911: Making Uncertainty your Friend with Maggie Jackson

Pete Mockaitis
Maggie, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Maggie Jackson
Oh, wonderful to be with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear about your wisdom you’ve put forth in your book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. But first, I need to hear about you swimming in the Atlantic Ocean almost every day. What’s the story here?

Maggie Jackson
Well, it’s a pandemic story. I used to be a pool swimmer, and I’ve increasingly loved swimming the older I’ve gotten. And then I moved out to the countryside in Rhode Island from New York City during the pandemic, and got kind of really into swimming all the time in the ocean, increasingly in the fall, and then all winter, and spring. I absolutely love it. Being there at dawn, it’s beautiful and feels a whole exercise you can’t beat.

But then it’s sort of interesting because it also offers a great deal, kind of a daily dose of uncertainty. So, I finally began to realize that part of the joy and the daunting nature of what I’m doing is that swimming is never the same twice. When you’re open water, four seasons swimming, it’s never the same twice. So, it’s a great little lesson in uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And I have recently been getting into cold water immersion. Fun things. And I’m thinking, wow, fall and winter, you’re getting that in spades. You know what the temperature in the water is like during these times?

Maggie Jackson
Oh, yes. Yes, we all keep track of the temperature quite carefully because I do wear some gear, so I adjust my gear. But the temperature is about the low is 36 Fahrenheit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Maggie Jackson
And a lot depends on it could be 20 Fahrenheit in air, and it can be the wind, and then you can be in the snow. It’s all really beautiful and it’s just so much fun. And they’re now doing studies, trying to augment people’s kind of understanding or capability with uncertainty in order to boost resilience. So, we could talk about that. But that, I feel as though, I’ve gained resilience by doing this.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, is it your experience, as it is mine, that just the sheer cold alone is invigorating and mood-boosting over the long term?

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. I find that the colder it is, the more joyful it is. The deep dark winter when my little band of swimmers is going at it, we’re actually laughing out loud and sort of hooting and hollering, and I find that the summer is beautiful, it’s relaxing, it’s wonderful, but it’s not quite as exhilarating. So, it completely represents what we might call good stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now let’s hear a little bit about uncertainty in your book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. Have you encountered any particularly surprising, or extra-fascinating, or counterintuitive discoveries about us humans and uncertainty while putting this together?

Maggie Jackson
Sure. A long list of surprising discoveries related to uncertainty. We mostly think of uncertainty as being, what psychologists call aversive. We don’t like it. Humans don’t like it. And there’s a reason for that. We’re naturally made to survive by getting answers. Like, we can’t exist in the state of not knowing. However, it’s really interesting because when humans encounter something new, it might be your first day at the job, it might be a six-month roadblock on your highway and you got to adjust, you actually undergo all of these kinds of stress changes in your body.

You might sweat a little, your heart might race, but at the same time, there are changes in the brain that are extremely beneficial when you are in this uncertain, this unsettling state of uncertainty. Actually, your working memory is bolstered, your focus broadens, the brain is more receptive to new information, so you’re basically on your toes. So, what seems unsettling and sort of this uncertainty that we dislike is actually priming us to be able to learn.

So, as one neuroscientist told me, “When you’re in that moment of so-called arousal due to uncertainty, the brain is telling itself there’s something to be learned here.” And so, I think it’s really important on the job, or on the restive life, not to squander that moment. Move forward into uncertainty. Don’t run from it or deny it or hide it. I think it’s really important that we don’t cut short that opportunity to learn that uncertainty offers.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we are more able to learn with these sorts of emotional stress response things going on, and that just sort of fits. It makes sense because, well, yes, there’s something that needs learning here because, by definition, it’s uncertain what’s going on.

Maggie Jackson
Yup, you walk into the meeting and there’s a surprise, or your boss hands you a project you didn’t really think you’re going to have to do. And it’s not emotion, really. It’s cognition. So, your brain is actually going on alert. It’s being aroused, as scientists say. And that puts you in a state where you can take advantage of that.

