Upcoming Events
Uncertainty’s Unsung Wisdom in Times of Flux
March 14th, 2024
12:00 - 1:00 pm ET
Virtual Talk to the Haynes Boone Law Firm (Invite-only)
Quick, neat certainty is typically seen as the path to success today. But the ultra-decisive leaders whom we admire tend to cling to the status quo in a crisis and so falter. In contrast, being skillfully unsure fuels agility and inclusiveness – skills that are urgently needed in an unpredictable era. In this virtual talk to the global Haynes Boone law firm timed to Women’s History Month, Maggie draws on the new science of uncertainty to discuss how leaders can own their uncertainty without appearing weak; how uncertainty can avert complacency in groups; and how professionals can gain skill in contending with the unknown. She reveals the hidden gifts of a mindset that we too often mistakenly shun and fear.
Book Signing and Reading at The Drawing Room
March 23rd, 2024
2:00 - 4:00 pm
The Drawing Room
22 William Street
New Bedford, MA 02740
Join Maggie Jackson for a cozy winter afternoon book signing at The Drawing Room, an art and design shop in New Bedford's famous downtown historic district. There will be wine and cheer and readings on the hour. Nominated for a National Book Award and thrice named a "Best Book of 2023," Uncertain offers an antidote to the narrow-mindedness of our day and hope in an age of fear. Come see what all the buzz is about!
Learn more here.
Yale Association of Rhode Island Book Talk and Signing
April 11th, 2024
6:00 - 8:00 pm
At a Private Home in Down City Providence, RI
In an age of flux, it’s too easy to retreat into the comfort of our certainty. But only by being skillfully unsure can we gain the agility, discernment, and resilience needed in a volatile era. Join Maggie Jackson ’82, P’14 for a talk hosted by the Yale Association of Rhode Island (YARI) on her acclaimed new book Uncertain. As YARI’s selection for the 2024 Yale Book Awards, Uncertain will be given this spring to two dozen R.I. high school juniors of outstanding character and promise.
Note: Free event open to Yale alumni and their guests.
Learn more and register here.
The Provocation of Uncertainty as a Driver of Creativity: A Workshop for Writers and Creators
April 13th, 2024
1:00 - 4:00 pm
Wamsutta Club
427 County St.
New Bedford, MA 02740
Do you fear the blank page and seem to spin your wheels when trying to generate bold ideas for a new project? Contrary to our assumptions, the “uncertainty mindset” is actually an antidote to the angst that holds us back from soaring creativity. In this afternoon talk and workshop, Maggie will introduce proven strategies to harness the “good stress” of uncertainty in order to creatively navigate the unknown. Creativity coach Midori Evans will then lead people in small group exercises to build skill in navigating the unknown. Following the workshop, there will be a signing for Maggie’s popular new book Uncertain. Tickets cost $10 dollars, including cookie break. Open to all. Register on Eventbrite.
World 50 Presents: Uncertainty is Edgework, A Conversation with Chief Technology Officers
April 16th, 2024
3:30 - 4:30 pm ET
Enterprise 50 Summit (Invite-only)
New York City
Chief technology officers are frontline drivers of their company’s capacity for agility and innovation. They work at the edge of the known – an exciting and daunting place to be. How can an ‘uncertainty mindset’ equip CTOs to dwell skillfully in a space of possibilities and find the answers best suited to fast-changing problems? What does it mean to ‘lean into’ uncertainty and how does this stance fuel insight, clarity, and vision? Why is uncertainty seen as the next big idea in designing smart, human-compatible AI? Going forward, the capacity to be expert in navigating uncertainty will be the skill set that sets apart the superior from the mediocre performer.
American Association of University Women's Annual Authors Luncheon: An Author's Journey to Discovering the Wisdom of Uncertainty
April 20th, 2024
11:30am - 2:00 pm
Wyndham Newport Hotel at the Atlantic Resort
2040 Aquidneck Ave,
Middletown, RI 02842
Maggie joins two other Rhode Island authors at the AAUW Annual Authors Luncheon to talk about her multi-year journey writing and researching her acclaimed new book Uncertain. She will relate her cutting-edge research and reporting adventures in AI labs, operating rooms, activist campaigns, and deep archives as she unearthed the unexpected wisdom of uncertainty in an age of flux. $40 for luncheon and author talks. Books available to purchase. Benefits the Rhode Island Center for the Book.
