The Hidden Cost of Certainty at Work | Margaret Heffernan

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Hidden Cost of Certainty at Work

Work for Humans with Dart Lindsley | Guest: Margaret Heffernan
Date: March 10, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the theme of uncertainty in work, creativity, leadership, and technology. Dart Lindsley and Margaret Heffernan, author of "Embracing Uncertainty," examine the hidden costs of certainty, how systems built around prediction and control undermine human agency, and why embracing artistic and creative approaches can lead to more resilient organizations and richer lives. The conversation moves fluidly between the philosophy of certainty, the limitations of control, the mindset of artists, leadership dynamics, and the power of art to disrupt the status quo.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Allure and Cost of Certainty

• Certainty as Control: Heffernan contrasts the desire for certainty—embodied by thinkers like B.F. Skinner—with the open-ended, discovery-driven mindset of creative people.
  • “What he's essentially saying is that someone… needs to decide what good looks like and then create the context in which we have no choice but to do that… You would call that totalitarianism.” — Heffernan [08:56]
• Impact of Technology and Surveillance: The pervasiveness of "control" thinking in AI and digital technology echoes Skinner’s ideals, posing threats to freedom, diversity, imagination, and agency.
  • “If we would just give up and surrender to technology, everything would be a lot easier… But what obeying our phones is doing to our powers of concentration, our capacity for imagination, sociability and empathy…” — Heffernan [10:22]

Notable Moment:

• Traintime Daydream: Heffernan recounts her train station fantasy, paralleling Alex Pentland's vision of a fully predictable, sensor-driven life, which she finds nightmarish rather than utopian. [11:57–16:13]
  • “Total certainty would be a prison because you would have no choices and life would just become a big list of things you have to do and cross off.” — Heffernan [13:00 approx.]

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2. Embracing Uncertainty: Lessons from Creative People

• Creativity and Not-Knowing: Many successful artists and writers (i.e., novelists who begin without knowing their plot) actively seek out uncertainty.
  • “Finding out where it’s going must be the fun part… If you knew the whole story, it’s almost like you were being dictated to.” — Heffernan [00:30]
• Contrast to Managerial/Efficiency Logic: Lindsley highlights how business attempts to measure, control, and predict often stifle what's truly valuable or innovative.
  • “Numbers feel certain, but it's hard to measure what's really most important. So sometimes we end up with the false comfort of measuring the wrong things.” — Lindsley [01:05]

Notable Quote:

• “Implicitly we acknowledge that the not knowing is what makes life life, that it is what creates the space in which we have some choices to make.” — Heffernan [17:45]

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3. The Artist’s Mindset vs. the Predict-and-Control Model

• Discovery over Control: Artists don’t seek to preordain results—they follow curiosity and courage, embracing wandering, uncertainty, and surprise.
  • [22:54–27:27] Heffernan describes novelist Olga Tokarczuk starting a murder mystery without knowing the answer, and artist Jeremy Deller’s open-ended public performances, as illustrations of wanting discovery, not preordained efficiency.
• Improvisation & Collaboration: The dynamism in jazz improvisation mirrors a willingness to play with uncertainty and co-create.
  • “What a joy to be able to do that… what a miraculous thing to be able to do.” — Lindsley [27:27]

Notable Practices of Artistic Thought:

Heffernan lists shared artist qualities:

• Curiosity & openness
• Courage to follow unplanned paths
• Patience to let connections form organically
• Stamina & resilience in the face of self-doubt and protracted "not knowing"
  • “Every sentence Robert Walser writes is an experiment… he has to bow to the sentence.” — Heffernan [28:01]
  • “That is excruciating on some level… I wish someone would just tell me.” — Heffernan [30:03]

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4. Leadership, Organizations, and Letting Go

• True Leadership and Agency: Heffernan’s time as a CEO taught her that the best results come from leaders stepping aside and creating space for others to contribute.
  • “If you take yourself out of the picture, you create the space in which this can emerge, because power is very, very disruptive of independent thinking.” — Heffernan [32:46]
• Stalemates and Latent Potential: Organizations suffer when employees’ ideas aren’t solicited or acted upon, leading to mutual frustration.
  • “Everybody's standing in their corner of the chessboard wanting more, but not knowing how to achieve it.” — Heffernan [34:00 approx.]
• Org Chart Origins: Early org charts distributed authority, recognizing the impossibility of central control in complex systems. [35:17]

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5. The Prepared Mind, Not-Forcing Ideas, and the Power of Observation

• Prepared Mind of the Artist: Artists collect ideas, observations, and materials, unsure when or how they will be useful. This openness primes them for insight and discovery.
  • “They have what I think of as a sort of well-stocked cupboard of ideas, experiences, observations and research.” — Heffernan [38:13]
• Comparison with Joseph Cornell: Lindsley compares artist Joseph Cornell’s barn of objects with the “well-stocked mind.” [42:44]
  • “…his barn was like an externalization of the mind you're describing.” — Lindsley [42:55]
  • “They prompt us to ask questions about, well, what are the connections? What does this mean?” — Heffernan [43:18]

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6. Art, Education, and Power

• Universities and Standardization: Modern education prioritizes standardized measurement, stifling creativity and producing “good second guessers” instead of independent thinkers.
  • “For every question there is one good answer. And if you get it and articulate it well, you’re clever… Not very creative thinking, not very good at asking contentious questions.” — Heffernan [44:46]
• Political Power of Art: Governments fear art’s ability to question, disrupt, and reveal alternative realities.
  • “Art comes to life in the space between the art and the viewer or the listener… the book doesn’t exist, really, until her mind, as articulated in the book, meets the mind of the reader.” — Heffernan, referencing Toni Morrison [47:23]
  • “It trounces this Skinnerian dream of inevitability.” — Heffernan [50:32]

