Hello and welcome to the Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.
I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience and
bring art, objects, and ideas to life.
So let's dive into this week's show.
Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Art Engager.
Today I'm chatting with Maggie Jackson about the power of uncertainty and
how embracing not knowing might transform our work in museums.
But before our chat, if you're enjoying my book, The Art Engager,
Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums, I'd love your support.
Please consider leaving a review or a rating on Amazon or Goodreads or sharing
a photo of your copy on social media.
And don't forget to tag me in.
I really love to see the Art Engager out and about in the world.
Now, before I introduce our guest today, I'd like you to take a moment
to think about your work in museums.
Whether you're standing in front of an artwork with a group of visitors,
wondering what they'll discover, or facilitating a discussion where different
interpretations and ideas emerge, uncertainty is woven through the work.
We do.
Museum educators in particular work with uncertainty every day, meeting
new groups, handling unexpected questions or situations, and creating
space for multiple perspectives.
So how can we embrace this uncertainty more skillfully?
Well, that's exactly what today's guest has been researching.
Maggie Jackson is an award winning author whose latest book, Uncertain,
The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, has been making waves.
It was named on four top books of 2024 lists and was recently awarded a prize.
Nonfiction Book of the Year by the Independent Publishers of New England.
A former foreign correspondent and Boston Globe columnist, Maggie has spent years
researching how uncertainty affects how we think, learn, and work together.
So today we'll be discussing what her research might mean for museum educators
and how understanding uncertainty better could transform our practice.
Enjoy.
Hi, Maggie, and welcome to The Art Engager.
Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you.
Thank you so much for having me, Claire.
You're very welcome.
Could you tell our lovely listeners who you are and what you do?
Yes I am a journalist, a former Boston Globe columnist, and past foreign
correspondent in Tokyo and London, and an independent scholar and an author.
My most recent book is Uncertain, The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.
Wonderful.
Now, what fascinates me looking back at your writing career, You seem
to have focused on social trends, significant things that are happening
in society at the time, from attention and distraction, and your latest
work, which is all about uncertainty.
So perhaps you could elaborate on what drew you to these topics.
Right.
No, exactly.
They're very big.
I have written three books.
I see them as a trilogy.
They are all on topics that are right under our noses.
And yet, subjects that we often misunderstand or don't really
understand the nature of home or distraction and the nature of
attention and finally uncertainty.
I think the this propensity of mine to tackle these big, messy topics grew out
of my time as a foreign correspondent, when as a general reporter based in a far
off land, you are often covering nuclear politics one day and sports the next,
and I was really interested in the meta view, the, the 30, 000 feet up view, as
well as the granular details of life.
So I've always been a trend thinker.
Yeah, I love that, that you're attracted to these massive topics.
They must involve a huge amount of research as well.
And for your latest book, Uncertain, The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure,
for people who haven't read it yet, could you define uncertainty for us?
That's a great starting point because, as I mentioned, it's a swampy topic, often
seen as monolithic and something to dread and fear and uncertainty can be defined
as taking two forms, generally speaking, although there's a lot of complexity and
debate, but nevertheless the first type of uncertainty is generally agreed to
be what we might call the uncertainty or It's called aleatory uncertainty, and
that's really just what humans can't know.
So for an example, there might be a storm reported in the local media,
it's heading your way, and despite all of the data and the modeling and
the AI, you don't know when it'll hit and how much damage it will do.
So that's what humans can't know, aleatory uncertainty.
And then in complement is our epistemic uncertainty.
That's really our inner uncertainty.
And we can think of that as the human response to the unknown,
so the storm is heading your way and you might be thinking.
Ah, should I evacuate?
Oh, should I batten the hatches?
Should I, buy extra cereal?
This is a state of uncertainty.
It's not ignorance, but you're working at the edge of what you know.
You've reached the limits of what you know.
Hence, We are uneasy, but hence, there are multiple, as you can
see from how I've described this scenario, there are multiple different
possibilities, there are hints.
So scientists actually call uncertainty a space of possibilities in, across many
different disciplines, which I think is absolutely fascinating and tantalizing.
Yeah, absolutely.
You're providing this fresh perspective, I think, and combining it with
all the research that you have put into this book, a lot of quite new
neuroscience, fascinating research about what happens in our brains.
So can you talk us through some of that, please?