And so, I think the myth-busting one we have to do first about uncertainty is to realize that uncertainty is unsettling, yes, but that is its precise gift. It bumps us off the routine. It’s telling us. When you’re uncertain, that’s basically your brain telling you that you have to stop your automatic behavior. The status quo doesn’t work anymore. You’ve got to be ready to update your understanding of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting is you say that we tend to not like uncertainty, and yet there are some contexts where we, humans, proactively go for it. We want to play card games, or videogames, or go to the casino, and that’s the whole draw of these things, is we don’t quite know how things are going to turn out. There’s an element of chance.

Maggie Jackson
Oh, I think that’s a very, very good point. It’s sort of uncertainty by another name. We might call it suspense, or just the kind of not knowing that’s playful or entertainment form that, I think, as uncertainty has grown, or I would say unpredictability in the world has grown, and, really, studies do show that economics, business world, climate, etc., there are a lot of aspects of the life that are more volatile. Uncertainty has become kind of a lament. You see it in the headlines. You hear people talk about it.

People just equate uncertainty with something bad. And that’s not moving us forward. That’s actually keeping us. Uncertainty is not the paralysis that we think. The human uncertainty, the unsureness, the not knowing, it’s not that all, as research shows. It’s actually something that’s highly dynamic and active, and something that moves us forward. Uncertainty is a lot more than we know.

And, actually, for decades and decades, this state of mind, it’s a mindset, basically, wasn’t studied. It wasn’t studied even in psychology because the onus and the emphasis was on what the human can do, what’s the task that you accomplish. It’s not sort of in between time when people are pausing and unsure, or they don’t know what to do. The scientists wanted to study what they could get accomplished.

And so, I think this puts human thinking, and even what it means to know what it means to be successful, it puts it in a whole new plane because if we can add not knowing to our skillset, as well as knowing, well, we’re suddenly really opening up to the world in ways that we weren’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, not knowing as a skillset that benefits us. Could you perhaps give us a story, an example, of someone who upgraded that skill and saw cool results as a result?

Maggie Jackson
Yeah, I’ll give you a couple of stories, but one little story came from a friend of mine who was calling me up, and saying, “Oh, there’s a merger and acquisition at my pharmaceutical company,” and she’s a scientist, and she was moaning and groaning. And in the next breath, she was talking about how she’s brushing up her resume, and she’s looking around for an internal job.

And I was sort of amused inside, having been steeped in uncertainty research, so I realized that she was actually doing precisely what, through her uncertainty, she was actually taking hold of the situation, and she was propelled to investigate further. And you can see this in many, many great figures. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was basically borne of uncertainty. He was a leader who was very humble. He wasn’t opposed to saying, “I don’t know,” and he really led the movement through conviction but also with adaptability.

And when it came to that incredibly important speech that day in 1963, The March on Washington, first of all, he had asked for opinions from many, many advisers. The night of the speech, he didn’t know quite what he would say. He had elements but he didn’t really know. He was actually still working on the speech right up on the podium that day.

And what that shows is that he was in tuned with a very divisive, very difficult moment in history. He was wakeful to all the different influences and patterns and sort of things that were going on in that moment, and he, of course, pulled off one of the greatest speeches of all time.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Let’s have another example.

Maggie Jackson
Well, I would say a more modern example is I’ve been studying the work style of the new Nobel Prize winner in medicine, the co-winner, Kati Kariko, who was originally from Hungary, and she worked for decades on mRNA, which, of course, was the sort of her work on mRNA led to the breakthrough that gave us the COVID vaccines and saved hundreds of millions of lives perhaps.

And she was incredibly dogged and incredibly persistent, and she saw the capacity of this aspect of biology when no one else was. She was terminated from UPenn, but this is not just a story of persistence. As she puts it in one Nobel Prize interview, one of her coworkers said, “Oh, Kati, you’re always zigzagging.” In other words, she didn’t always work in a straight line. And she said, “By zigzagging, I learned so much.”

And this is what it means to inhabit uncertainty. You’re not shutting down on that space of possibility that uncertainty is. And one of the most interesting things about curiosity is that scientists have been finally studying this topic, too, and they’re beginning to kind of understand that one of the most key components of curiosity, of the curious disposition, is the ability to work with or tolerate the stress of inhabiting the unknown.