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7. Ethics, Decisions, and Hypotheses

• All Decisions Are Hypotheses: Instead of fixating on outcomes with artificial certainty, leaders should treat decisions as testable assumptions, open to re-evaluation.
  • “If I do X, Y will be the outcome. But I tend to frame it as a hypothesis because I think it's incredibly important to remember it might not be true.” — Heffernan [53:28]
  • Boards should explicitly state their assumptions and revisit them as facts change. [53:28–55:38]

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8. Initiation vs. Reaction and the Problem of Passivity

• Playing “Closer to the Net”: Artistic and entrepreneurial mindsets favor initiating rather than just responding—a skill requiring comfort with risk and uncertainty.
  • “It's beautiful to play the game close to the net and to have the skills necessary to do that… a lot of it has to do with not responding but initiating.” — Lindsley [55:38]
  • “What I find alarming is the propensity of people to be in the bleachers… so I can deny all responsibility, but I can comment endlessly.” — Heffernan [56:32]

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “Total certainty would be a prison… Life would just become a big list of things you have to do and cross off.” — Heffernan [13:00 approx.]
• “Not knowing is what makes life life… it creates the space in which we have some choices to make.” — Heffernan [17:45]
• “Artists start from a different place, which is their prime motive isn’t to control the outcome, but to discover it.” — Heffernan [22:54]
• “Curiosity, courage, patience, stamina—the key ingredients of artistic thought.” — Heffernan [28:01]
• “If you take yourself out of the picture, you create the space in which this can emerge, because power is very, very disruptive of independent thinking.” — Heffernan [32:46]
• “All decisions are hypotheses… you have to keep alert to how far the foundational assumptions of your decision continue to be safe.” — Heffernan [53:28]
• “Art trounces this Skinnerian dream of inevitability.” — Heffernan [50:32]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:04 | Heffernan on creative people’s comfort with uncertainty | | 07:17 | Discussion of B.F. Skinner and totalitarian logic of certainty | | 11:57 | Train station story; Alex Pentland’s surveillance/“certainty” vision | | 17:45 | The implicit acknowledgment of the value of not knowing in life | | 22:54 | Artists’ processes: discovery vs. control (Olga Tokarczuk, Jeremy Deller) | | 27:27 | Jazz improvisation and the characteristics of artistic thought | | 32:06 | Heffernan on leadership: courage of letting go, unleashing team creativity | | 35:17 | The origins and philosophy behind the vertical org chart | | 38:13 | The ‘prepared mind’ of the artist and collecting ideas | | 44:46 | Impact of higher education’s focus on credentialing and standardization | | 47:23 | The political power of art and why institutions fear it | | 53:28 | Ethical decisions as hypotheses, the need to revisit assumptions and outcomes | | 55:38 | Initiating vs. reacting; playing close to the net metaphor |

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Final Thoughts

The episode argues compellingly that a quest for certainty and control not only stifles creativity in organizations and individuals, but also undermines the core of what makes us human—our agency, imagination, and capacity to surprise even ourselves. By adopting the practices and mindsets of artists—curiosity, patience, courage, and a tolerance for not-knowing—leaders and organizations can find more meaningful, adaptive, and humane ways to navigate uncertainty.

Margaret Heffernan’s essential message:
“Since uncertainty is a defining quality of human life, we need to learn how to cope with it better. Our best guides are those highly creative people who actively choose what is an uncertain way of life.” [00:04 | 17:45]

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Listen for More

Those interested in actionable insights for organizations, the interplay of creativity and uncertainty, and what it means to lead in an unknowable world will find this episode both deeply thought-provoking and inspiring.

Transcript

[A]

Since uncertainty is a defining quality of human life, we need to learn how to cope with it better. And our best guides are those highly creative people who embrace it on a regular basis, who actively choose what is an uncertain way of life. One of the most astonishing things I discovered was how many fantastic novelists start their books without knowing the plot or whether it's got a happy ending or not. Now, these are enormously complex plots, and you just think, you start that without knowing where it's going. But then you stop for a second and think, yeah, but finding out where it's going must be the fun part. If you knew the whole story, it's almost like you were being dictated, too. But you're in the process of discovering it, which is infinitely more rewarding and which I would say is true of any book at any bloody wise, which is, if it's any good, you stumble across things you did not see coming, and that's when you know you're onto something.

[B]

Welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. It's tough to make confident business decisions in a world that feels increasingly uncertain. The business depends on on these decisions, so it's scary. As a result, we grasp for certainty. Numbers feel certain, but it's hard to measure what's really most important. So sometimes we end up with the false comfort of measuring the wrong things. Or maybe worse, we control the system to death in order to make it measurable. It's expensive, and it rarely works. In her most recent book, Embracing Uncertainty, Margaret Heffernan presents the intellectual tools and practices that artists, writers, and musicians have developed to produce extraordinary work in conditions where the future simply can't be known. In this conversation, Margaret and I discuss the hidden costs of certainty, why systems built around prediction undermine human agency, and how artistic ways of working offer a different relationship to risk, failure, and learning. We also discuss what it means for leadership, technology, and the kinds of institutions we're building. As always, I admire the high standard of intellectual courage that Margaret demands from leaders. Thank you for listening. If you enjoy these conversations, subscribe and leave a review. It really helps new listeners find the show. And now, here's my conversation with Margaret Heffernan. Margaret Heffernan, welcome to Work for Humans.

[A]

It's really nice to be talking to you again, Doc.

[B]

Today we're going to talk about your book, Embracing Uncertainty. I don't know how to describe how I feel about this book. I feel like it's submerging me into a space, a very sort of unexplored space in Assumptions about how we think and about how we strive for certainty and the risks of doing so. So the last time we spoke at the end, I asked you what job do you hire your job to do for you? And one of the things that you said was you write to discover. So what did you set out with? What was the thread that you began to unravel in this book? And what did you discover?

