Work For Humans

The Hidden Cost of Certainty at Work | Margaret Heffernan

Work For Humans

Show Notes

In a world that feels increasingly uncertain, making confident business decisions is hard. So we grasp for certainty. Numbers feel certain, but they often give us the false comfort of measuring the wrong things. In her book Embracing Uncertainty, Margaret Heffernan explores a different approach. Looking at artists, writers, and musicians, she asks what we can learn from people who produce extraordinary work in conditions where the future simply can’t be known. In this episode, Dart and Margar...

More from Work For Humans

Oct 20, 2026

Dart Lindsley wanted to publish a book, but agent after agent turned him down despite the quality of his work. Finally, one told him why: he wasn't famous. So he climbed into his attic, threw a blanket over his head, and recorded a podcast episode that his wife and his friend both called terrible. Then he found Jason Ames, who spent hours grilling him about what he actually wanted before agreeing to produce the show. 200 episodes later, Dart and Jason sit down to mark the milestone. In this e...

Oct 13, 2026

In her first job out of college, Kim Scott thought managing Russian diamond cutters would be simple: pay them well and the rest follows. It wasn't. They wanted a picnic, and by the end of a bottle of vodka, she understood what they actually wanted: someone who gave a damn. That instinct, respecting the whole person, not just the employee, became the seed of her book, Radical Respect. In this revisited episode, Dart and Kim discuss how leaders mistake authoritarianism and aggression for domina...

Oct 6, 2026

James Seechurn spent over a decade building compensation programs on a simple premise: design the incentive right, and you'll get the behavior you want. But his first clue that this was wrong came from watching it fail on him. As a young accountant on billable hours, slowing down to actually understand something cost him money. He kept redesigning bonus plans for clients anyway, until the pattern became impossible to ignore: paid people don't do better work, they just do whatever gets measure...

Sep 29, 2026

In robotic surgery, a device good enough to let the surgeon operate alone makes the resident, the future expert, optional. Matt Beane saw this pattern everywhere technology gets smart enough to make the apprentice unnecessary. Dart calls this one of the episodes he keeps returning to, for how clearly Matt names one of AI's biggest threats to how we learn. In this revisited episode, Dart and Matt explore how technology reshapes workplace learning, whether tech shapes us or we shape it, and the...

Sep 22, 2026

Under John Chambers, Cisco grew from $70 million to $47 billion, completed 180 acquisitions, and became the most valuable company in the world. He built the company on one idea: employees aren't employees, they're family. Then the dot-com crash hit, and John had to lay off 7,854 people, almost all of whom he'd hired himself. He calls it his worst year as a leader. In this episode, Dart and John explore why John calls employees family, how John builds a leadership team, and why playbooks creat...

See all episodes →