The courage to act without full information
The humility to update when reality diverges
The discipline to hold intent firm while holding plans loosely
The Courage to Lead amid Ambiguity
In a time obsessed with certainty, strategic ambiguity demands a different leadership posture:
Hold your intent firmly.
Hold your plans loosely.
Hold your ego lightly.
The organisations that thrive in complexity are not the ones with the most detailed strategies. They are the ones that can sense, orient, decide, and act faster than the environment shifts and faster than their competitors can respond.
Strategic ambiguity, done well, does not create confusion; it creates space for emergence. It turns uncertainty from a threat into an asset. And it gives you something that no amount of planning can deliver: the ability to stay coherent while responding in real time.
That is not a weakness to be fixed. It is a capability to be built.