Sure.
Just at the very basic level of when we as humans meet something new or
ambiguous your body and brain, react.
You actually experience a stress response.
So that's at the heart of our dislike or unease with uncertainty.
We are stressed by the new thing.
And uncertainty causes a cascading series of Changes in your body and brain.
So you might feel your heart race, at the report of the storm or when you
fall into a traffic jam, you might have your palms sweat, etcetera.
But what's new and really interesting is that neuroscientists have just, in the
last decade or so, begun to unpack what's going on in the brain on uncertainty.
So when you're unsure your working memory goes up, your attention
sharpens- very interesting and a surprising facet of uncertainty.
And so that doctors who are in difficult clinical situations, Who
are unsure actually report heightened attention, and that helps us perform.
So in a nutshell, uncertainty is seen in neuroscience as a signal
that autopilot should be over.
We're no longer in routine, and now it's time to update
our understanding of the world.
And so contrary to the popular assumption that uncertainty And it's
unease, it's something to retreat from.
Actually, the science tells us that this is the point when you are on your toes.
Basically, uncertainty is the brain telling itself there's
something to be learned here.
That's another, point that a neuroscientist made to me.
uncertainty itself.
Not knowing which way the wind will blow, so to speak, is a state in which you
are readied for learning and performing.
And that's a really tremendous, reset in our Just our basic
ideas about uncertainty.
It really turns it.
But if you think about it, if you're in a challenging situation, giving a
speech or put on the spot or having a heated discussion, if you think
about it, when you are I'm sure you do feel all cylinders, rising.
And the other important point is that this is different from fear.
It's very complicated, but just in very brief we have different stress
systems in our body and brain.
When you're afraid, your body is preparing you.
Your heart might race, etc. But your body is preparing you to Flee or
fight or to react simplistically, whereas the uncertainty response,
a. k. a. arousal, scientifically speaking, is preparing you to, again,
learn and perform so you can respond.
You're actually being set up to do higher order thinking when you're
unsure, but not when you're fearful.
That's really important.
And that kind of allows us to think of uncertainty as a space of wonder and
curiosity and multiple possibility, etc.
So we're really lifting the veil on a whole new story of
uncertainty, as you mentioned.
And it sounds so wonderfully exciting the way you describe it like that
as well, thinking about uncertainty as you say, being a good stress
response, having that wakefulness, that attentiveness being switched on and ready.
So what does it mean for us to view uncertainty not knowing in this way?
Well, I think it there are so many implications.
I mean, first of all, in the moment, in the challenging moment, when we
meet up with something new, when our assumptions and our predictions
and our expectations, all our home knowledge, you might not apply.
In fact, very often in a novel, complex situation, what you knew isn't necessarily
going to equip you to face forward.
It could be meeting a new person.
Again, it could be a challenging project.
It could be looking at a challenging artwork, etc. So
this is a, a real reset on it.
How we face the unknown and going back to the definition we discussed,
it's important to note that here we are in an era of rising volatility.
I mean, no matter what our professions in geopolitics and economics and the climate
in our daily lives and our work hours.
We're faced with a lot more unpredictability.
The IMF calls this the decade of uncertainty.
But the question is how do we respond?
So moving from the uncertainty that we can tackle with probabilistic
means and mathematical and all sorts of ways, but moving from that to our
uncertainty, it opens the door on a whole new spectrum of responses that
really add up to skillfully being unsure.
Whether you're not, you're daydreaming or you're a surgeon facing a crisis in the
operating room, or you're dealing with the divisiveness in our local politics
or national politics, in all these situations wielding uncertainty rather
than retreating from it or rather than thinking of it as passive is important.
And then thirdly, I'll say that I think uncertainty really unlocks a
very new and absolutely timely way.
to face the volatility, the unpredictability, et cetera,
with new definitions of success.
Because we've leaned on and we've utilized and honed our veneration for
efficiency and for speed and for sureness.
And these are seen as the markers of success, but actually we've
been wrong in many different ways.
Leadership is not necessarily in times of dynamic flux a quick, sure, snap judgment
that we've come to associate with success.
And that's true of many other professions too.
So I think Uncertainty opens up a whole new world.
It's really quite exciting and allows us to face what, seems to be a dark
time with a new approach, but also a new set of tools, as I mentioned.