So, when you’re curious about something, anything, painting or what you’re curious about, something you’re doing at work, or curious about what this Nobel Prize winner did, you are actually having to kind of understand, or withstand, or kind of leverage that uncertainty in order to get to the answer. And that she really represents that. She really does. She spent so much energy on doing things that were denigrated, devalued in every sense of the word. She kept going and she basically exemplifies the willingness to stay in that liminal space, which is to not know, to not know in order to get the better answer.

If she had raced to the first answer, well, she might’ve discovered something but she never would’ve put the pieces together. She had to go down a lot of dead ends, and that, to me, is that entirely what uncertainty is about, productive uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you elaborate on the distinction between working in a zigzag fashion versus linear fashion? What are those different modes look, sound, feel like by contrast?

Maggie Jackson
Well, I would say that the linear fashion         of working would be to work from one logical point to another, to be focused on outcome. Outcome orientation is a really hot topic in business circles today. Whereas, a zigzag, a nonlinear, that is something that Leonardo da Vinci was famous for. “Confusion rouses the mind to invention,” he once said.

And the zigzagging that she was referring to would be the dead ends. Many times, mRNA was actually toxic to the body when introduced in mice, etc. It didn’t do them any good. And so, basically, she could’ve quit there but instead she zagged, or zigged, over to a different type of thing. So, that’s what I mean.

Eighty percent of strategic business decisions are made after considering just one option. And, yet, if people actually go to the root of the problem and consider multiple reasons for the problem, multiple roots of the problem, then they’re actually four times more likely to have a successful decision.

So, again and again, we hear that we should widen our options but the other point of that is what I call widening and deepening, and that is testing and evaluating. So, again, that’s where you’re leveraging uncertainty. This is leveraging what Kahneman calls the slow mind. It’s what I also call take two. Rather than just leap to a solution, or go to what’s obvious, or try to shoot for that outcome, you’re willing to explore many avenues, and not forever.

Sometimes this can happen just in a few minutes in the operating room with a surgeon in crisis. They just take a minute to do take two, or to dwell in uncertainty, and then they find the better answer, or the hidden answer. And so, that’s what I mean by zigzag.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And so, if folks do have this attitude or fear of uncertainty, do you have any recommended first steps in terms of, “Hey, if that’s where you’re at right now, here’s what I recommend you do or think about”?

Maggie Jackson
Yes, that’s a great question. And it’s really important, and I get asked that all the time now, “How can I get better at dealing with uncertainty?” And, actually, I’ll talk a little bit about what I found, but also there’s some new research on this, a great deal of research. There are scientists now planning a new study, an intervention, in Columbus, Ohio, to help stressed high schoolers gain resilience by teaching them how to better tolerate, which is not such a great word, but to manage uncertainty, to actually, it means lean into uncertainty. That’s the term I prefer.

And how are they doing that? Well, scientists, clinical psychologists, and others were developing these interventions, are now, they’re basically importing some lessons from exposure to therapy, so that makes sense. If you are fearful of uncertainty, if you’re the type who’s intolerant of surprises, you need to overprepare for the presentation, you need to pack not just your bag for the family vacation but the entire family’s bag because you don’t trust them to do it, those are kind of signs that you might be a little bit intolerant of uncertainty.

And so, trying new things, trying to, in effect, seek a little bit of surprise in your life, will show you not that it’s always the perfect solution. You might delegate at work, and it might not actually work out better every single time. But, at the same time, if you never delegate at work, you will never know the other possibilities that that person, that the hidden talents of that person shows. The person who works for you might show hidden talents when you allow them to work on that project a little more than before.

So, what you’re doing is expanding your perspectives, expanding your range of experience, and one of the ways in which clinical psychologists are now teaching people, especially people with anxiety, to get better at handling uncertainty, to stop denying and avoiding it, are tiny little things like, for instance, “Answer your cellphone without caller ID.” And that seems so simple but, at the same time, it’s just injecting a little bit of mystery.

