Leveraging Uncertainty for Marketing Success

Today, we are joined by Maggie Jackson, award-winning author and journalist known for her visionary writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure has been nominated for a National Book Award and is a selection of the Next Big Idea Club curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Dan Pink, and Adam Grant. Jackson's recent lead New York Times opinion piece on uncertainty and well-being drew a quarter-million views.

In this episode, we explore how to navigate uncertainty and what Maggie suggests you do to experience the positive effects of uncertainty in your own life and digital marketing career.

This episode is for you if you’re curious about the following:

1. You feel overwhelmed or stuck by how to deal with the uncertainty of SEO and digital marketing and would like tactics to deal with uncertainty and overwhelm.
2. You want to present yourself and your strategies confidently, even if the data is uncertain about future outcomes.
3. You want to learn more about how uncertainty can help you become a more creative and curious marketer.

Resources
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Chapters

• 0:00 Navigating Uncertainty in Digital Marketing
• 17:25 Embracing Uncertainty
• 25:50 Thriving in Uncertainty and Resilience
• 36:11 Fostering Disagreement for Uncertainty & Progress
• 51:57 Marketing Guest Appreciation & Call to Action

Transcript

Katherine Watier Ong: 0:42

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the changemakers in digital marketing. Great digital marketers understand that people are the most challenging part of doing their jobs, and this show focuses on the people part of digital marketing wins what tactics or skills the guests use to align people with their marketing strategy. I'm your host, Catherine Watsier Ong, the owner of WO Strategies LLC. We focus on increasing organic discovery for enterprise-sized, science-focused clients. Thank you for joining me. Let's get into it and celebrate our victories.

Katherine Watier Ong: 1:18

Today we're joined by Maggie Jackson. Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and a journalist known for her visionary writings on social trends and particularly technology's impact on humanity, and her new book is called Uncertain the Wisdom and Wonder of being Unsure, and it's been nominated for a National Book Award. It's a selection in the Next Big Idea Book Club curated by Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Dan Pink, Adam Grant we all know those names. Jackson's recent lead New York Times opinion piece on uncertainty and well-being drew a quarter million views. She's also written the acclaimed book Distracted, reclaiming our focus on a world of lost attention, which reveals the scientific discoveries that can help recundle our powers of focus in a world of overload and fragmentation.

Katherine Watier Ong: 2:03

So this show is going to be perfect for you if you're feeling overwhelmed, like I think most of us are right now in the industry, or stuck with how to deal with this uncertainty in the digital and SEO space, and you want tactics to deal with that uncertainty and overwhelm, and you want to make sure you can present your strategies confidently, even if the data underneath it is potentially uncertain and the future outcome is uncertain, or if you want to learn more about how uncertainty on the flip side can make you a more creative and curious marketer. So, Maggie, thanks for joining us. Oh, my pleasure, Thanks for having me. So do you mind if you get started just sort of laying the playing field and define uncertainty and how it impacts everyone's emotional wellbeing?

Maggie Jackson: 2:45

No, that's really important and I'm glad to start there. Uncertainty there's usually two main kinds of uncertainty. Experts now agree. So we have the uncertainty or what's called aleatory uncertainty. That's kind of what we don't know out there. We don't know if the markets will rise or fall next Tuesday. That's aleatory uncertainty.

Maggie Jackson: 3:09

So despite all the data, the AI, the probabilistic reasoning etc. Humans can't fully know. On the other hand, we have epistemic uncertainty, which is basically psychological uncertainty. That's really what I'm writing about and in a nutshell, it's the human response to the unknown. So basically, when any of us meet up with something new or unexpected or ambiguous, we kind of gain the recognition that we've reached the limits of our knowledge. You know we kind of fall short and yet we also can sense multiple possibilities.

Maggie Jackson: 3:46

So a very granular, you know daily example is hitting a traffic jam on your way to an important meeting and you don't know if the traffic jam will clear or if the app's going to tell you the better route. That leads you to think it could be this, it could be that that's actually uncertainty. It's not ignorance, it's reaching the limits of your knowledge. And what's really important also to underline at the get-go is that I'm not talking about and no one's idea of the good life is to be in limbo. In other words, uncertainty is not the end goal. Uncertainty is now being revealed by many, many different scientific avenues of studies to be really related to curiosity, as you mentioned, and adaptability and better decision making. But it's not where we want to end up. It's a vehicle, it's a path to thriving in this age of flux.

Katherine Watier Ong: 4:45

That's such a great way of pivoting it to making it a positive thing versus something that I think, if I say it maybe induces stress in the listeners. So I'm kind of curious because I know our audience is international. Is this a cultural thing that only works in the US? Is this a universal thing that everybody feels, regardless of culture and where they're located?