[A]

Well, I think like a lot of my books, it actually started decades ago when I was working in the BBC doing radio first and then television. And I was working alongside some immensely creative people. These were poets, playwrights, musicians, designers. And one of the things I started to notice was that they quite frequently would produce something that seemed to be exactly, exactly what the times required. And especially in television, you know, the production time to make a big TV series, for example, is quite long. I mean, it was longer then before digital. But bringing a big drama series to the screen could take two, three years, maybe more if it was an international co production. And yet there seem to be people who wrote exactly the right thing or found exactly the right story or wrote exactly the right script. That when it came out, which was frequently two or three years after they'd started, was just exactly what audiences were attracted to and found meaning in. And it posed a question which was how could they do this? It wasn't that this was a trend anybody else could see. It wasn't something that marketing people were writing about. They just seemed to have an instinct not for where we were, but for where we were going. And it just stuck in my head. And I started, I think, unconsciously saving stories somewhere at the back of my brain that exemplified this. And then when I was writing Uncharted, which was about how we think about the future, I kept thinking about these people thinking, well, they clearly somehow somewhere are thinking about the future, even if they don't know it. And so I would say I set out to figure out, try to figure out how creative minds work and why it is that they are so often ahead of their time or right on their time. And there were many, many interesting things along the way. It was a ton of fun to do the research, as it usually is. But one of the things that was really interesting was that nobody offered me a sort of recipe. Follow these four steps and you too can be a visionary. It was never as crass or unrealistic as that. It was much more a description of how they are in the world and how open they are to what they find and the degree to which they are what Many people would regard to be opposites, which is they're very comfortable wandering through the world without a plan or an agenda. But they're also deeply practical, decisive human beings. And I've been very aware that. I think often creative people are marginalized as chaotic, impractical, daydreamers, slightly infantile, slightly chaotic. And it just struck me that actually they have the kind of perfect combination of openness to new observations and discovery and the capacity to act on them, which I think we need, particularly at this moment, where we really, really cannot see where we're going.

[B]

At the beginning of the book, you describe the opposite, and the thinkers and theorists who have strived to attain certainty, who are some of those thinkers.

[A]

The one that comes first to mind is obviously B.F. skinner, who was, it seems to me, extremely intolerant of human beings as a group, felt that they had made nowhere near the progress that they should have made and it was time to get them into shape. And he talks about this. He talks about the nonsense of liberty, the nonsense of freedom, and how if we would just let go of these rather childish infatuations, we could be made to be infinitely more efficient. And I think I first encountered Skinner probably in high school and found it, as any teenager would, I think, a pretty abhorrent concept. But then of course, he bounced back with a force when Shoshana Zuboff brought out her book on surveillance capitalism. And I suddenly realized that, of course, this is the mindset that underpins the AI revolution. The apification of us, our increasing dependency on technology, this notion that if we will just bow down to the power of technology, we can be made to be the efficient machines that Skinner absolutely idolized.

[B]

You know, it's funny reading Skinner because when you read his objectives, you're like, those are great objectives. Yeah, it's his methods. His thing is, we should get beyond violence, for instance, we should get beyond social unrest. But his means are through mind control.

[A]

Yes. Who could argue that we shouldn't get beyond violence? Who can argue that the world without civil unrest wouldn't be a nicer place to live? So, of course, the rhetoric is very persuasive. But what he's essentially saying is that someone or some entity or entities need to decide what good looks like and then create the context in which we have no choice but to do that. Well, I think we all know what that's called in the non psychological research world. You would call that totalitarianism. Do what you're told and everything will be fine. And let's be clear There certainly have been what we might regard as totalitarian states whose chief benefit has been prolonged peace, but whose downsides have been an absence of diversity, an absence of freedom, an absence of liberty, an absence of individuality, and an absence of what I would call the finer qualities of humans, which is their capacity to imagine other people, places and things, to be creative, empathetic and responsive.

[B]

Is that the cost of certainty?

[A]

I think it is. I mean, it's interesting because of course, I write a book and it finally grinds through the publishing process after six to nine months. And it's been very fascinating to me now thinking that I was going through the final proofs about this time last year, that actually, in the year that has passed, I think we've seen more of this. We've seen much more emphasis on the notion that freedom is our problem, and if we would just give it up and surrender to technology, everything would be a lot easier, at least for a certain group of people. And of course, we've also seen all the evidence that just keeps mounting as to what obeying our phones is doing to our powers of concentration, our powers of thinking, our capacity for imagination, sociability and empathy. So, in many ways, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but in many ways it feels as though the moments that we're living through right now have conspired not explicitly, but nevertheless have produced an environment in which our ability to think for ourselves has been progressively ground down.

[B]

Who is Alex Pentland? He's a thinker who I was not aware of, but that you speak of in combination with Skinner.