And some scientists actually surmised that phones, because they provide instant answers all the time, and we’re checking 150 times a day, that’s what they call certainty-seeking behavior. So, some part of this is just sort of lifting up your head and kind of contending with what’s happening, not trying to control every little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. This reminds me of a recent camping trip in which we were…I don’t even remember what we’re talking about but it was some sort of factual question that could be readily Googled, and we weren’t sure, it’s like, “Oh, I think it’s this way.” “Well, no, I think it might be this because what about that?” And it was funny, we’re like, “Huh, here we are all not being quite sure about this thing,” which, on ordinary circumstances, when we had cellphone reception, someone would’ve Googled it within about five seconds, and then that would be that.

Maggie Jackson
Right. And, actually, what you were doing, by collectively or individually kind of cogitating, you were reaching into your memory, which is not something we do when we’re turned to the phone all the time. You’re actually reaching deep into your memory. And even if you don’t come up with the answer, it strengthens your brain to do so.

It’s really quite amazing but just searching around in your memory, something that we just don’t do today, is actually great for the brain. And why is that? Because, say, you’re trying to think of a painter. I’m trying madly to think of Degas, and all I can think of is Monet. And, really, if you’re looking around in your brain, internally searching, in other words, you’re looking through different knowledge networks because our minds and our experiences, they’re varied associations. They’re networked. They say they’re branching trees of knowledge.

And what you’re doing is going along those paths, and you’re saying, “Oh, well, maybe an impressionist, or I guess French,” so you’re strengthening by utilizing those synapses, you’re strengthening other areas of the brain, and that’s really great for greater wisdom. Our minds are not computers, information is not downloadable and upload-able. It’s really sort of an organic shifting thing. And that’s another reason why not knowing is really important because it kind of blows away that idea that our minds are computers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are fun practices. Tell me, Maggie, anymore?

Maggie Jackson
Yes. Well, I would say one very, very important practice is it involves teamwork. So, uncertainty has a social side to it. And the upshot is that, basically, one of the best fuels of collaboration is conflict, and I mean judicious, mild, respectful conflict. But study after study shows that teams and groups that have mutual criticism, conflict, dissent are better performing. They actually have deeper discussions, they’re more creative, they surface hidden information that isn’t usually discussed, etc. Now, why is that?

Well, a lot of people think that, basically, when you have a disagreement or even when you just have diversity on a team, diversity of opinions, that diverse or dissenting opinion is just giving you the right answer, but that’s not true because a dissenting opinion, even if wrong, also bolsters performance. Why is it? It’s because uncertainty has rousted you from that kind of complacency of being in agreement. And the neuroscience on that is pretty amazing. The brain in agreement is a really lazy animal, believe me.

So, basically, if you can keep cultivating disagreement, then you get on what I call uncommon ground. It’s really important to be uncertain, and then you can do a whole host of things. You’re basically finding out what the team doesn’t know, which is really important for growth. You basically deepen and intensify the discussion. Now, studies have shown this in supreme courts, in the Supreme Courts, in juries, in financial trading, even on Mount Everest.

They did studies where teams that were very diverse, had a lot of different kinds of knowledge on climbing Mount Everest, but who emphasized all for one kind of mentality, so a kind of collective mentality, actually were more likely to have a depth on the team, and that’s really serious business. So, one flexible work consultant told me a wonderful story to illustrate this.

Cali Williams Yost was at a law firm where she was helping the firm institute flexible work for the legal team. I’m sorry, it was the legal team of an energy company. So, the legal team was all set to go, the bosses were on board, they were going to work remotely part time, etc. Well, one executive stood up and said he was completely opposed, at a meeting, and there was going to be a lot of knowledge left on the table because people weren’t meeting in the morning to coffee clap, etc.

Well, the bosses were angry, and everyone was shocked, they were all set. And what Cali Williams Yost wisely told me is that, basically, he was wrong to oppose flexible work but he was right, something was missing. And so, his dissent actually sparked a younger person in the room to, later in the afternoon, stand up, and say, “Well, I can create a virtual knowledge platform, and we can go remote and still have that time to coffee clap, so to speak.” So, that’s a perfect example of how dissent threw everyone into uncertainty, and then they were able to actually kind of find a third way to meet the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny how, as I imagine that scene, the emotional reaction is just as you’ve described, it’s like folks are annoyed, like, “Oh, come on, man. Just, like, shut up and get in line. We’re almost done. Why you gotta be difficult and cause problems, and not be a team player?” Like, all of these negative associations. And yet, it really is an asset to have folks who have unique perspective and the courage to share it and go against the grain, it really does enrich the whole team, and yet so rarely do we say, “Thank you, dear colleague, for disagreeing with all of us. This is very helpful.”