Maggie Jackson: 5:05

Well, uncertainty epistemic or psychological uncertainty is very much a part of the human condition. When we meet that, something new because we evolved to need and want answers in order to survive we actually have uncertainty and we have unease. That said and I want to unpack that more, about the neural workings of uncertainty and how it affects our brain and decision making et cetera. But as far as differences, there are mainly two kinds of differences. There's individual differences and then there also are cultural differences in people's attitudes or approach to uncertainty. So there's actually a personality trait called intolerance of uncertainty or you could say tolerance. So we all, of course, want to. My book is all about gaining skill in navigating uncertainty and responding to the unknown. But you know, to back up a bit, we all have a kind of comfort zone. You know give or take with uncertainty. So, just as you might be more or less shy than I am, or you know, extro you up for anxiety. Actually, you don't like surprises. You're more of a rigid thinker. You treat knowledge as something you hold and defend, rather something that can be continually updated. On the other hand, tolerance of uncertainty is really highly related to resilience and to mental well-being is really highly related to resilience and to mental well-being. It's people who are more tolerant of the uncertainties of life and also the unsureness they evoke are more likely to like surprises, be flexible thinkers and kind of even revel in a complex problem. So that's really important to be aware of where we all fit, but also it's also important to note that it's mutable. In other words, we can bolster our tolerance of uncertainty through very simple steps. There's a lot of work now about that. You know, just simply it's kind of jumping off exposure therapy. So a lot of studies show that hey, try a new dish in a restaurant or delegate more at work. Or I personally turn to open water, ocean swimming, all winter long. That's, you know, my daily dose of uncertainty, because the app can tell you everything but it really doesn't tell you anything when you're in the water. So these are very simple steps.

Maggie Jackson: 7:42

And then to get to your question about culture. And then to get to your question about culture, teams, companies, countries, all can have different sort of tolerance for uncertainty. So we can't generalize too much, of course, but we can gain kind of hints of different areas of the world or, as we might imagine, different companies have more or less tolerance of uncertainty. A design company is probably going to be more tolerant than you know, like a straight, straight, laced I don't know insurance company, and so that's really important to keep in mind.

Maggie Jackson: 8:18

You know, if you're marketing or you're managing, for instance, you might want to frame your messaging differently according to whether to whether the audience is steeped in intolerance of uncertainty. So a manager who's introducing new training in a country, an area like South America, that's very rule-oriented and stability-focused, actually should kind of frame that training as something everyone's going to do but your job is safe and et cetera. If you're in a more tolerant of uncertainty, flexible kind of culture, you can say, hey, this is going to help you get ahead, it'll stretch you, it'll grow you, you're going to be working on the edge of your comfort zone. You get the picture. So these are different sort of nuances in this large issue of how well we tolerate uncertainty and again, the unsureness.

Katherine Watier Ong: 9:13

Yeah, so that's fascinating background. So our, our industry of digital marketing is definitely one that's constantly changing. So the last numbers were that Google changes the algorithm nine times a day. We now know that might even be more than that, based on the most recent leak. So I've got two kind of questions here. One I'm kind of thinking when I was hiring folks for my team and I'm not sure that I really nailed the uncertainty bit, but I did try to find folks that had sort of outside the box thinking if that makes sense, Because if you're grabbing somebody from college and training them on this, they're ultimately going to fail if they can't handle the uncertainty. So my first question is is there any sort of way to like vet people's level of comfort with uncertainty? And then, for those folks that have decided they want to be in this career, what tips do you have for them to maybe bolster and increase their tolerance of constant change and uncertainty?

Maggie Jackson: 11:14

Sure. Well, this is very, very new the attention, the intolerance of uncertainty can be tested, but it's very new. There's a lot of new attention to that. It hasn't really gained traction in the business world yet, although there's a lot of interest. So you can find on the internet the short form assessment for tolerance of uncertainty and you could actually give it to your employees. I would not take it too literally. Again, I wouldn't say that because someone scores high in tolerance and uncertainty.

Maggie Jackson: 11:53

The second point about this is that it's not just mutable. We can challenge ourselves to be more tolerant of the uncertainty. But it's also situational. So when people are tired or overloaded, if you got a firm that's coming to a deadline or a team that's coming to a deadline on a project, they're likely to be exhausted and overloaded. That's when they'll show very high tolerance, intolerance of uncertainty. They will, and so they.