[A]

Pentland's very interesting. I came across his work, I guess around 2010, when he was at MIT doing some very, very interesting research and did particularly some quite appealing research in which he indicated that when people work together, as opposed to individually in their separate boxes, so to speak, they're very much more productive. And this had some significant consequences for collaboration. And I was writing a book on the subject at the time. So after that I started keeping an eye on what Pentland was doing, but wasn't particularly following his trajectory, although I noticed that he then went to work for Google. And as I say in the book, I describe a situation where I was standing on a train platform one day, daydreaming, probably. I'm quite a big fan of daydreaming. And there was this very, very authoritative announcement that the train to London would arrive in exactly two minutes. And for some reason my mind just wandered off and I thought, well, imagine if there could be an announcement for everything. That was going to happen today in my life. The train will arrive in two minutes, and you will sit down in three minutes and you will order your cup of coffee in seven and a half minutes, the train will arrive in London at this time and you'll do that and you will do the other. And then, of course, this daydream became quite compelling. And I thought, well, imagine if you could do that for your whole life, right up to the minute that you died. You would know everything with as much certainty as this train station manager knows about his train. And of course, the further my daydream went, the more bleak it became, because I thought, well, if I know everything, I'm going to eat all the friends I'm going to meet when my friends are going to die, when my parents are going to die. This doesn't feel so great anymore. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm super glad the train's on time, but actually, total certainty would be a prison because you would have no choices and life would just become a big list of things you have to do and cross off. Anyway, I ignored the daydream. It went on with my day until about two years later. I'm reading something that has crossed my consciousness, which is work by Alex Pantlin, when he talks about something very similar, talking primarily about connected cities, about how if we had sensors for everything everybody was doing, your mirror could tell your stress levels, your travel around the city could tell you exactly when you would need a taxi. It could predict all of your movements. And in many ways, this was my daydream, except the way that Pentland described it, it was an absolute nightmare. It was indeed a total surveillance state. But it was going to make your life super convenient. Everything would work fine. Your doctor's appointment would be scheduled before you knew you were going to get sick. As a consequence, the medical treatment would be lined up immediately. It was all completely frictionless. And I thought, how fascinating that for him this is heaven and for me it's hell. And I thought, but this is this Skinnerian daydream, which is the state knows best, or the tech state knows best, or whatever the governing body is that makes this happen. And we're just extras in a movie, we're just going wherever without thinking, because that's what we're supposed to do. And I think that was the point at which I finally understood another problem I'd been chewing on for a long time, which was, what is it about the whole tech universe that makes me feel it's so bossy that is constantly nagging me to turn my notifications on, that is constantly telling me what to do. And I think it is a very different outlook. Whether you think, well, we technology overlords know what's best for you, so you should just surrender and enjoy the comfort. Or do we believe that actually we have agency in our lives and part of life is about exercising it.

[B]

And this is where we get to the profound unplumbed depths of this, which is that you could talk about uncertainty and the desire for certainty as sort of a fool's errand, which is, you know what, systems are complex, you can't predict their outcome. You can waste an enormous amount of time trying to achieve certainty and never achieve certainty. This is a completely different argument. This is the argument if you could achieve it, that would be not good. And so people find uncertainty uncomfortable. Hey everybody, here's some upcoming events. On March 5, 2026 in Oakland, Robin Zander, the organizer of the Responsive Conference, is launching the first of a new series, the SNAFU Conference. It's about something that's important to all of us who are mission driven, which is how to sell yourself without selling out. Remember to use promo code elevenfold. That's eleven fold to get a significant discount for tickets to SNAFU. Also, big event on March 20th, I'll be speaking at PX Live in London. Luc Omani and his remarkable community of PX leaders are getting together for a one day event. If you want to deliver an extraordinary people experience, this is the single best opportunity to meet kindred leaders. Thanks and watch this space for announcements about my future speaking events.

[A]

I remember talking to a very, very interesting German academic, Gert Geigerenza, who reminded me this is when I was writing Uncharted, which is most people, when they get married, don't want to know if the marriage is going to last or not. Most people having kids don't want to know if it's going to be a girl or a boy. Most people don't want to know what they're getting for Christmas or Hanukkah or for their birthday. And almost nobody wants to know the day on which they're going to die. In other words, implicitly we acknowledge that the not knowing is what makes life life, that it is what creates the space in which we have some choices to make, and that it helps us to define and see who we are in contrast to other people. And while I readily acknowledge that the person waiting for their cancer diagnosis are all clear, the person who's ill and doesn't Know why? The stroke victim who's going through lengthy and painful rehab. That uncertainty there is painful. The certainty that those things would end badly would not bring joy. I mean, I completely agree with you, because this is what Uncharted was about, which is our inability ultimately to predict accurately all the things we want to know. My central argument is, since uncertainty is a defining quality of human life, we need to learn how to cope with it better. And our best guides are those highly creative people who embrace it on a regular basis, who actively choose what is an uncertain way of life and often make it more uncertain for themselves. One of the most astonishing things I discovered, which I didn't know before I started, was how many fantastic novelists start their books without knowing the plot or whether it's got a happy ending or not. And this isn't just what I would call artistic fiction. These are very complicated thrillers of the kind that Lee Childs writes. Now, these are enormously complex plots. And you just think. You start that without knowing where it's going, but then you stop for a second and think, yeah, but finding out where it's going must be the fun part if you knew the whole story. I don't know. It's almost like you were being dictated, too, but you're in the process of discovering it, which is infinitely more rewarding and which I would say is true of any book that anybody writes, which is, if it's any good, you stumble across things you did not see coming, and that's when you know you're onto something.

[B]

I want to create a bridge between the control version of the world and the artistic approach. So we're going to get to that, because I really want to spend the majority of our time talking about those practices. But. And I have three different things I want to say before I get there. One of them is I find Skinner appalling. And yet I am a member of what I have termed, loosely, the architect class, and many of my friends are, too, which is people who are responsible for the performance of large systems, complex systems. And I no longer believe that you can possibly collect enough data to be able to predict what those systems are going to do, but you can totally make a living selling it, selling the idea that you're going to do that. So it's very interesting. One of the writers I shared with you ahead of this is Robert Walzer. And Robert Walzer was a Swiss writer who you can tell reading his work that he wrote a sentence and then he wrote the sentence that was implied by the previous sentence. And Then he wrote the next sentence entirely based upon the previous sentence. And many of his stories are called A Ramble, A Walk through the Woods. And so you feel like you're following this very squiggly line through his stories. And they don't have structure because I don't think he went back and rewrote them, but they are sentence by sentence, just this absolutely extraordinary feeling of discovery. So I think a lot of these novelists go back and clean it up, but Walser left it where it was. Quite Lovely writer. So let's start talking about. There's these concepts that seem to run together, and I just want to name them so that when we're talking about the artists and their approaches, we see them. The first one is to get good outcomes, I need to be able to predict the future, which ultimately leads to control, which is I need to control the outcomes as opposed to just predict them. And there's something in there also that seems to always go along with it, is let's be efficient, let's not have waste. So efficiency, prediction, certainty, control, all go together. So how do artists approach the world differently?