Stockbridge Library Presents: Uncertainty: An Antidote to Angst and Hate in an Age of Flux
April 27th, 2024
3:00 - 4:30 pm
The Stockbridge Library
46 Main Street
Stockbridge, MA
Why is not-knowing the next frontier in human meaning-making? Why is the uncertainty we fear actually essential for curiosity, creativity, and resilience?
Join renowned author Maggie Jackson at the venerable Stockbridge Library in the beautiful Berkshires for a talk on the unsung wisdom of being unsure. Drawing on cutting-edge reporting from Paris to Los Angeles and in-depth multi-disciplinary research, Jackson upends our outdated notions of uncertainty as inertia and weakness. Instead, productive not-knowing is a proven treatment for anxiety, a path to mental well-being, and a promising strategy for making AI safe for humanity. It's the mindset we most need in this time of flux and angst.
Learn more here. Books available for purchase courtesy of The Bookstore in Lenox.
World 50 Presents: Uncertainty as a Critical Human Resource, A Talk for Chief HR Officers
May 15th, 2024
3:30 - 4:30 pm ET
Enterprise 50 Summit (Invite-only)
New York City
Global Human Resource Leaders operate at the epicenter of workplace change, from tensions over where and how to work and frictions arising from difference to the strains of doing business in a shifting climate. Drawing on cutting-edge research and case studies, Maggie offers a deep dive into the workings of psychological uncertainty to reveal why not-knowing fuels exceptional performance in a volatile age. She takes us inside the Mars Rover mission to highlight how productive uncertainty drives accuracy, engagement, and creativity in groups. She brings us into the world of the top surgeon to show how superior experts strategically “inhabit the question” in order to find the better answer in a crisis. The lessons of uncertainty are clear: what seems to set us back in thought in reality winds up moving us forward.
Conversation Around Uncertain at the Arlington Central Library
May 22nd, 2024
6:30 - 8:00 pm
Arlington Reads
1015 N. Quincy Street
Arlington, VA
In this signature speaker series of the Arlington Library system, Maggie will discuss why our current reliance on certainty-seeking imperils our lives, our societies, and our species’ survival. She will explain why epistemic uncertainty long was neglected as a topic of study in medicine, business, and even psychology and share the new scientific discoveries that reveal uncertainty’s critical role in curiosity, adaptability, and even resilience – the cognitive skills we urgently need to cultivate in today’s era of flux. Come prepared to learn, to question, and to come away more productively unsure!
Maggie will appear in conversation with library director Diane Kresh. Arlington Reads brings authors and readers together to discuss the most important topics of our time. Past speakers include Barbara Kingsolver, George Saunders, Viet Thanh Nguyen and Nikole Hannah-Jones.
Learn more here.
The Wisdom of Uncertainty: Launching a Non-Fiction Reading Series
May 29th, 2024
7:00 - 8:00 pm
Serendipity Books
108 E. Middle Street
Chelsea, MI
How can we skillfully contend with the unknown and the unsureness it sparks?
How can we cultivate the wisdom of uncertainty - and not appear weak? Why is not-knowing an unsung antidote to polarization? On the next leg of the popular "Uncertain Tour," Maggie will be the inaugural author in a new series of non-fiction talks at Serendipity Books in beautiful book-loving Chelsea, Michigan.
Free, with books available for purchase and signing.
Festival du Làc
Les Merveilles d'Incertitude (The Wonders of Uncertainty)
June 8th - 9th, 2024
Time TBD
Geneva, Switzerland
At this renowned Swiss book festival, Maggie Jackson will present her newest book: Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.