Yeah.
And so much to unpack there in what you were talking about.
And I love the way the book And we'll perhaps come on to this in a second, talk
about how we can apply this in our work.
This podcast is for people who work in museums and mainly for museum educators.
And I have lots of ideas from reading the book about how we
might apply some of these ideas or incorporate into our practice.
But on a personal level, cause I like in the book that you look at
uncertainty from a personal level, but also how it affects our lives as well.
Could you tell us how we can build our tolerance for it?
Because.
It seems to me, and I'm unsure whether you think uncertainty is a skill or
maybe it's even a disposition this is something that we can get better at.
Exactly.
And I think we can do so in two ways.
And the answer is yes.
Basically, uncertainty is a disposition.
It's a stance, an approach to life.
So Our approach to uncertainty is basically our approach to life because
as one scientist told me, if you have difficulty with uncertainty,
you're having difficulties with life.
So it's basically we'll take that first.
And then secondly, the answer is yes.
It's also a skill set.
So Tolerance of uncertainty is a personality trait.
It's basically just like extroversion or conscientiousness, it's a
personality trait that's gaining a lot of scientific attentions.
And in, in a nutshell if you are highly intolerant, we all fall
somewhere on the spectrum of way of intolerance or tolerance.
If you're highly intolerant of uncertainty, you're more likely to be
a rigid thinker, you dislike surprises.
Knowledge as a rock to defend.
I mean, there's a lot of, rigidity there.
And if you're tolerant, on the other hand, you tend to like ambiguity
or revel in complex problems or be a more flexible thinker.
Knowledge as more like a tapestry that whose mutability Is its strength.
Knowledge is changing, and so can we.
And that's the difference.
People who are intolerant of uncertainty actually have far more troubles during
the acute phase of the pandemic.
The intolerant people were more likely to turn to denial, avoidance and
abuse of substances to cope with the very overwhelming advent of COVID.
Whereas people who are tolerant were more likely to accept the
realities of the situation.
And I'll also add that to answer your question.
It is changeable.
It can be developed.
So your tolerance of uncertainty can be boosted, which is an
extremely important thing to do, especially in times of change.
And scientists, psychologists, even people in medical school faculties
are working on helping them bolster tolerance of uncertainty, even tolerance
of ambiguity through very simple steps.
And they're based on exposure therapy.
So if I'm afraid of a dog, I learn to, sit with a puppy or a stuffed toy, I
get more comfortable with, or I get more practice actually with, dogs of the world.
Similarly, with the unknown.
So if you want to bolster your tolerance of uncertainty experts challenge people
to delegate more at work, cede a little control, try a new dish in a restaurant,
something you'd never try necessarily, don't stick to the old and familiar.
Try something if you're a mom.
Let your kids pack their bags.
I guess that's a offshoot of, uh, delegating more work.
But you can see through our daily small granular choices that what we're
doing is not necessarily learning that Uncertainty is more of a positive always.
It's just that we're learning that our expectation that
it is a disaster is wrong.
So we're learning that there are multiple outcomes with uncertainty.
And then when you experience them, then you can gain skill in
experiencing them well and skillfully stepping up to uncertainty and not
retreating from it and hiding from it.
But yes, it's very much also a skill.
So the different types of uncertainty that are woven into our live
arenas where we can gain skill.
And ironically, I actually started to learn about this.
The idea of skill and uncertainty through studying artisans.
I was fascinated with the idea of skill in being an artisan, and particularly the
work of David Pye, the great woodworker slash philosopher who called being
an artisan 'a workmanship of risk'.
He said 'the outcome is not known'.
Now this he contrasted with automaticity and machine made objects.
So when you are carving or making an artwork, you really don't know
what the next piece will, next You know, act of the story will
be you have to listen to the wood.
You have to be open to your new ideas, etc.
So it's an improvisational sort of work.
And so is being uncertain in a skillful way, we can be improvisational open
to what might come, but in an active way and with that skill comes the idea
that we can improve, not just in our disposition, but also in the skill itself.
You can be a better daydreamer.
You can be a better listener to someone whose ideas you think you loathe.
You can be better during a crisis, all with uncertainty, not despite it.
And also with these ideas of skill and uncertainty come the idea of care.
That's something a noted surgeon who studies uncertainty and surgical
judgment told me her quote was, 'uncertainty, that's when you care'.