Maggie Jackson: 12:19

We all should be aware of that, that certain situations we're going to lean into jumping to answers and disliking surprises, just when we need to be flexible. So that's really important and I think one way to there are two main real big takeaways from all of the new studies about uncertainty, and the first is you know, how do we gain adaptability in this world which is more and more unpredictable. You know, if the world itself, the uncertainty is rising. Unpredictability. You know, if the if the world itself, the uncertainty is rising, unpredictability, volatility, et cetera, that you know, studies show that that's the case. Well then, what is our response going to be? And studies of expertise can help us, because now the bottom line is that true experts actually know when and how to be unsure. That's how they are adaptable, that's how they're nimble in the moment. One big study of CEOs in the middle of a huge crisis in Europe actually found that the ambivalent CEOs were the ones who were more inclusive, listened to multiple perspectives and they were more resourceful. They actually tried and experimented to adapt to this crisis, which was the doubling expansion of the European Union. At the time, people who CEOs who thought that they knew just what to do and you know the typical expert response were actually ones who tended to do nothing at all. So it's not uncertainty that holds us back, it's our poor approaches to uncertainty.

Maggie Jackson: 13:54

And so, just to continue further, we all gain expertise. You mentioned two decades in the field, and we gain through practice in our 10,000 hours, and so we do know what to do. We have these mental models the doctor hears chest pains and then thinks heart attack. You know you might, in your field or endeavor, know about certain situations that demand certain solutions. Even amidst the unpredictability, that kind of expertise is impressive and important in routine, predictable environments.

Maggie Jackson: 14:32

So when you have seen it before, when this is not something new and complex and ambiguous, well then, yes, you can rely on old solutions, but it's the time when something is new and that you need to draw on that uncertainty. You need to make time for it. I call it inhabiting the question. So superior experts are actually called adaptive experts and they're the ones who actually spend more time assessing a new, complex problem than even novices do. So you know you need to make time, you need to wade in to test and evaluate.

Maggie Jackson: 15:10

This is the space of uncertainty that you know. Basically, this is the space of possibility that you're. You know testing and understanding and taking, and I'm talking about even just a few minutes. You know you're in a fast, fast, fast paced world. I studied surgeons and actually went into the operating room and if they took just a few minutes to assess a crisis, they were far, far better off in the long run. Those were the adaptive experts. And another way we can be an adaptive expert is to take on harder cases, kind of live at the edge of your comfort zone rather than always, you know, coasting with what you already know. Those are the experts who actually, you know, grow rather than just continue to apply old solutions. So those are a couple of that's a really important point about uncertainty.

Katherine Watier Ong: 16:05

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. In fact, one of the audio books that I'm reading um diary of a CEO kind of talks about that, with one of his tips for being successful was uh, if it's uncomfortable, lean in. Especially if it's a learning thing like, lean in, just keep going, keep leaning in until it you know, you sort of understand it a bit more, but don't back away from things that are scary and new, basically. Um, so I'm of curious cause. In your book you mentioned that this uncertainty creates good stress. So and the quote that I particularly liked was people who learn to reappraise stress as natural and useful are more perceptive and effective in challenging situations. So how do people get to that state? How do they regulate their nervous system so they can think through situations? And is there any advice you might have for listeners that get anxious and stressed when confronted with workplace uncertainty?

Maggie Jackson: 16:59

Yes, that's a great question and that actually aligns with the second most powerful takeaway from the new studies of uncertainty Basically, studies of uncertainty, basically uncertainty's angst, uncertainty's unease is beneficial, it's the gift, so it is good stress. Whenever I travel, I talk to audiences and ask them what's the one word that comes to mind when I mention uncertainty? And invariably the responses are angst and unease. And that's really true because, as I mentioned, we as humans need and want answers. So you get uneasy. Well, that unease is basically your body and brain springing to action to meet this new thing, whatever it is to investigate, and so your heartmate race in that traffic jam or your cortisol levels will probably rise. At the same time, your brain undergoes these really powerful positive changes. So, for instance, your working memory improves, your brain becomes more receptive to new data when you're uncertain and your focus sharpens, you're on your toes. And one study of emergency medicine doctors found that when they're in a sticky situation clinically and they felt unsure, that's the time when their attention was really sharp. So they were able to. So this is what's happening is called arousal by scientists.

Maggie Jackson: 18:24

Uncertainty is not something to fear or to retreat from. It's something to lean into, because of two things. First of all, uncertainty is literally, as one neuroscientist told me, the brain telling itself there's something to be learned here. So what does that mean? It's basically uncertainty is the body and brain's way of jolting us out of that routine, that kind of autopilot. We live our days kind of knowing just what to do, how to tie our shoes, how to make a cup of coffee. Now there's of autopilot. We live our days kind of knowing just what to do, how to tie our shoes, how to make a cup of coffee. Now there's something whoa new and your brain is telling you to now slow down and update your understanding of the world. It's really important not to so. This is why ambivalent CEOs were more resourceful, because they picked up on this wakefulness and then they waded into that space of possibility. So those are the two most important.

