Book “Uncertain - The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure”: Transcript: Agile FM radio for the agile community. [00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you for tuning into another episode of Agile FM. Today I have Maggie Jackson with me. She wrote a book called Uncertain the Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure. She also has published a book Distracted you might be very familiar with because it has been published a few years ago. Maggie is an award winning author, journalist.She writes about social events. In particular about technology. She's a contributor to the Boston Globe. She wrote for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and she has been featured on media around the world, including MSNBC, Wire. com, and the Sunday Times. And now she is on Agile FM. So thank you so much for being here and sharing some thoughts on the latest release, Uncertain, with the Agile FM listeners.[00:00:54] Maggie Jackson: My pleasure. Great to be with you. [00:00:56] Joe Krebs: Yeah, that's awesome. You have some really good endorsements and praise here from people like Daniel Pink, Gretchen Rubin and Sherry Turkle on your book. This is it's really amazing. You you have written this book. This was recently released in 2024. So this is a new publication.What drove you to writing this book? Uncertain. What was your motivation of approaching this project, this book? [00:01:24] Maggie Jackson: Yes, sure. Especially because uncertainty seems so foggy and monolithic and negative. And I, after I wrote the book Distracted, which is about, the gains and costs that we have in a split focus world wanting to write a book about thinking, so if you have a moment somewhere, focus, or you have the skill to focus, what do you do with it?And of course, thinking well is our challenge as we move forward in this world, in this day and age. And so the first chapter of the new book was about uncertainty, and it became in a classic way, the whole book, because first of all, because I discovered, veins of or explosions of new research in so many different fields from medicine to business to psychology, a lot of new research about uncertainty.And it hadn't been a very well studied topic, believe it or not before. And by that, Epistemic or psychological uncertainty, which is the human response to the unknown. So I'm really writing about our human response to the unknown and the basically the idea that when you meet something new and unexpected, Your response is to understand that you've reached the limits of your knowledge that you don't know that it could be this way.It could be that way. So that's how I fell into writing the book and I discovered as well that uncertainty is highly misunderstood. It's maligned and yet it's far. It's not weakness. It's not inertia. It's not the negative that we all assume it to be today in this efficiency oriented society.[00:03:03] Joe Krebs: Yeah that's true. We probably have some listeners here at Agile FM that are maybe in the corporate world and they are building products and or executing projects of some sort. And and we see the desire of being certain. We see the desire of running and having a plan, even if the plan is very short and maybe only a few weeks long.Uncertainty is always present, isn't it? [00:03:29] Maggie Jackson: Exactly. And again there are these two kinds of uncertainty. There will always be unpredictability there. Life will always take twists and turns. And we might have the data and the models and the plan. And yet, there's so much we can't know.Despite this incredible probabilistic weather models that we have, you don't know if the snowstorm will dump one or two inches on your backyard next week. So there's so much we can't know. We don't know, but what we can do is control our response to the unknown. We can get skillful at understanding how to manage not knowing or what we don't know and what we want, what we're not sure about.And that's where the, that's where the news is fantastic. There's so much now that relates to how uncertainty basically is very highly connected to. Cognitive skills like curiosity and agility and resilience, which are exactly the kind of cognitive skills we need now on. So I think you're right.And another point I'd make is that we always will need resolution. We always know we'll need an answer. And of course, we want a plan and a kind of security. And yet. By, over predicting or clinging to a plan when it's out of date. That's where we lose the agility. So what I'm talking about is opening up the space between question and answer.Uncertainty is really that middle ground. It's basically. The brain's way of telling itself that there's something to be learned here when you're meeting something new, you have a kind of stress response, which is really, that's where the unease and the discomfort of uncertainty comes from. It's a stress response.But now we're beginning to find out scientifically that unease is actually highly beneficial because, as I mentioned, the brain ...