And if you begin to think of that, you care enough to slow down a minute.
You care enough to ponder the options.
You care enough to heed multiple perspectives.
Those are the markers of a person who's skillfully unsure.
That's what the studies show.
That's super interesting.
I was thinking then about switching off that automatic response that you get
when you're incredibly skillful, you're an expert at something and you have a
kind of go- to response that you think, ah, this would work in this situation.
And sometimes that's not always the best response, but your brain
is going there automatically.
So when we're more open, more receptive to this uncertainty, we are
asking ourselves the question, what would happen if, what would happen
if this happened or that happened?
And seeing that there are other perspectives out there You gave me a
really nice link there as well, because I was thinking about our work as museum
educators, the work we do in museums.
And when I was reading the book, I was thinking, well, we deal
with the uncertainty every day.
Everyone deals with uncertainty every day.
But for the museum educator, you are meeting lots of
different people every day.
You are in different situations in the museum.
You are working with different artworks and objects.
And there are all sorts of things that can happen, all sorts of
things that can go wrong, even if you have a plan and a structure.
So I loved thinking about your book and your work and your research
in terms of our work as well.
And I'd love to move on to thinking about how you think about your research
might relate to what we do in museums.
Well, I think it relates enormously and significantly, and again, it might open up
new pathways to a new approach to museum work, actually that's necessary and that's
more beneficial in a time of, dynamism.
When we can open the door to uncertainty, we open the door to
the dynamism that you mentioned.
You know, creativity is not about making precise widgets.
Creativity is in itself an uncertain venture where
unsureness is part and parcel.
I mean, collecting, conserving, these are again, areas of the world that
are not benefitted by black and white judgments and right now, of course,
as museums strive to be more flexible to open their doors to more different
groups, the inclusivity and the multiple perspectives that being unsure offers are
really important for museum work today.
And then, Education.
I mean, education often used to be thought of as Pavlovian, but actually a
much More predominant view of education now, based on all the new brain work,
is that it's really all about surprise.
Learning is about what's called prediction errors.
So as we go along in life.
We expect and we assume that your front door of your house will be
the same, that you know how to, make a cup of coffee, etc. That's how
we move smoothly through our days.
When reality contradicts to your expectation.
That's what's called in neural terms of prediction error.
There's a gap between reality and what your senses are telling you.
And that's where learning occurs.
That's why babies are great learners.
And so I think.
In all sorts of ways, and particularly for museum educators uncertainty could
provide a very potent foundation for a new approach that really strives for the kind
of values that we need and want today.
Yeah, I think I'm nodding my head here wholeheartedly that museum education
has undergone quite a big transformation anyway in the last 20 or so years as we're
moving away from the transmission model, very much guided tours of the past, and
still in, in some organizations, still very much the model where an educator with
'all the knowledge' will then transmit that information in a way to their group.
And moving towards this inquiry based version, which is based on open ended
questions, seeking perspectives from our participants, making them feel
comfortable and really listening to their thoughts about what they're looking at.
I'm really excited by thinking about the way uncertainty can change how we might
engage with art, as you say, and objects, and really invites in all those different
perspectives that we can hear from people.
Yes.
And for a talk I'm giving in a month or so I was just preparing or learning
about Hokusai's Under the Wave at Kanagawa, usually called the Great Wave.
Now, that is one of the world's most popular icons of visual images.
And yet it's something that we might dismiss as a cliche because it.
I sensed that it had something to do with uncertainty, I began to research the,
background of Hokusai, the artist who was extraordinarily adaptable and curious, and
also the wave is so much more a painting about uncertainty and facing the unknown,
as a metaphor for Japan's opening up to the world in the 19th century, and so
if I had just dismissed that and said, 'Oh, yeah, I know that's about threat.
Yeah.
Okay, nice image, good for branding on my little PowerPoint', but there was so much
more uncertainty, slows us down, offers us a chance to gain nuance, perspective,
complexity and to listen to the signal of that prediction error, that reality check
that uncertainty is trying to point us to.
The other thing I think is really important, and you've, mention
that a little bit is the idea that as educators, we know.
Now the educator is the educated person.
They are opening up these wonderful worlds of learning to the visitor to the museum.
And yet, in so many different fields there's been a kind of a
misnomer about what an expert is.
