Black Belt of I Don’t Know

In life and business, we get put into situations to answer questions on the spot. It’s very natural to want to help, or due to pressure provide an answer. The problem is, if you don’t know the answer then you are just making a guess…and hopefully an educated one.

This happens every day in basically all companies. The pressure to know can be crushing and in some cultures if you don’t know the answer to a question, especially in your domain of expertise, it can be viewed as incompetency of your job…potentially becoming career limiting.

How do you know or how can you know everything? Skilled educated guesses are usually good enough to help provide guidance. However, with that guidance comes complication. People who depend on guidance are hoping for an absolute answer. Something they can actually count on. There is so much turmoil in what people can depend on that they act as starved animals around anything they interpret as an absolute. If this doesn’t happen at all in your organization, then consider them well fed/conditioned in reality. Absolutes often stick in a person’s mind much easier (“Johnson you said…would be available by 1/1” vs. “Johnson you said…is targeting a few months from now hopefully”).

Some of the starvation is caused by projects and initiatives gone wrong. Even if leadership is understanding, there is still an expectation that their employees are doing a good job on average. If they don’t, reverse conditioning occurs as leadership is placed into a complication of either replacing employees to get back to a “good job” or they revert to the starved animal mentality and put people into situations to answer questions they don’t know.

There isn’t a great answer for all of this as a fix because we are dealing with people’s perceptions. Each extra person that is involved in the process adds another force to be reckoned with. You have to simply try to make people aware. Even the statement, “I’ll have to look into that further” is both an answer and an I-don’t-know. You don’t want your team to know you as the person who commits them to stuff that can’t happen. I once told the whole company how every system would be migrated from A to B in 1 year, which obviously didn’t happen. I could hear my team sarcastically laugh in the back when I announced it. You live and learn and apologize :-).

The one areas that you must stick to is a noncommittal one. Yes you want to help and quench their thirst with knowledge of when something will occur. If you don’t know the answer and a reasonably educated guess won’t do, don’t commit. Defer, find out, and answer. People may not like it at first, but you’ll be doing them and your company a favor with something more stable to depend on. We are assuming here that all answers are not “I’ll have to get back to you” because that’s not productive either.

Be a black belt of i-don’t-know where it matters.

Originally published: 11/26/2013