[A]

I think that all of these concepts are connected, which is one reason they're quite tricky to write about, because you're not quite sure where the end of the string is. I think artists start from a different place, which is their prime motive isn't to control the outcome, but to discover it. So if I think of. We're talking about writers, the Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize a couple years ago, wrote a wonderful murder mystery story called Drive youe Plow Over My Bones. Not a very magical title, but maybe it sounds better if you.

[B]

I like it.

[A]

Yeah. When she started it, she didn't know who'd done the murders, and she only discovered it about two thirds of the way through. So she isn't doing what I always imagined murder mystery story writers would do, which is to start knowing how the murder was done and by whom, and working backwards, she starts with character settings and ideas and sees where they will lead her to. I think you'll find often much the same thing that happens with improvisatory artists. And one of the ones I write about there is Jeremy Deller, who there's quite a lot of big public performance art pieces, and he will create the conditions in which it starts, but once it starts, has very little control over what happens afterwards. And part of the interest in it is to find out, in fact, what happens. And sometimes I think you could say they're A little dull sometimes. They're absolutely mesmerizing. I mean, there's one I wrote about where in the UK on November 11, there's a memorial service for the dead of the first and Second World Wars. And it's a moment where at 11 o' clock in the morning, everybody's supposed to stop for a minute, silence all the heads of state and ministers and so on, stand in a parade in the center of London. It's a very formulaic, rather dreary, increasingly ignored ritual. And he said, given the devastation of these wars, it just felt pointless in comparison to what the cost of war to people, families, culture, societies is. So he came up with this idea of getting a very large number of people all over England to dress as First World War soldiers. Each one was based on a known character who had died in the war, and simply to spread out among their communities just rather like ghosts. And not to say anything, but if anyone spoke to them, to hand them a card, which was the name of the person they represented and the day that that person had died. And honestly, watching the film of this, it's one of the most moving memorials I've ever seen in my life. And what he had done is he had taken something that was stale, formulaic, actually not very human or humane, and turned it into something deeply personal and meaningful. And that was a great achievement. And it showed that you can memorialize things in ways that really do make you think about the cost of war that need not be ridiculously expensive or fancy or technologized or whatever. It's just about putting people in an unexpected position. So that's a discovery. It's a discovery about the nature of memory and memorializing. And it left anybody who saw it with some really interesting questions about should we reconsider the way that we remember the things and the people and the events that we want to remember? Can we get away from the sentiment and away from the ritual to produce something that's more meaningful as a society? And I think, like all artists, having set off with one question, of course he doesn't come to the end and think, right, that's done. He thinks, right now I have a different question to answer. So that's absolutely not about control. It is a little bit like Robert Waltzer's writing in the sense that one thing leads to another.

[B]

You recount the stories of many artists, jazz improvisationists, who blow my mind, and the way that their jazz emerges from an in the moment collaboration in ways that are completely new. What a joy to be able to do That I look at that and I just think, what a miraculous thing to be able to do. And you identify a number of characteristics of artistic thought, things that if you look across all of these artists, you tend to see recurring. What are some of those?

[A]

So I think it starts with curiosity. I think that then requires a certain amount of courage to go and follow your nose and start researching or thinking about or asking questions about the things that make you curious. The curiosity is also about being able to cope without a plan. So instead of trying to research everything before you go to a new place, for example, just going there and wandering around and trusting your own instincts to find things of interest. So that's about curiosity and a certain amount of courage. I think it also often takes a lot of patience, waiting before it makes sense, which I know is very frightening for many, many creative people. Will the idea come? Will I be up to it? What if it doesn't come? Then what am I going to do? And waiting for that, for all of the stuff that's been seen or collected to coalesce into something that has some vague concept, and then having the courage to stop not knowing what it's going to be or where it will end or how it will work out. So any writer knows when they start a book, it'll be harder than they think, it'll be different than they think, and nobody can prophesy whether it's going to sell well or people will like it this year, next year, 10 years from now, or 100 years from now. So in the midst of all that uncertainty, they're still making decisions every day. Every sentence Robert Waldso writes is an experiment, because he doesn't know what one's going to come after it, but it will define what comes after it. So he has to bow to the sentence in a way. And then I think this curiosity, the confidence to wait, patience, the endurance, the sheer stamina to keep going, to be

[B]

fair, during that moment of patience, I think it's excruciating.

[A]

Oh, I think it's excruciating

[B]

for them, right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to decide what my next book is, and that is excruciating on some level, I think I wish somebody would just tell me. And of course, if they just told me, I probably wouldn't want to do it. But I've always felt that at some point, I've had a very clear sense. Yeah, that's the one. You know, I have probably an idea for a book every day, and then there's one that won't go away. And then after a while, I think, yeah, that's it. Now that's a very dangerous moment because now I'm going to invest a huge amount of time and effort in something and I still don't quite know what it's going to turn out to be. So it's a huge risk and there's a huge opportunity cost. I remember talking to a fantastic Irish novelist, Sebastian Barry, who talked to me about a book he wrote called End of Days, I think, and he spent nine months working on the first chapter and throwing it away and rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it. And then one morning, nine months after he'd started, he wakes up, he writes a new sentence of a kind that he's never written before. It's a very different style, and he's off. So he has a different style for a very different kind of book. He has no idea if anybody's going to like it. He sends it to his agent and says to his wife, I think I'll need to write another book next year, because I don't think anybody's going to like this one. And it wins a huge book prize here in the UK and makes him the only person ever to have won that prize twice. So he didn't know what it was. He didn't know how to write it. For nine months after he'd written it, he didn't know what it was. That's a lot of uncertainty. And it takes incredible stamina in the face of that to get up every morning and discipline and just keep going.