Maggie Jackson
Oh, you’re so right. And you put it so well, and I’m so glad you used that word courage because I was just thinking of a quote by William James, a great psychology philosopher in the 19th century, who talked about the courage of a maybe. He basically talked about how no human achievement can be created without the “courage of a maybe.” And that’s exactly what’s happening.

I think one tip for people who want to try this, and I would advise, throw in a no, a gentle no, or maybe just a maybe. And what you’re doing with the word maybe is actually using something called hedge words. And so, those are really, really important. Hedge words are maybe, sometimes, those sorts of words, as opposed to more…there’s no alternative word for hedge words, but anyhow, non-hedge words, which are, “You’re wrong,” or, “Therefore.” Those are not hedge words.

And what hedge words do is signal your receptiveness to another opinion. They also signal that there’s something that’s not known. So, if you say, “Maybe we should consider something,” or, “Maybe we haven’t thought of…” etc., you’re actually smoothing the way for others to pick up on that. And it’s a wonderful kind of linguistic flag that you’re waving, saying, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t be so sure,” and that’s where then the disagreement can be fueled, and the uncertainty. And then people can be in the space of uncommon ground, and then go deeper and explore multiple perspectives.

Another study I really loved, which brings this all to life, was basically a CEO who’s in Europe, a few years ago when the European Union was being widely expanded, so quite a bit of Eastern Europe was being inducted into the EU. And so, it was a time of great unknowns for business leaders on that continent. And so, two professors, one in Germany, one in the US, went and studied German CEOs for an entire year, and they asked them whether they’re for this expansion or were they against it, and what would happen, was it good for their company or was it bad for their company.

Well, when they got the results back, they found this third group. To their surprise, 25% or more of the CEOs were ambivalent, they didn’t really know, “Well, we’re not really sure this is going to expand the markets. Is it going to take our customers away? We’re not sure.” And it’s amazing to me that the professors were surprised.

Well, a year later, fast forward, the result was the people who were sure that it would be either good for their company or bad for their company, basically didn’t do very much. Those who were ambivalent were more resourceful, they came up with more products, they opened new factories, they actually were more inclusive, they asked for different opinions. They weren’t sure so that propelled them to do more.

And I think there was an award-winning study, and it just perfectly underscores not just what we’re talking about, about dissent, but also about the power of uncertainty. And it certainly is an overlooked unsung power.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. They’re not sure and, thusly, they do more. They’re not sure, so it was like, “Uh-oh, I don’t know so I better hustle. I better figure it out and do the research, do the work, do the investigation, talk to people, and get the info.” And this reminds me of, I don’t know if this has been coined somewhere before, but I might’ve made this up. I call it second time syndrome.

Like, the second time you do something, you might get worse results than the first time because you’re more confident, like, “Oh, I know how this goes,” versus the first time, you’re like, “Oh, boy, I’m a little scared, a little intimidated, a little overwhelmed. I better really hustle and figure this out.” Like, I remember, I was, at one point, a leadership seminar chair, or HOBY daddy for these HOBY, Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership event, so there’s a bunch of folks assembled for a three-day thing, and I’m kind of like the guy in charge of everything.

And so, the first time, I was like, “Wow, this is intimidating. I really want to make sure I’m on top of everything,” and it went very well. And the second time, I thought, “Oh, we got this. It’s fine.” And it was still good but it was not as excellent as the first one. I could see this event now years later. And it’s because I was more certain and more comfortable and less effortful the second time around.

Maggie Jackson
I think that’s so true and that’s such a good point. Because uncertainty, and confronting something new, is actually putting you at the edge of your knowledge, and that’s exactly when we want to retreat. There’s a term called the routine expert. The routine expert is someone, we’ve seen it everywhere. We see it in medicine. We see it in accounting. We see it in reporting. I’m a journalist. But people who have accrued years of experience, they’re really good at what they do, but everything has become routine. They have this sort of honed automaticity, so the heuristic thinking, “Chest pain equals heart attack” that is predominant.

