You've most likely heard it in different wordings during meetings or retrospectives, but it usually points to the fact that there is some uncertainty. What I always try to remember when this topic comes up is that it usually triggers different reactions to people:
- Uncertainty breeds anxiety
- e.g. anxiety about not able to come up with solution, anxiety about choosing the wrong solution, anxiety about becoming irrelevant, etc
- Uncertainty breeds creativity
- e.g. exploring new sets of problems, growth opportunity, etc
Uncertainty is not a binary thing - in both the state and the effect to humans.
When I say the state of uncertainty, I mean that there will always be some level of uncertainty and often what we complain about is how much uncertainty we want to tolerate.
The effect to humans is also not binary. Too much uncertainty is bad, but so is too much certainty (read Lara Hogan's excellent breakdown of BICEPS model). A good thought experiment is if we invert the situation so we have certainty in everything, then in that case either you're engaging in some certainty theatrics or you have eliminated all creative aspects in your work - again some people might actually enjoy that and some people might hate it.
An example of unhealthy conversation to have when this topic comes up is treating it as a binary and having uncertainty becomes the catchall of all your problems. A healthier conversation is to actually start asking your team about how that makes them feel and get into the specifics of why it makes them feel a certain way.
When I say getting into the specifics here, I mean getting to the bottom of how the uncertainty affects the day to day activities e.g. when I write code I don't know whether we want this to be performant or not, I don't know what metrics to choose to see whether the project is successful, etc. When you can get it to that level of specifics, that's when you can actually have conversation on whether it breeds anxiety or creativity or both. If it breeds anxiety, then do the work of answering specific questions about the day to day activity itself and how it can be improved instead of engaging into ethereal battle of removing uncertainty.
Should you actually answer all of those specific questions then? My personal thesis here is that there are questions that should stay unanswered unless certain conditions met, but I will write more about that in another blog.