Maggie Jackson: 19:16

And to get to that dreaded word, anxiety, which is also on everybody's minds when it comes to uncertainty, it's very, very important to understand that uncertainty, the arousal of uncertainty, is distinct from fear. So basically, when you're afraid of your boss's anger because you can't get to the meeting, or you're afraid of next year because it seems like you really don't know what's going to coming down the road. These sorts of fears actually produce a different reaction to in the body and brain and in essence, in a nutshell, it's basically a shutdown, your body and brain shutdown. We all know what that feels like. We're giving a presentation and we feel this angst and you feel like you're shutting down, not rising to the moment, because you're going into survival mode and your brain actually blood begins to funnel away from the brain. So how can we kind of avert that, not go down that road of anxiety? How can we go into the arousal and wakefulness? Well, first of all, understand it sounds really simplistic, but hey, understand that the world is always going to be changed, it's always about change. So if our default mode is think, oh gosh, I wish this Monday morning meeting was just the same thing and I'm not going to, you know, I wish the week was, you know completely, nothing ever happened, and you know, then you're basically tuning out of that arousal, you're not picking up on the signal that uncertainty is giving you, so you're not picking up on changes in your environment. And the second thing we can do is to, in order to harness this arousal, this wakefulness, is to dial back on outcome fixation Now. So that's basically. I mean this.

Maggie Jackson: 21:04

Studies in sports and in, you know, giving tough presentations and all sorts of challenging situations, find that when people focus on the outcome, in other words, what's in it for me, or, more commonly, I think I'm gonna fail or the audience doesn't like this presentation, that's an outcome fixation that removes our attention away from the process of gaining a good outcome.

Maggie Jackson: 21:29

So your mind is elsewhere, you're putting the cart before the horse, and that's really important to just stop that. And so one way to do that is to get very present oriented during challenging situations, and so top athletes actually use things something called cue words, a very simple little trick. It's a personal mantra. In the middle of a trying situation, you just have a little mantra. You might say focus now to yourself. Or you might say be now, and that's actually proven to help you become more engaged in the moment, more alert, and then do, and it enhances performance. So that all has to do with seeing uncertainty as good stress, picking up on it, leaning into it, seeing that the world is always going to be full of change. Then you're on your toes rather than retreating away. From that kind of performance mode you need.

Katherine Watier Ong: 22:28

Well, and it sounds like meditation might be a little bit there too, because that'll help you maintain the present. This resonates a lot with me. I do. I think I've told this people on the podcast before, but I do a weekly check-in, check-out just to manage my life every week, and one of the things is I picked this up from somewhere else, but there you have like a word, motivational word for the week. Mine, without fail, never changes. It's always the same, but it's one step at a time. So it's not one word, mind you, but it's just reminding me that I can't look at the whole thing. I'm just going to pick one, one step at a time, then do the next step. That, personally, reigns in my overwhelm.

Maggie Jackson: 23:07

Yeah, that's perfect, and that's basically allowing yourself to be in uncertainty. So then you can perform and and be, you know, kind of navigate, harness the best of uncertainty, rather than kind of wishing it were over.

Katherine Watier Ong: 23:23

Right, Right, Cause it's it's. I'm in a space where it's not going to be over. No, no.

Maggie Jackson: 23:30

One, one leading psychologist, one world's leading psychologist on anxiety, michelle Dugas of Canada, said to me you know, put it very pithily, if you have difficulty dealing with uncertainty, you have difficulty dealing with a life.

Katherine Watier Ong: 23:45

Yeah, I know, I think it was very heartbreaking. I weirdly remember as a kid when I realized that life is always changing. I have, like this childhood memory of being very sad. I forget how old I was, but I really wanted things to be stable. I'm going to guess it's eight, because I particularly liked being eight for some reason. But that's not true. Like you always change, you grow, you go through puberty, you go to a different school, like stuff's changing all the time. Through puberty, you go to a different school, like stuff's changing all the time. Um, though, possibly I have more, uh, patients with uncertainty Cause I I discovered early on with jobs where it was the same thing every day. I got horribly bored. So I'm on the other end.

Katherine Watier Ong: 24:24

I like new challenges, just personally, um. And so what I found interesting is cause. Maybe this gets back to like vetting vetting your employees because one of the things that I did with team members is that I, if you were interviewing for me, coming from college, you have no idea what SEO is. I would give you a screenshot of Google analytics and say what can you get from this information? What would your next question be? Trying to tap into that curiosity, because if you can't take a leap of like, you know, if you can't be curious about it, you're just not going to be a good fit for the industry. But what I found interesting with your book is you said that this uncertainty is the key to curiosity. So can you tell me a little bit more about that, because I think that was fascinating.