But when the routine expert hits something that’s really new, they just retreat into the same old solutions, and they’re then not doing well. They fail. Whereas, adaptive experts are the people who can utilize that uncertainty, to do the kind of deliberative work, and also to be flexible about using their knowledge. And so, adaptive experts are nimble. And that’s exactly what we want.

When something goes wrong in the operating room, I witnessed multiple operations up in Toronto while researching this book, and one of the senior surgeons who epitomizes our ideal of the expert, he was quick, he was sure, really sure, well, he then, in a moment, in a terrifying moment in the operating room, he thought he had done something nearly lethal to the patient during a liver operation. Everything fell silent, there was sweat on his cap.

Well, he was just too sure. He carried his certainty into that operation like a badge of honor. And then he was able to, “It was not a lethal error,” but, at the same time, he epitomizes what we loved in experts. And we really are venerating the wrong type of experts. What we want to really emulate and respect the people who ask the questions, the people who say, “I don’t know,” whether it’s medicine or not, and the leaders who are willing to pause and deliberate.

And other study shows that those leaders, who when confronting a new problem, actually, are deemed in experimental studies anyhow as being less influential. But we’ve got it all wrong. We’ve got it all wrong. We need to be really promoting people who ask questions, who don’t mind hesitating for productive uses, who don’t mind being unsure.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Indeed, we tend to favor, like, trust the confident-sounding voice but there are studies that reveal that there is almost no correlation between the confidence someone exerts and how right or good they are at the thing, so that’s dangerous and some ways it’s like we’d be better off if we trusted or valued more the nuanced person, it’s like, “Well, you know, under these circumstances, it’s probably best for A, but, however, given the variables X, Y, Z, I’m leaning towards B.”

Like, that doesn’t sound as commanding and inspiring, like, “Yes, you know what you’re doing. I’ll follow you unto death” That doesn’t give you the that emotional charge. And yet, it’s likely much closer to true, and there’s much higher probability, it seems, of finding great wisdom there worth following.

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. Adaptive wisdom, the kind of person who sees the world as it is, not as they wish it to be or assume it to be. And that takes time, it takes effort, it takes unease, etc. but it’s really important that we change our views on what a leader is, that we change our views on what a student or a pundit or a presidential candidate is, because the cost of our certainty are certainly rising, and we can see it everywhere in terms of the polarization, narrowmindedness, etc., the anxiety levels.

I see that uncertainty, if we begin to understand it, to study it, to learn how to use it skillfully, can really change humanity, and give me great hope. They’re even trying to, there’s a movement by leaders in AI today to instill uncertainty in models, in robots, that is to make AI unsure. Now, there is some uncertainty in a robot. It couldn’t traverse the factory floor without some degree of being open to what’s unpredictable in its environment.

But what they’re trying to do, and this is picking up steam, and it’s really quite important, is to make on a robot that’s unsure in its aims. So, say, you have a housekeeper robot, and it’s fetching your coffee, well, today’s AI is built to carry out a task because the rationalist’s definition of intelligence is fulfilling your goals no matter what. And, therefore, that’s both the danger and the wisdom of today’s AI.

Well, an unsure robot, and what I call the “I don’t know” robot, will actually ask you how you want your coffee, or which room across the kitchen, or, “Do you want something?” It’s teachable and it’s more honest. It’s not just doing what it was initially programmed to do. It’s more flexible. And in that very vision of “I don’t know” robot, we can see something a little bit that we should be striving for, too.

Pete Mockaitis
The quote that comes to mind thinking about these notions of certainty is this quote, I come back to it again and again, I just got to have him on the show. Robert Rubin said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” And I can totally relate, it’s like, “Are you sure?” And I think about all these scenarios when the experts tell me the opposite of each other, and they do so very confidently.