[B]

There's something that runs through, I think, maybe not all of your books, but most of the last. I don't know, 4, which is the courage of letting go. I think it's in Uncharted, actually, or it could be in willful blindness, where it's talking about great leadership in organizations is, in part letting your team lead, not controlling your team, it's letting your team lead. And there's a sense of moral courage and strength in that. And so I hear it again here in a much more general sense, which is that there's a courage and there's a strength to living with uncertainty.

[A]

Well, I think some of this derives from having run companies for the first. Well, not the first, probably the second 15 years of my life, and in particular to running tech company, because everybody, when they learned I was running a tech company, just sort of laughed and said, but, Margaret, what do you know about technology? To which the answer was, well, quite a lot, but no, I cannot write A line of code. I think this put me in a fantastic position because what it meant was that the engineering team knew that. So they knew that they had the key decisions to make because they had the most knowledge. And they knew I couldn't and wouldn't pretend that, no, no, I could do it better. There was no way I could do it better. So it gave them a very, very high degree of accountability, which they took very personally. And I knew that my role was to ask them questions and to challenge them, but it wasn't to be better than they were at doing what they did. So I think that was one very big part of my experience of being a CEO. I think the other part of my experience being an employee and a CEO is that I think almost everybody who goes to work is capable of much more than they're ever asked to do. They get put into tidy, defined, narrow little boxes and they do what they're told to do because that's what they're getting paid for. And most of them, if you talk to them outside of work, will articulate frustrations. Why do we have this system which doesn't work very well? It would be so much better if we did it that way. Ideas, why are we doing this instead of that? They have huge capacity that nobody ever, ever taps. And you get this really strange, what I think of as a mutually assurance stalemate, which is the managers don't ask for ideas and initiative, but they do complain that they don't get any. And the people who they're managing complain that nobody asks and they never offer any. So everybody's standing in their corner of the chessboard wanting more, but not knowing how to achieve it. And I think one of the things I learned as a chief executive was if you take yourself out of the picture, you create the space in which this can emerge, because power is very, very disruptive of independent thinking.

[B]

Recently I was looking at the history of org charts, the vertical org chart where the management's on top in a controlling position. And I thought when I looked at the beginning of org charts, I was going to find the ultimate sort of Skinnerist, controlling, Weberian sort of person. That's not what I found what the original org chart was. It was when the railroads were just starting in the 1860s and it was flipped. The board was at the bottom and all the branches went up, which is something that I've recommended for a long time. But I didn't know that it was the original org chart. Now, why was this? It was because the person who wrote it didn't talk about the pathways of control. He was talking about the allocation of authority. He said the board is the fount of authority and it needs to distribute that authority out to a small enough part of the railroad that the railroad can run on time. In other words, we do not know enough. Information is too slow, information is too complex. We cannot make the trains run on time if we do it from the center. So his was all about the distribution of control, not the centralization of control. Really interesting. It's also really pretty. It doesn't have straight lines. It looks like the roots of something organic that are spreading up into the. It's beautiful.

[A]

And I think I've always intuitively felt that, you know, and I still find that when I go in and write about companies that I want to know what does it look like from the bottom, not just from the top. And what I almost invariably find is there's a lot of pent up energy, there's a lot of pent up creativity. There are lots of really, really good ideas. And the challenge for leadership is to get those out where they can be seen and acted on. And it's a hard thing to do, and it's something which easily is omitted. And if you have very strong leaders, what happens is everybody looks to them for everything. So you get this rather infantilizing aspect of a hierarchy, which is, well, the people on top must know more than I do. Well, they may know different than you do, but they probably don't know the reality of your work. It's like a sort of bubble in the heating system. You know, the two don't quite connect, these two sides of the power dynamic. And so things get stuck.

[B]

I think this is a good place to talk about the prepared mind of the artist. And it's partially because being open to seeing good ideas in an organization might be very similar to being open to seeing good ideas as an artist. What is the prepared mind of the artist and how is it prepared?

[A]