Maggie Jackson: 25:09

Yeah, no, it's really interesting and it also also kind of lends itself to what is the personality that best you know who best navigates uncertainty and who is you know that goes hand in hand with who is the curious person, as you're saying, because you know, just to. You know kind of sink into what we had been talking about. If you can, you know, open up to the world with curiosity and wonder rather than fear, and you know sort of anxiety, then you're going to just do a better job, day by day, minute by minute. So there's a lot of work now on curiosity and there are a lot of different types of curiosity and they're all studying all sorts of different interesting things that have never been explored before. You know, for instance, there are different styles of curiosity. Some people have this pinpoint style called the hunter and they go after you know that they want the answer to X question and that's really a valid. And then at the same time people also can sort of lean toward this busy buddy kind of curious. They're just interested in everything. I know personally as a reporter and a journalist. That's a really good thing to be as a journalist and most people are kind of a blend of the two.

Maggie Jackson: 26:20

But the one thing that all curious people have in common is tolerance for the stress of the unknown. So really closely related to that tolerance of uncertainty, but kind of tolerating the good stress, seeing the benefits. So really closely related to that tolerance of uncertainty, but kind of tolerating the good stress, seeing the benefits. So the people who tolerate the stress of uncertainty are actually the ones who are actively curious. You can be curious and like, oh, I wonder about this, but not actually do much about it. Those who are able to tolerate the awkwardness or the sort of possibly's really fascinating. Most fascinating is this tolerance of the stress of uncertainty is the facet of curiosity. That's most related to well being. So people who can you know, actively explore, who can raise their hand and ask a difficult question, etc. Etc. Those are the people who have higher well being, more life satisfaction. Those are the people who have higher well-being, more life satisfaction. They are just better off mentally in life.

Maggie Jackson: 27:39

And because? Why? Because they're open to all of life, not just the good but also the bad. They're open to the frontiers of what they don't know and they just continually to push into that. So it's I think it's really interesting to link uncertainty and resilience and wellbeing. The other thing that's really related is that people who go through sort of experiments or therapy actually targeted therapy to bolster their tolerance of uncertainty actually they have more resilience. So all of this, you can see, is highly related to each other. If you can be open to uncertainty, you can be curious, and if you're curious and open to uncertainty, then you are more nimble. And that's what a lot of people tell me, because there's a lot of work going on in business, in medicine and all sorts of different sectors about this. Uh, try boosting people's uh ability to navigate uncertainty. Uh, people constantly use the same word when they begin to understand this, they say it's liberating.

Katherine Watier Ong: 28:49

That's, that's a really powerful word liberating so that's that's a really powerful word liberating. So that's so interesting Cause I on the show, I'm definitely dancing around this idea of resilience Like how do you become more resilient? And you're just approaching it from a sort of a different perspective for anyone listening. We actually had Lloyd Lobo on talking about the power of community to also give you more resilience. So if you're, if you yourself are also curious about how to build your resilience, I encourage you to check out that episode.

Katherine Watier Ong: 29:18

So I just want to circle back around to the nitty gritty of what goes on in this industry. So oftentimes things are changing under our feet and we need to appear confident when providing recommendations. First of all, I have to come up with recommendations, and then we have to be confident, and then the data underneath it might be horribly incomplete, because the tools we use don't tell us the whole picture, and so, as much as we try to get the whole picture honestly in the back of our head, we know that it's missing some stuff. So how do you handle? Do you have any recommendations about how to handle that from your research? What strategies or mindsets can help people be more confident in that particular moment?

Maggie Jackson: 30:13

is often seen as weakness, as inertia, when actually it's the fear of uncertainty that's more highly related to inertia. Uncertainty is seen as weakness in leaders and in expertise, but that's not the case at all. The research doesn't show us. It's the opposite, actually. So I think there are two couple important points. First of all, today we're really under pressure very often in this quick answer, quick fix kind of tech-oriented environment, to be confident. Unwarranted confidence is what's demanded, in other words, confidence that's immediate, confidence that's ultra-sure, and that's actually not going to gain us the better answer. You know, I was at one conference and executives were saying well, we need to be quick, we uncertainty slows you down, and yes, it slows you down briefly, as I mentioned. But at the same time, uncertainty gives you the better answer, not just any old answer, it allows you to get to the better answer. And where does confidence have to do that? Well then, you're gaining a kind of solid confidence, a confidence on knowing the ropes. You can't know everything, as you mentioned, but you can know the situation, you can understand what you're coping with. That's a solid kind of confidence.