Like, roofers. You get multiple bids on a roof project, it’s like, “Wow, that guy said we had to tear it off, and the other guy said we could just put another layer on. And they were both very sure. And they’re the roof experts, and I’m not. What the heck am I supposed to do here?” And I think that if most of us took the time to solicit multiple perspectives from multiple angles, we would see a lot of that, “Wow, these people are very certain of the exact opposite thing. Well, now I have to do some hard thinking.”

Maggie Jackson
Exactly. And we think of uncertainty as being sort of lost, adrift, etc., some of the metaphors used with uncertainty or lostness and wandering, etc., but it’s a form of exploration. It’s kind of a wonderful way to buy time, in a sense, so that you can explore the possibilities and uncover the complexities that are already there.

You’re not creating complexities when you do a little bit more pondering. You’re actually uncovering what’s already there. And it’s not that it’s an endless kind of pursuit but it has its place, and we haven’t given enough due to being unsure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Maggie, tell me, any final things you want to share before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Maggie Jackson
No, I think we covered a lot of great ground.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Maggie Jackson
Yeah, it’s actually a quote from my book, and there are many but I’ll start the quote, “’I know’ seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, ‘I thought I knew.’” That’s Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Maggie Jackson
Well, there are lots. Yeah, I’ll tell one little one. And you probably heard of the candle problem. This was a psychological experiment developed in the 1920s in which people were asked to tack a candle to the wall using just a box of matches, some thumbtacks, and then just the candle. Well, people made a real mess of it, and they tried to melt the candle, glue it to the wall, etc.

Well, the answer lies in making a platform out of the matchbox. But the point of this story is that people only see what an object is meant to do, not what it can do, because they’re so sure that matchboxes are there just to hold the matches. They cannot see any further. And what’s wonderful about this study is that if you take a bunch of five-year-olds and give them a similar study, but without the matches, with toys on a shelf, the five-year-olds don’t have any problem with this. Their knowledge doesn’t get in their way of their problem-solving.

Whereas, at age seven and up, they’re beginning to act like adults. They only see what it’s made to do. They don’t ask what it can do. And that’s a miniature example of the beauty of being unsure. And uncertainty is basically another word for open-mindedness.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Maggie Jackson
I would have to say Pride and Prejudice, kind of an old classic but it’s really about two people, Mr. Darcy, Elizabeth Bennet, whose certainty got in the way of their love. And, finally, when they were a little bit less sure, they were able to get together and understand one another despite their differences. I already loved that book before I became an uncertainty junkie, so to speak. But now I kind of see it through the prism of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Maggie Jackson
It definitely has to be just plain old paper pad. I’m completely adoring of the technology of paper. By writing, I don’t write everything in the longhand, but I do drafts of what I work on that I call sketches, literally, because I can draw arrows and make circles out of what it is. It’s all over the map. And I find that, by putting something immediately onto a computer, I’m forcing my thoughts onto the template of another person’s design. And so, I find that the legal pads, I go through so many, and they’ve been a huge help to me in my writing.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Maggie Jackson
Well, in order to get in the focus that I need, there’s a kind of boundary-making, focuses literally a boundary-making, a type of attention that creates boundaries around what you want to be doing, I use alarm clocks and I use distance from my phone. So, if I really have to concentrate, I’ll put my phone on another level of my office, downstairs, basically. If I’m able to take a phone call, it’ll be nearer to me, but it changes how you think, etc. So, I really curate where the phone is.

I also use alarm clocks. So, if I have an appointment in an hour, I’ll put the alarm clock on, and then I don’t have to spend my mental resources thinking about when I have to do this. I then am able to drift off, inhabit the uncertainty, focus on what I need to do, and completely within the new you of what I need to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Maggie Jackson
I’d say that the quote from my book that resonates most with people is “Uncertainty is unsettling, and that is its gift.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Maggie Jackson
I would say my website would be a great one to stop and shop. I’m also on Twitter, LinkedIn, but the website is a great resource for my articles, my events, etc., what’s going on with my books.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Maggie Jackson
I think that if you realized that at any one moment you might not know, you’ll be giving yourself the power of an open mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maggie, this has been a treat. Well, Maggie, thank you for this. I wish you much fun uncertainty in the years to come.

Maggie Jackson
Thank you, Pete. It’s been a pleasure. You, too.