And this is one of the most powerful findings I came across in all
my research about uncertainty.
In a nutshell, the true expert is the person who knows
when and how to be unsure.
And so If you think about it, we gain expertise by practice, experience,
learning the canon, etc. Therefore, knowledge becomes know how.
That's simple.
That's where we get the fluency.
When an expert sees a painting or sees even a situation, they know how to apply
their knowledge, because they've been there in the past, they recognize this is
a situation they've dealt with in the past and they recognize a rewarding solution.
This painting is about X. That's what I learned in my training.
At the same time, This kind of expertise, while it's a very important,
impressive stage of expertise is actually only useful in predictable,
so called benign situations.
So if something is different, say the art history world has discovered something
completely new about Hokusai's The Wave, or a child asks a question that
you've never heard in 30 years before.
If you're dealing with something new, that old expertise Isn't going to suffice.
In fact, even is wrong.
Our first thoughts that come to mind, especially as
experts, are based on the past.
What you want to do in dynamic situations and in order to be curious, is to
work at the edge of your knowledge in the space of possibilities.
That's uncertainty.
So study after study in many different fields, show that years of experience
are only weakly or not correlated at all with skill and accuracy.
Wow.
I mean, that's just to put a different example and accounting, senior
accountants are actually less good at finding embezzlement in the books than
undergraduate and counting students.
So we might think this is maybe something to do with beginning mind.
And yes, actually now researchers have discovered a higher echelon of
expertise called adaptive expertise.
This actually came from the work of a. a Japanese educator in the 1980s
who was dealing with very small children, but adaptive expertise
is studied and even being trained in education, in engineering, in
design, in medicine, et cetera.
So it's extremely important that we understand the difference between
routine and adaptive experts.
Just briefly, adaptive experts do several things.
They inhabit the question.
So adaptive experts spend more time diagnosing a new situation
than even novices do on average.
They wade into the question.
Sometimes it's just for a few minutes.
When the child asks that amazing, strange, and new question, it just
might take a few minutes to open up the group to exploring together, not
to being the expert who dismisses or hands down the pat answer that's worked
in the past, just as an example.
Adaptive experts, secondly, widen the frame of their understanding, so
they explore multiple possibilities.
Again, this is according to many studies across different professions.
And then finally they widen and deepen.
Deepen means they test and evaluate.
So basically they're not just thinking 'it could be this, it could be that',
but then they're taking a couple of next steps forward, either in the mind or
sometimes scientifically or in real life, testing out those other possibilities.
And basically, in a nutshell, adaptive experts listen to the
story that the problem, not their assumptions, wants to tell.
Which is, change is not just what it means to be an expert in a new, complex,
challenging moment, but also over time.
The adaptive expert.
loves errors and mistakes and even detours.
The nonlinear is okay.
The adaptive expert sees themselves as a partner in learning and in care,
not just a authority handing down the right judgment and everybody
else's, oh, a novice, or wrong.
And then the adaptive expert takes on harder cases, so they might, I don't
know, develop the tour that they're uncomfortable giving or, work at the edge.
I love the idea that this is all about edge work, and so I, I think that is very
applicable to museum education, possibly.
Absolutely.
we talk about this a lot on this podcast, even challenging yourself to change
up what you're doing on your tour.
Think about the questions that you're asking, how you're inviting the group
into the conversation, even challenge yourself, perhaps to work with an object
that you thought was perhaps, speech marks, "boring" or uninteresting and
seeing what you find out doing that research like you did with the Hokusai
painting and seeing what you discover and thinking, can I go anywhere with this?
What are the possibilities?
So being happy in that, not knowing for a bit and playing with the
options, working with your curiosity.
I think all of that is sounds particularly relevant to us.
Yes, and I think that circling back to our discussion of tolerance
of uncertainty and what it means.
I think you mentioned that the bottom line marker, the difference between
being intolerant and tolerant, being closed or open, is whether or not you're
threatened by uncertainty, and then you want to retreat, or you're challenged.
Now notice, underscore, challenge.
So I use the word comfortable, but it's not really a picnic.
Uncertainty never will be.
That's where we are.
Rising to the occasion.
That's where we're stretching ourselves.
It's never going to be feet up on the sofa eating potato
chips kind of moment in life.