Maggie Jackson: 31:30

Now, at the same time, it's important although we all want to be confident and we should be confident in our answer. But in a client situation or a management situation, it's really important to understand that expressions of uncertainty are not bad. In fact, they're actually highly beneficial. For instance, expressions of uncertainty are persuasive, believe it or not. Now, we wouldn't think that the doctor or the SEO expert who says they're not sure of the answer would be persuasive. But it's true as long as it's linked to potential. So you wouldn't want the doctor to walk into the room and say I really don't know what to do with your case, or the SEO experts the same of the client. But what you can do is link it to potential. For instance, the doctor can say I'm not sure, but I have resources or colleagues who can help me and we're going to figure this out. There's potential there. Or you can say plan A, our next marketing strategy plan is you know, we're not 100% sure that this is going to be guaranteed successful, but we have a lot of the evidence that shows it likely will be and there's a lot of potential there.

Maggie Jackson: 32:47

People respond really well because it's plausible, because it's persuasive, and the other thing that it's really important to understand is that the words we use. I think the more I immerse myself in uncertainty the more I see this kind of culture, addicted to using certainty words. You know that's for sure and absolutely. Those are actually not seen as professional in workplace situations when used by executives and studies out of Harvard as making people seem more professional, more approachable, you know, just as authoritative and yet more human to deal with, which is a very good thing. And these words do two things.

Maggie Jackson: 33:44

Linguistically, if I use the word maybe, it signals to you that there's something more to know, which is very important. If you're working together, you really need to know where your knowledge ends and where you need to do further work. The second thing is that the word maybe and these other hedge words indicate that you are receptive to another person's perspective, which is also very, very important today, especially in a divisive society and divisive workplaces. So these little granular words like maybe and that would be in contrast to you know, obviously, or you know you're wrong or therefore those are the opposite of hedge words. Then they are not persuasive and they don't help. You appear to be someone who everybody wants to work with. So those are some granular tips and strategies for how to be confident while also being strategically unsure.

Katherine Watier Ong: 34:46

I just I need to have an episode about what words you should and should not use. I'm just utterly fascinated with ones that are more persuasive versus not, and how to train yourself to use the ones that are more effective. As just a side note, I find it very fascinating. So let's pivot for a second and talk about this team dynamic. So in your book you've talked about this, and we haven't talked about it much yet on the show, but that fostering a culture of uncertainty is going to lead you to better outcomes, basically, and so can you talk a little bit more about the value of that and how to build a team that can handle uncertainty?

Maggie Jackson: 35:25

Yes, yes, no. It's really important to understand that uncertainty is not a solo act, that we can be unsure productively together. And in fact, very, very new research shows that uncertainty is the foundation, it's kind of the bedrock of excellence in group collaboration and teamwork, and this is true of Supreme Court justices or climber Mount Everest expeditions or workplace teams. So it runs the gamut and so you know. Of course, to back up or to preface, it's very often seen as agreement is what we all want to strive for and of course you know again, that should be the end goal, but it really shouldn't be the norm in a team. When a team is in agreement, when a team agrees, even no matter how diverse that team is, they start to lose sight of individual differences, different levels of knowledge, expertise. They lose what's called the hidden profile of what each individually knows and they begin to most often talk about what everybody already knows. Maybe that'll ring some bells from your audience. You sit around and talk about what everybody knows and you're not going to progress. Teams that are in agreement are also less accurate and less creative and the discussions are more shallow and cursory. That's what happens when we're trying to get on the same page and stay there, whereas teams that are disagreeing who you know productively, respectfully, micro conflicts it's often called, those are the ones that have more intense discussions, that surface this hidden information, that are more accurate, creative, etc. Etc. Now so the question is how Well?

Maggie Jackson: 37:10

I studied a deep dive in the Mars Exploration Rover team, which is considered one of the most innovative in space history. They were an amazing team, diverse in all ways, and they basically were highly successful putting those robots on Mars, discovering water, et cetera, et cetera. Because they constantly cultivated disagreement. And why? In order to gain uncertainty. So this is what happens when you're disagreeing.

Maggie Jackson: 37:42

In today's polarized world, we often assume that, oh, a disagreement is good if the right side wins, or disagreement is good if that dissenting voice has the right answer and everybody follows behind. But that's not actually how the best collaboration works. When there's disagreement, actually what should happen is that the disagreement spurs, sparks, uncertainty, and then there's a whole new dynamic of curious and skeptical, intense kind of discussions and all those performance gains. Well, how do we know that uncertainty is so important? Because even dissenting or disagreeing voices that are wrong actually end up with these performance gains. Somebody can be wrong, but it's the jolting the group off the assumptions and sparking the uncertainty that lets people know what they don't know, and the gains are just stunning. It's really amazing.