The prepared mind of the artist is created by their curiosity, noticing something and wanting to know more about it. They're hearing about something and digging into it. They're traveling and observing different kinds of ways of thinking or living or doing, and then taking the initiative themselves to find out more about it. Not necessarily because they know it's gonna be useful, but just because it's interesting. So one of the things that you often find talking to artists of all kinds is that they have what I think of as a sort of well stocked cupboard of ideas, experiences, observations and research. And they don't know if they're ever going to come in handy. But they've kept them because they think there's something there. And so I think of the well stocked mind a little bit like, you know, my well stocked kitchen cupboard, which is if somebody suddenly turns up and needs dinner, I can concoct something, you know, I'm not only buying exactly what I need for dinner tonight, so the preparedness is having that cupboard full of sources, contacts, knowledge, memories so that I can start playing with them and start seeing how they might relate to each other. And of course most great ideas are a mashup of other ideas. And so I can start saying why do I keep thinking this is related to that? So I'll go a bit more deeply and I think if I'm honest, that's where all the ideas from my books have come from is completely random experiences that somehow over time seem to have something in common. I mean, when I wrote Uncharted, I think the first thing that prompted that book was, prompted me to think about the future was I was picking up my daughter from a play date and the friend's mother said, would I like to come in for a glass of wine? And I said, no, I've got to get going or something. And she said, oh, you're white. Because it's just if I knew that I was going to live to 100, I'd feel much freer to drink white wine. And I got thinking, yeah, but you probably wouldn't live to be a hundred if you drank all the white wine that you're conjuring up, right? So that just sends me on one of these thought experiments that I do all the time. Not intentionally, they just happen of thinking. Well, that's really funny because it's such a topsy turvy way to think about the future. And then I started thinking about what are all the other crazy ways people think about the future. And I thought about horoscopes and I thought about Roman augury and cutting open birds and Greek oracles and all that kind of nonsense. And then I started thinking about, you know, nutty predictions and I don't know, maybe three months later I start to think this is really an interesting idea. And it's kind of adjacent to willful blindness in an interesting way. So it kind of feels like my patch, but it isn't willful blindness, it's something quite different. So then I just started doing research into what are all the different ways people think about the future. And is that helpful? What does it tell us where is it going? And probably three years later, the book pops out.

[B]

I would argue it's the opposite of willful blindness. Willful blindness, as you wrote about it, is things in front of us that we are unwilling or unable to see.

[A]

But we could.

[B]

But we could. And so a part of the prepared mind. And you also talk about artists just noticing, walking and just seeing is looking at the world without forcing it into a model yet. And collect. Collecting those things. And you know what I'm reminded of, I notice a lot of arguments are because we value ideas differently from each other. A scientist values an idea if it's true. An engineer values an idea if it's useful. And an artist values an idea if

[A]

it's beautiful, or at least interesting.

[B]

And I'm going to say interesting and beautiful are very, very close. Very close. In fact, interesting and beautiful for some people might be the same thing. It may not itself be beautiful, but I think it might lead to something that's beautiful.

[A]

Yes, I think that's right.

[B]

And what I'm particularly reminded of is the artist Joseph Cornell. He assembled assemblages, I guess is the right word.

[A]

Yes, absolutely.

[B]

Extraordinary artist.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And what he had was a giant barn full of little drawers with things in them that he could pull out and he could use to assemble things that had symbolic meaning to him, which is largely opaque to us. But his barn was like an externalization of the mind you're describing.

[A]

Exactly. And what's so fascinating about his boxes is that they prompt us to ask questions about, well, what are the connections? What does this mean? And that means that we then go away and we see things we might not otherwise have seen. You know, it changes what you notice. In the same way that you can go to an art exhibition or, you know, I went recently to an exhibition of Lee Miller's photographs, and you leave with something that feels similar to her way of seeing. You see things differently because you've spent two hours looking at things through her eyes. And one of the artists that I wrote about in Embracing Uncertainty, she makes a lot of her work from found objects. And I just found, after I left her studio, her name's Ann Hardy, I just started noticing things all over the street that in the past I might have just not seen at all, because I would have thought it was litter. But to Ann Hardy, these might be materials. So I'm in a much more dynamic conversation with my environment than I had been when I walked up at the studio. And it's infinitely more interesting a world to be walking through.

[B]

You Speak about how universities have decreased investment in the arts. Do artists need universities?

[A]

I think some do, some don't. Some have profited from them enormously. Some depend on them for their living. I talked about it primarily, though, because I think that what universities have done, and I don't think they've done this deliberately, I think there are lots of complex reasons why this has happened, is universities have become kind of credentializing institutions. And to do that they have to have some sort of system for their credentialing. And so that means they have to have a way of measuring achievement. And what that means is that they have to be assessing work in a way that seems fair, which leads to standardization, which is intrinsically anti creative. And this is not true, obviously, of every university or every university teacher. I hope it's not true of the teaching I do, but who knows? I certainly tried to mix it up a great deal and probably even more since writing that book, to the consternation of some people for sure. But I think what's happened is that universities have come to be seen as the guarantors of a certain level of thinking and mindset, which means they're kind of teaching and high schools do this before them, that for every question there is one good answer. And if you get it and articulate it well, you're clever. And if you don't, then you're not clever. And the problem with this is people believe it. They think if they got bad grades, then they must be stupid. They think if they got great grades, then they must be brilliant. I think it also inculcates the habit of trying to guess what's the answer you want to hear, which is fantastic for pleasing your boss, but not great for the institution as a whole and definitely not great for you. So I think I'm familiar mostly with the American and the UK educational system, both of which are competitive, which I think exacerbates this tendency. But I think what we've done unwittingly is we've created an education system which has produced very good second guessers. Not very creative thinking, not very good at critical thinking, not very good at asking contentious questions and developing an independent mind. And I think that hurts all of us.

[B]

What is the political power of art?

[A]

Oh, now that's a hard one. But it's not a hard one, it's a big one. The book on embracing uncertainty had started as a series of essays I was asked to write by the BBC. And that's what got me thinking about all of this. And then I Blithely assumed when I was writing the book that I could just kind of make those essays longer. Of course, that was ridiculous. I had to start rethinking the whole territory because I'd been thinking ever since. But I added the last chapter on political art. Partly because we live in a very political age. And partly because I was seeing attacks on the art from all corners, all around the world. And I thought, what is it that governments, especially totalitarian governments, find so frightening about art? And I thought, well, it's two things. They're frightened that it has power, which it clearly has. Art is remembered. Music is remembered. It lasts longer than anything else human beings do. So that's threatening to power. And, you know, I go to a lot of theater and music and art galleries, and this question kept sticking in my head. And I thought, in the end, the reason governments fear art and artists is because art asks the question, what is the difference between what you see and I see? Which implicitly means you have to start thinking about, well, what do you see and why, and could it be otherwise? So in many ways, I think art comes to life in the space between the art and the viewer or the listener. Toni Morrison talks about this as. And I think this is brilliant, you know, that the book doesn't exist, really, until her mind, as articulated in the book, meets the mind of the reader. And she talks about her readers as co conspirators. And it's that co conspiracy that makes art so powerful. It's why it can and does change lives. It can and does change attitudes. And for institutional power structures, that's quite unsettling.