And yet that's where we can, cope with whatever life Throws at us.
So I think that's a really wonderful and it's not, it
doesn't have to be all the time.
Uncertainty is special.
It doesn't mean that we throw out the everyday, the routine, the
knowledge that we do know, et cetera.
But I have a little museum example story that also might drive home the
difference between these two types of expertise, and I came across the story
of a museum director in Benin, and she started the first ever modern museum in
Benin in Africa, and there really hadn't been very many museums with four walls.
To begin with, she was schooled and raised in France, largely so she really
tried to model this museum on the West.
But then she realized that Well, the former ancient kings of Dahomey in
that region of Africa had always once a year or more brought their palatial
artworks out into the streets and the marketplaces, the museum came to the
people, and that changed her mind.
She didn't have to, work with the old models, which is, routine expertise, as
important as it is, she realized that she could bring the art to the people.
Just a lovely example is that she commissioned a
songwriter for every exhibit.
So the song of the exhibit was actually on the charts in, Benin and she worked
with what might be, what could be rather than what had come before, and
I think that's a wonderful example.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks for sharing that.
And I think thinking about our work as facilitators of these experiences, perhaps
we could move from being the facilitator to actually talking about the groups we
work with every day as well, because I think there's some applications here too.
So we work with different groups every day.
And we have to embrace this uncertainty.
We don't know who we're getting in our group.
Sometimes we also have to be able to facilitate conversations that
involve different perspectives.
So people will share different views.
Some of those can be quite challenging.
As you said we live in quite polarized times, quite volatile times.
We're not sure what comments people might come up with.
So you mentioned in your book you found something quite
interesting about disagreement and can actually help groups learn.
So can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Yes.
And in fact, uncertainty and disagreement have a very interesting and catalyzing
effect on good group collaboration.
And that's really interesting.
I mean today We often think about smoothing over frictions,
particularly of diverse situations.
We think about getting on the same page as quickly as possible, whether you're in
a workplace or in an education situation.
But and of course, agreement is very important.
Agreement is the end goal.
We want to be on the same page, roughly speaking, or at least not be completely
at each other's throats in terms of assessment or any kind of work.
But what's really interesting is that studies show that Teams or groups, even
groups that come together temporarily like a tour that are in agreement
actually suffer performance declines.
So when a group is in agreement, no matter how diverse the group is,
they see each other as more similar than they really are, they begin
to stop challenging one another.
They become less creative and less accurate.
I mean, those are pretty significant deteriorations in what we might call
collaborative performance as well.
A team that's in agreement.
Rapidly begins to see itself as doing better than they are because
that fluency and the smoothness of, I call it, hanging out on the love
seat of a cord, because it's smooth.
And so we mistake it for excellence.
And on the other hand, well, disagreement is important because then we air
differences and, I'm talking about respectful disagreements, airing different
perspectives, etc. But why does that work?
This is where it gets really interesting.
And we often think that disagreement is good or dissent is good
because the right side will win or the right answer will win.
Cool.
And then everybody gets back into agreement, but actually studies show
again in many different fields that even a dissenting or a disagreeing voice
that's wrong, flat out wrong, actually promotes these performance gains,
more creativity, accuracy, et cetera.
Basically, what you really want in a group is to fuel
uncertainty through disagreement.
To disagree with one another, judiciously and productively,
actually sparks a new group mindset, questioning, skepticism and also the
understanding of what you don't know.
Just for instance, A little word like maybe when you're in the middle
of a disagreeing conversation, or maybe different parts of the team,
or the group, or the participants, the visitors that day really are
sharing very opposing perspectives.
We might think as the expert, as the tour guide, as the engager, that we
should, be more certain in order to move the group along, but actually,
the word 'maybe' is a hedge word.
Hedge words are: sometimes, at times, possibly, it could be.
These are hedge words.
And maybe, I like the best, it's like the poster child of uncertainty,
maybe actually does two things.
First, it signals that you The leader are approachable -studies out of Harvard
show that to be the case, -and also that linguistically there's something
more to know if you say maybe it's very powerful and contrary to some
opinions, it does not connote weakness.
These same studies show that leaders and managers who Are willing to say
maybe during difficult conversations are seen as more professional and as better
teammates and approachable, et cetera.
Wow.