Maggie Jackson: 38:44

And in this Mars rover team, 20% of their conversations remote, virtual side-by-side, all sorts of conversations involve micro conflicts and they often use those hedge words, maybe sometimes things like that I don't know that, things like that but also 100% of the micro conflicts involve expressions of uncertainty.

Maggie Jackson: 39:08

So one one page we can take away from this Mars team, which is absolutely fascinating, was so highly studied, is they had something the time would say does anyone have anything they disagree with and is there anything that someone doesn't know? In other words, raise your hand and say I don't understand or I disagree. And they kept to that listening ritual and it was. That was one of the more important ways, means of their success. So it's absolutely fascinating. So I think I call this gaining uncommon ground and basically you know what we want to do, to do right by our teams, is to not only accept disagreement and then the resulting uncertainty, but also to offer it ourselves and not see that, as you know, the person who disagrees or engenders uncertainty shouldn't be seen as a pain in the neck. They should be the hero of the group, really.

Katherine Watier Ong: 40:21

You're just reminding me why, when I was in an agency, I hated brainstorming sessions. Because the agency I was at I would be the one coming with a unique perspective, because I was the only digital one sitting there and I was always shut down and the brainstorming sessions were always about finding the one thing everybody agreed on and it just felt like it was not brainstorming per se. There was no new ideas, anyway, especially since I was coming with new ideas and shut down. Anyway, that's just fascinating and I love the tips about how to close out the meeting to make sure you're keeping that curiosity, basically. So the other thing I want to flip to, because you mentioned just a little bit so we've got I'm a little bit concerned about the future in general.

Katherine Watier Ong: 41:03

So, if we go a little bit meta, obviously the world is uncertain. We're in a pandemic, we're watching the bird flu thing, we've got climate change. So, beyond even just the industry, life's a bit uncertain for sure. And on top of that, we know that online everybody's experience is personalized to them. So you know, I've mentioned on the show, I think, the filter bubble, which is all about the fact you're only going to get opinions that confirm what you think, because social media platforms, you know, personalized to you, so to search. So I'm kind of concerned about where we're going, because you just talked about how, in order to get to a better outcome, we actually need this diversity. So do you want to talk a little bit about how, maybe, if we just pull it down to the individual level, if you're an educated person, what can you do to make sure you're not too filtered? And you've got this broad perspective.

Maggie Jackson: 42:01

Right, yeah, no, that's important because in talking about workplace teams and collaboration through disagreement and uncertainty, I'm really talking about, you know, kind of progressing or collaborating with so-called our side, even amidst diversity. We want to not rest only in the known, in other words, not just hang around with people like us. You might be bonded with your team and still able to be uncertain. You might be still able to engender that disagreement that puts you forward. Or there's someone who's even the opposite sports team, across the stadium, or the person across, you know, in your neighbor, whose politics you loathe. These are the bridges that we also need to make. This is also where the open-mindedness of uncertainty can really help us today. So, in the meta view, you know, we really need to understand you know the people the other side, to understand you know the people the other side, so to speak, through gaining more uncertainty. Because, basically, the humans are, you know, we evolved to need and want answers. We also evolved to categorize. Even when you see a face of someone, either online or, you know, down the street either online or down the street unconsciously your brain assesses within milliseconds whether that person is in-group or out-group, like you or not like you, and from there the brain begins to quiet in these complex, interesting ways. When your brain sees someone they deem out-group, they begin to quiet down and so they become less like an individual. So this categorization socially is very, very dangerous, leads to dehumanization and misunderstandings at the very least, and the polarization we see today. One way again we can jolt ourselves out of that unconscious categorization is well, two ways. One is first of all to try to actively, deliberately, see another person as an individual. You know, studies show that again, this could be true. Even if you know you were talking about being the only person from digital in these meetings, well, they probably categorized you as, oh, that person from digital, and we say, oh, that person from accounting. We could do this in the workplace just as easily and say to ourselves well, let's think about who Joe is or Sally is or whoever they are, rather than the person from the, from the, you know accounting or whatever.

Maggie Jackson: 44:44

The second really powerful way to both lower prejudice and also to gain a kind of the space for mutual learning that uncertainty gives us is something called perspective taking. I mean, that's just kind of your grandmother's folk wisdom, you know, thinking about the world through their eyes. Now, this is not empathy, it's not how do they feel, but it's really. What does the world look like through the eyes of a 90-year-old if you're 30? Or through the eyes of a you know X party political party if you're from Y political party? And that little bit of leap of imagination actually makes people more likely to work together, to want to sit closer together, even if they're really you know, outcasts in society, like a convicted felon or a drug addict, etc. And it really kind of matches.

