As a new year begins, it's OK — even valuable — to be uncertain

The most piercing divide between people isn't about politics, wealth, gender or race.

The divide is between certainty and uncertainty. It's about how they cope, whether they are led by fear or possibility.

There are people who crave certainty and frequently proclaim it. And there others who are comfortable in uncertainty and, even at the risk of appearing weak, express it.

The world is chaotic, which means the desire for certainty is natural. In a new book called "Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure," journalist Maggie Jackson shows how that drive is often detrimental. She argues people should make more room for uncertainty.

"We don't want to be roiled by life as if we're a piece of seaweed tossed about the ocean," she told me recently. "But to be really alive, we must cast off this idea that comfort is king and that easy answers are what we should seek."

Whether we demand certainty or can accept uncertainty colors so many aspects of life: who we favor politically, where we invest our money and how we raise kids.

Business prizes certainty because money is at risk. Employers seek certainty of return on the money they spend. Employees find the way to advance in their careers is by appearing to be certain, even when they're not.

I live this divide in front of your eyes. Column-writing demands the outward expression of certainty. And yet, the reporting I do shows me there are many potential outcomes or directions on each topic I write. That means I am less certain than my written words make me appear.

For a brief time in the 1990s, Jackson and I worked together on the business news desk at the Associated Press in New York. Since then, she became an expert on workplace culture, writing two previous books about how digital technology is changing us.

When we caught up last month, she assured me I wasn't a bad commentator for harboring uncertainty.

"If life's unpredictability seems unfair or makes us angry, it shows we're highly fearful of the unknown," she said. "If we can't delight and wonder and be open to uncertainty, then we're not open to life."

With the presidential election this year, we are going to hear a lot of people speaking with greater certainty than they truly possess. "In the new year, we might be all the more faced with the pressures to be certain, politically, socially and emotionally even," Jackson said.

Since the arrival of smartphones 15 years ago, certainty has been at our fingertips. Don't know something? Having a disagreement with someone over something that's easily looked up? Resolution is just a few taps away.

Sometimes, it's not though. Over the last few weeks, financial journalists produced many articles and broadcast reports attempting to answer some variant of the question "How come we didn't get a recession in 2023?" The premise of the question is there was certainty a year ago that we'd get one.

In his weekly "Thoughts from the Frontline" newsletter, investment analyst John Mauldin last weekend suggested the abundance of market analysis is making investors too certain for their own good. He began 2023 expecting a recession, though he felt uncomfortable that so many other people did too.

The way the year turned out, he wrote, "was a reminder every time I get in the middle of a consensus, I get this tingle and I think, 'You're going to be wrong.'"

When the Star Tribune last weekend published our annual roundtable discussion with local investment managers, some readers commented online that it was a futile exercise. "There is a big range in these predictions. What does that tell you?" one commenter asked.

That person is looking for certainty. I view that article, though, as our annual reminder of the uncertainty that's part of investing.

In her book, Jackson looks at many different ways that the drive to be certain can hurt people — and ways that people learn to cope with uncertainty.

In one chapter, she looked at how children raised in uncertain circumstances — often due to the difficulties faced by the adults in their lives — learn the coping skill of reflective thinking. She chronicles breakthrough research by University of Minnesota developmental psychologist Philip David Zelazo on the topic.

She spends another chapter exploring the tension at work between the positive outcomes that come from team-building and the need for innovation that spring from difference.

One highly-visible turning point in the history of productive friction played out on New Year's weekend 50 years ago between the astronauts aboard Skylab, the nation's first space station, and ground controllers.

In its quest for safety and drive to get as much done as possible on the last of the three Skylab missions, NASA had done all it could to assure certainty. One of the main ways it did that was by strictly controlling the astronauts' time and activities. The astronauts, however, started to feel like they were "marionettes on high."

Halfway through the 84-day assignment, astronauts were so upset that they called for an unscheduled meeting and aired everything out. From then on, astronauts have had far more agency to react to the uncertainty of the day.

This lesson became so much a part of the space agency's culture that, during the Mars Exploration Rover mission, weekly team meetings ended with a ritual in which participants were invited to raise questions and uncertainties.

One sociologist followed the team for years. That and other research, Jackson wrote, show that groups cultivating uncertainty with judicious, respectful conflict outperform groups where people quickly agree with each other.

"It's not comfortable to hammer out a new level of knowledge and not paper over all the differences," Jackson told me. "But why come together to be less than the sum of our remarkable parts?"