And I did these wonderful explorations of the space program and particularly
the team that put the rovers on Mars, those incredible robots and 20 percent of
this incredibly diverse and very highly successful team, 20 percent of their
conversations involved micro conflicts.
Again, I've read the transcript.
' Maybe it could be this that we're seeing on Mars' or 'maybe those rocks...'
'well, I don't know,..' It was very gentle, subtle kinds of disagreements,
but nevertheless, constant disagreements 20 percent were micro conflicts and a
hundred percent of those micro conflicts involved expressions of uncertainty.
So the scientists think that the success of that mission was really
based on uncertainty and disagreement.
And I think that, as I write about this topic, I ask why come together
to be less than the sum of our remarkable parts, because they unearthed
something called the hidden profile.
So most groups actually only discuss what everybody already knows.
I mean, maybe that rings bells for anybody who goes to meetings.
That what's lost are the hidden profile of individual information that people
in the group have because it doesn't get aired because it gets overlooked.
And so if you have this wonderful form of what I call 'uncommon ground
disagreement' and uncertainty, you unearth the hidden profile, what
could be more inclusive than that?
And you can see how that moves the group forward to new frontiers.
I love it.
Yeah.
And that tiny change as well that you were talking about with
the hedge words, that tentative language, it's a really small change.
We talk a lot about using conditional language, the mights, the woulds,
the coulds and also bringing in that, that wondering as well.
' I'm wondering that this might be going on'.
'What are you wondering about' showing that nobody's sure here?
There are lots and lots of options.
We're laying it wide open on the table and then it just invites all those
other perspectives in, doesn't it?
Exactly.
It's all about opening the door to others, opening the door to our minds.
And there are studies that show that people who are tolerant of uncertainty
have no less assertiveness when they're in difficult conversations.
So we, it's really important not to mistake uncertainty with wishy
washiness, uncertainty is not the same thing - uncertainty and conviction
can go hand in hand, but certainty is closing the door, locking the box, et
cetera, shutting things down whereas you can be uncertain skillfully and
still have tremendous conviction, and I think that's really important.
Yeah, definitely.
I want to move slightly over to perspective taking because you talk about
it in, in the book and it's something that's very dear to my heart, something
I do a lot of work with in the museum.
And you call it where did I write down?
No, yes.
The social side of uncertainty, which I thought was a lovely description of it.
You mentioned the example of the LGBT outreach group in California.
Can you share a little bit about that?
Sure, sure.
And the work on disagreement is also the social side of uncertainty.
There might be more sides of, social sides of uncertainty that I haven't uncovered.
But I guess I was interested in Two aspects of our divided society today.
First, we talked about disagreement and dissent, and that's often, letting, us
air perspectives on so called 'our side'.
But at the same time, uncertainty can bridge to the 'other', to the people we
oppose, at etc. So there are two different ways in which uncertainty can help us
tremendously in our social situations.
I went canvassing in Los Angeles with a extremely creative and innovative
group called the Leadership Lab.
They were canvassers or activists for LGBTQ rights.
And they also did a lot of research on their their kind
of, Projects and missions.
So there was a lot of actual gold standard academic research showing
that in a nutshell, their approach to conversing with opponent voters
was tremendously successful.
And really at the bottom of that, at the heart, their conversations
with opposing voters, people who are really against any kind of gay
rights, transgender rights, et cetera.
Their conversations took seven years to hammer out and experiment
with and at the bottom of what they finally did was a perspective taking.
So, by success, I mean, they were able, in 10 minutes, approaching a stranger's
doorstep in a 10 minute conversation to boost tolerance for transgender rights
and other rights of minorities by as many sort of points on a scale as the American
public rose in tolerance over 15 years.
I mean, it was tremendous in just a few minutes.
What they had been doing was talking at the voters.
They basically used scripts, they used pre planned conversations and
talking points, and they really thought that they would hammer these
people to change to their opinion.
And what really turned things around was when they began to see
the voter as just another human, not as a label, not as an ideology.
They began to listen to the other side and they also began to take their perspective,
to see the world through the voter's eyes.
And this is something that also has been studied in very many different situations.
If we can see the world through the eyes of a murderer or, a convicted
felon or someone, again, whose politics we loathe, we actually begin
to be willing to sit closer to them, to work with them, to et cetera.
The changes are extraordinary.