Maggie Jackson: 45:40

What Socrates tried to teach a long time ago, at the dawn of the democracy, was that that perspective taking is just a leap of imagination.

Maggie Jackson: 45:51

You really don't know what they think or how they see the world through their eyes, but by doing so you're in some ways, I think, seeking, you're basically self-induced arousal is how I describe it. You're basically moving away from that easy, complacent categorization and you're suddenly waking up to the fact that maybe there's something you don't know about them. That sets the stage for the engagement that allows us to learn from each other, engagement that allows us to learn from each other. So it's a really important simple little tactic that people are now that is getting a lot of scientific attention and is being used in political campaigns. As activists talk to opposition voters on, you know, lgbtq rights, they're using this as a core of a way to help people lower prejudice on both sides. The activist, you know, might have prejudice against the opponent and the opponent has prejudice against them or closed mindedness. This helps open both minds and then they can talk, which is golden.

Katherine Watier Ong: 47:00

Those are great tips. So we're we're just about out of time. I actually have just a few more questions. The first one is we have this thing called artificial intelligence, right? That's sort of taking over our industry, both automation and AI. Do you have just? What is your opinion about how that's going to impact our future, Because I know you talk about it a little bit in the book.

Maggie Jackson: 47:24

Oh yes, it's a very complicated and it's you know. Talk about change. It's changing, you know, by the millisecond as we speak. But one thought I have is that we have to be very, very careful that AI doesn't do what most technologies have done in the history of human technologies, which is human. You know, machine age onwards technology. So I'm not talking about the stick or the ax, I'm talking about the machine onwards to computers, and that's induced automation bias.

Maggie Jackson: 47:55

Whenever a human is working with a machine, they become complacent. Basically, it happens with pilots, it happens as we search the web, it happens in hospitals. We become complacent. We then allow the machine to do the work for us. I think I see very many signs that that's happening with AI It'll do the work for us so we can just kind of go asleep at the wheel. In fact, many, many accidents with self-driving cars are because the human in the beta test, who was supposed to be there alert and ready, basically just was watching a movie or something like that. They just abdicated all responsibility to a machine that wasn't ready for it.

Maggie Jackson: 48:36

I think that's one really important trend to watch. It's also really fascinating and I do write about this to understand that AI has traditionally been founded and created on a very narrow definition of intelligence the rationalist Western idea that an intelligent being achieves one's goals. As you can see from that brief definition, it means process goes out the window. It means AI is built to do something with the leading minds in AI, to redefine AI, basically to make the robots and models more unsure of their goals. So if you tell your housekeeper robot to fetch coffee down the street, traditional AI will just do it.

Maggie Jackson: 49:40

They might plow down someone, they might go the fastest route to get the most expensive copy and unsure robot and I tested one at the Virginia Tech and it was fascinating will actually be teachable. They'll ask you questions, they'll show you multiple scenarios and they're seen as more smart and as more cooperative by humans who are testing them. So there's a trend to watch for us. I think the bottom line is uncertainty, with its capacity to help us be engaged and wakeful and also its provision of this space of possibilities by allowing us to slow down. Uncertainty really equips us to be in control in fluid and flexible ways, to be nimble, and that's where we need to be if we're going to be cooperating with, working, with collaborating with ultra, ultra smart machines and also, I'm sure, ai is our best hope. Many people think for having AI be stoppable instead of going completely out of control.

Katherine Watier Ong: 50:51

That would be the other uncertainty thing that's lingering in our head, right Not to get too existential Right, right it might come for us seriously. So this has been a fascinating conversation. I loved reading the book. I just have the last couple of questions, which is do you have any resources you want to share with the audience today? And then, how can people learn more about you?

Maggie Jackson: 51:13

Sure, and I think I can answer two questions in one. I would go send people to my website, maggie-jacksoncom. Just Google Maggie Jackson, un uncertain or my previous book distracted, you'll find me and you'll find a lot of resources there many, many articles, podcasts, interviews and some granular things. I'm just about to post a quiz on readers guide, quiz developed as a by the next big idea club Club and on the website, and so you'll find a lot of resources to help you learn about uncertainty and then harness it and navigate it well in your own life.

Katherine Watier Ong: 51:50

Awesome, this has been great. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, my pleasure. Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we're up to, go to digitalmarketingvictoriescom and, if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Rate us, comment and share the podcast please. I'm always looking for new ideas, topics and guests. Email us at digitalmarketingvictories at gmailcom or DM us on Twitter at DM victories. Thanks for listening.