[B]

What's coming up in my mind is an image of power, political power, people in political power, weaving a view of the world that they sell. And it becomes a kind of a mirage that we live in. And that one of the things that art does is it can get past that blindness. And one of the things you mentioned is that it just makes something the topic of conversation. It brings it forward. It disrupts the hallucination.

[A]

In a way, I think that's right. And I think that to some kinds of power, that's extremely threatening. In other circumstances, of course, I would say it's pretty much what's propelled human progress. And it's definitely what we remember of ourselves. Because it felt lost. Everything else.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And it implicitly says things could be otherwise. So it trounces this Skinnerian dream of inevitability.

[B]

Recently I had on the show Robert Gaines. We did an episode on the change from the humoral and miasma theory of disease to germ theory. And my very patient audience came along with me. But we talked about what led up to paradigm shifts, and what was it? What were the things that happened that made that possible? And one of the things, by the way, that we saw was many people who disrupted the dominant paradigm just looked at the facts. They just looked. There was a surgeon who was doing human anatomy on cadavers. And he realized that galen, who for 2,000 years had been the authority on human anatomy, had never actually looked at human anatomy. He'd been looking at apes and dogs and things. And so all this surgeon had to do was look. And what was interesting about that was what made it possible for him to look. And a part of what made it possible for him to look was that the norms, the social norms that forbade human autopsy in Greek times had come down. I would imagine that along the way, in that 2,000 years, somebody had to transgress. They had to start crossing the line into actually doing human anatomy before it could be seen. And so there is this other thing besides all of the things you mentioned, which is the willingness to transgress.

[A]

And interestingly, in that context, of course, some of those people were artists who wanted to understand better how to paint or to sculpt the human body.

[B]

Absolutely involved. Yeah. He pointed that out. There were two people who really were after anatomy, and one was the medical doctors and one was the artists. And the people in power actually wanted the artists to be successful and opened up the door to human anatomy. That's right. I forgot that connection.

[A]

Yeah. Because Michelangelo was obsessed with anatomy and looking at cadavers at a time when it was really forbidden. But how do you make a leg look like a leg if you don't know what's underneath it?

[B]

I see your work trending toward this idea that the cost of knowing is something. But if you hold a consequentialist ethics, an ethics that says that it's not what I intended to do that I should care about, it's what I actually created in the world, it's a very challenging thing to do anything without knowing what the consequences will be three steps down the road.

[A]

So I tend to think all decisions are hypotheses. And the hypothesis is, if I do X, Y will be the outcome. But I tend to frame it as a hypothesis because I think it's incredibly important to remember it might not be true. And one of the things I think people struggle with in making decisions is, first of all, it's difficult. And if you're making ethical decisions or you even acknowledge that it's ethical. A decision with ethical consequences, that's even harder because it's hard. They want to get it over with. So when they've made the decision, they like to think like, that's it done. But actually it's the beginning, it's not the end. The really critical thing, and I say this to boards all the time, is since it's a hypothesis, it's based on certain assumptions. My decision not to wear a coat today is the hypothesis that the weather forecast is correct, that it isn't going to rain, and that it isn't going to be cold. I've made that decision fine. When I walk to my car and I realize it's become very overcast and I'm chilly, I could say, well, I've made my decision. I'm just going to carry on. Or I could say, one of the underpinning assumptions is not turning out to be true. What lawyers call change circumstances, Right. If the conditions or assumptions of the decision change, I have to revisit my decision. And I'll often ask boards when they're making important decisions. Let's just tease out what your working assumptions are so that everybody here who's implicated in this, if they can see that one of those changes, can easily come back and say, hang on, we assumed this. But what I'm seeing is that should we reconsider, in other words, the making of the decision is not the end, it's the beginning. And you have to keep alert to how far the foundational assumptions of your decision continue to be safe.

[B]

You know, what keeps coming to mind for me in this conversation is one of the things that we're conflating a little bit is actions we initiate and responses to our environment. And I keep thinking about how artists are playing tennis closer to the net. We'd like to stand at the back of the tennis court and see the shot coming so that we have lots of time to respond. And the closer you get to the net, the less prediction you have of what's about to happen. You don't have time to see the ball and what's going to happen. And it's beautiful to play the game close to the net and to have the skills necessary to do that and the abilities necessary to do that. But a lot of it has to do with not responding but initiating, being the one who initiates the action somehow.

[A]

And I think what I find alarming is the propensity of people to be in the bleachers. I started to be as far away from the net as possible. So I can deny all responsibility, but I can comment endlessly.

[B]

Well, thank you very much for appearing on the show. For anybody who's listening and is disappointed because I didn't ask the closing questions about job to be done, you're going to have to go back to Margaret's last episode to hear her answers to those questions. Really another lovely book and really thought provoking and I recommend it all the time to people that I speak to. So thank you.

[A]

Thank you for being such a wonderful reader. It's a huge privilege to talk to somebody who's invested as much time and thought as you have in what I've written and it makes it all worthwhile. And I don't say that lightly. I think all authors learn that all readers are lovely, but some really read and that's fantastically gratifying. So thank you Dot. It's been another wonderful conversation.

[B]

Well, we'll see you next book, whatever it is.

[A]

Gonna have to make that decision sometime soon.

[B]

All right, thank you. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at 9th Path Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.