And this kind of perspective taking, I'll note is not empathy.
It's not how does that person feel?
It's actually what is their day like.
How do they see the world?
Let me project and imagine what the world looks like.
Now, what's at the heart of this?
What does this have to do with uncertainty other than you're putting
a pause button on, hammering something over the head with your opinion?
Really, the perspective taking is actually just a leap of imagination.
You don't know what that voter is thinking.
You don't know what the convicted felon's day is like.
But that's the marvel and the miracle with this small, brief leap of
imagination, you are jolting your assumptions, you are willing yourself
to be uncertain, you're practicing a form of uncertainty, so you get beyond
your assumptions and your expectations.
And you can see the theme here.
We need and want to offer ourselves prediction errors.
And then we begin to be opened up and there's so much more we
can do to engage in these diverse conversations to talk to people.
But unless we utilize productive uncertainty in this way, we
can't have the conversations that then build the relationships.
That's really important.
And I think this is something that we can also bring that I think
perhaps your listeners can bring to the museum world because it's a
very brief, free interesting little exercise in walking you don't have
to walk a mile in someone's shoes.
You just have to walk a minute in someone's shoes cognitively
to really be on a different plane of existence with them.
And that's very powerful.
Yeah.
It's a really powerful discussion that you can have with people with
different types of objects with artworks, with photographs, documentary
photographs, all sorts of things.
And even we do a lot of work around imagining what
perspectives are involved here.
So even just improving that cognitive ability to think about, well, there
are a range of perspectives beyond mine, because the brain obviously
places ourselves there at the center.
Yeah, I was delighted to read about that in your book as well.
We are coming up to time.
I have two last questions for you and they're related, so I am going
to ask them at the same time.
So If museum educators could take one key insight from your book, from
your research about uncertainty, what would you hope it would be?
And the second part of that question is, what did you take away from writing it?
Sure.
Well, I think maybe I'll add one and a half to your first question, but I think,
try on the unknown every day, realizing that uncertainty again is not monolithic,
it's woven into the fabric of our lives.
So we have so many opportunities to try it on and to practice uncertainty.
That's where the golden experiences come.
And I'll also add that keep remembering that uncertainty is wisdom in motion.
And then I, this book changed my life.
I mean, I, it's my third and I learned a lot and I might have changed many
practices in my life from writing about home or attention, but writing about
uncertainty really helped me build a capacity for meeting the unknown with open
eyes and open heart and with curiosity.
So I think that, I mean, I'm a very curious person anyhow, I'm a journalist
and I'm a researcher and I'm constantly sticking my nose and things, but it
just made me that much more open.
And even in terms of relationships, I think that so often in our culture,
we think we need to offer answers to a friend in need or a family
member in crisis or, even if we're imparting our knowledge to an audience.
And instead I find myself far more open to not providing the fix, the solution,
but working toward it incrementally.
And then finally, I pause a lot more because pausing is very
much a moment of uncertainty.
It's a moment of suspense.
And in another part of the book, I talk about what pausing does
for your memory and your learning.
Just pausing five minutes after learning new information, helps your
memory boost by up to 20 percent and there's a lot more to it than that.
But in essence, instead of stacking and racing through interviews and readings
and meetings during my day, I put in a little bit more time to not just breathe.
This is not about rest.
This is about a kind of activity.
Nevertheless but it allows us to basically let our minds
catch up with our experiences.
And I find that the day is a little less of a blur.
And so that's a wonderful feeling.
That's a wonderful takeaway to share with our listeners as well.
Thank you so much, Maggie, for coming on the podcast today.
Could you share with our listeners where they can find
out more about you and your work?
Great.
Well, first, I think best starting point is my website.
Maggie Jackson.
com or just Google 'Maggie Jackson uncertain' and you'll find me and that
has a lot of different interviews but also articles I've written, excerpts
from the book and other resources about uncertainty as well as my other work.
Perfect.
Just leaves me to say goodbye and thank you very much for
coming on The Art Engager.
It's been such a pleasure and I think your work is so important
and I'm really thrilled to be here.
Thank you so much.
So a huge thank you to Maggie for being on the show today.
You'll find links to her award winning book 'Uncertain, the wisdom and wonder
of being unsure' in the show notes.
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Thank you so much for joining us.
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Thank you for listening to the Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.
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