The product of multiple years of research, hundreds of interviews, and thousands of miles of travel, the book explores the surprising upsides of being unsure in an age of flux and angst. To map and track the science of uncertainty, Jackson spent time in operating rooms; in a shelter for houseless people; in robotics labs; on the front lines of a remarkable effort to lower prejudice via political canvassing, and with leaders in psychological, neuroscientific, sociological and other sciences.
Just as Distracted sparked a global conversation on the need to reclaim our attention, Uncertain will highlight an overlooked and misunderstood turn of mind that is a source of human flourishing.
Learn more here.
Book Love Presents: A Talk and Reading with the Author of Uncertain
July 18th, 2024
6:00 - 7:30 pm
7 Village Green South
Plymouth, MA
Join Maggie for a summertime dive into Uncertain at Book Love, a store with heart and spunk by the Massachusetts shore. In a year fraught with precarity in geopolitics, climate and health, Maggie's timely and popular scientific adventure tale explains why we should paradoxically seek not-knowing and unsureness in times of flux. Book Love started life in a shipping container and is now a spacious, light-filled treasure trove of books and more, set in The Pinehills community of Plymouth, just a few miles from Cape Cod Bay.
Uncertainty as Wisdom in Motion: A Keynote to the Association of Art Museum Directors
October 14th, 2024
10:00 - 11:00 am
Museum of Contemporary Art (Invite-only)
Denver, CO
How can cultural institutions and their leaders navigate a world of rising tensions and seemingly endless change with curiosity, resilience, and an open mind? Why are fertile pauses, productive unsureness, and the controlled drift of reverie essential cognitive stances for both preserving and furthering human ingenuity? In this keynote to the AAMD, Maggie reveals the startling gifts of a mindset little studied until recently, even in psychology. Far from being synonymous with weakness and inertia, uncertainty jolts us from the routine and assumed into spaces for exploring unseen meaning. It is an essential driver of good decision-making under duress and a proven path to human flourishing. There is no better time to be unsure.
Lost in the Instant: Finding Focus and Connection in an Age of Distraction
October 30th, 2024
Luncheon Keynote
Pickle Packers International Annual Meeting Palmer House Hilton (Invite-only)
Denver, CO
Our attention is embattled, hijacked by smart software, undermined by relentless info-streams, and diluted by our own split-focus efforts to keep up with it all. How can we reclaim our focus and manage our devices and our days? In this talk from the author who presciently sounded the first warnings of our crisis of distraction, we learn the secrets to rekindling the focus and awareness that are essential for good problem-solving, creativity, and human connection. Drawing on exciting discoveries from the new science of attention, Maggie Jackson reveals what is at risk in this era of always-on connectivity and the secrets to turning data into knowledge and distraction into masterful attention. She offers both a wake-up call and a path forward as we reckon with one of the most pressing problems of our time.
Maggie at Google’s I/O Conference
Invite Maggie to Speak
Harvard Business School
Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business
The Embassy of Sweden in D.C.
CNN Town Hall
Arena Stage/Civil Dialogues in D.C.
The New York Society Library
The New York Public Library
American Association of Museums
Google's I/O Conference
The Atlantic-Google Summit on Humanity+Tech
The invitation-only Forbes CMO Summit
The Local Online Advertising Conference
Business Marketing Association
The Families and Work Institute-Conference Board Annual Meeting
As a keynote speaker, moderator, and panelist, Maggie has addressed…
…and many other organizations and gatherings worldwide.
“I know two things for sure: Uncertain is a wonderful, thought-provoking, and enlightening read, and Maggie Jackson is phenomenal and engaging as a speaker. She offers a refreshing reminder that not only is it okay to be uncertain but that uncertainty can lead to greatness.”
— Veronica Chappelle-McNair, Ellucian
“Maggie is an amazing speaker and her talk as part of our Distinguished Speaker Series for HR leaders from some of the world's top organizations was fascinating. Drawing on her deep research and reporting, she taught listeners practical strategies for harnessing uncertainty to achieve better problem-solving, collaboration, and approaching life with a curious mindset.”
— Jennifer Fraone, Director of Corporate Partnerships, Boston College Center for Work & Family
For speaking inquiries, please contact Tom Neilssen at BrightSight Speakers