The Value of Those Three Special Words: "I Don't Know"

I had a conversation today, during which a figurative headache materialized into a literal one. We've been trying to dig up the answer to a couple questions for going on three weeks. It wasn't until after I hung up the phone, I finally understood: Oh! No one knows the answer!

After hours, days, and weeks of my staff and me being passed around from office to office, no one had ever bothered to say, "I don't know." Instead, they each put on an air of authority and passed the buck back and forth between departments.

"I don't know" isn't always the easiest thing to say, and certainly most people's knee jerk reaction is to contemplate the question aloud. As the question asker, you assume that when someone starts responding that they must have the answer. When the answer is confusing, we just dig ourselves further into the mess, asking clarifying questions that will never clarify a thing because bottom line is: No one knows.

Maybe it's providential that just yesterday I was listening to a great webinar where the presenter urged business leaders to start by responding with "I don't know" and then spend only a couple of sentences speculating.

In my situation, if my staff heard an "I don't know" early on, we could have advanced to the next logical question: What information do we need to gather to solve this problem? Instead, the filibustering had us running from department to department, asking the same questions and, in the end making zero progress.

I realize I'm an anomaly. I always invoke, "I don't know" when appropriate, because I don't want any misinformation coming back to embarrass me. However, I always quickly follow up an "I don't know" with, "but I can figure that out."

Some people worry that by admitting what they don't know, others will think less of them. I hope when I make my promise to figure out the answer, and then do, that people I work with think of me as honest, dependable, and capable.

I don't always need to have command of all of the answers to all of the questions. And you don't either. What we both need: The ability to identify what information we need to solve a problem and the capacity to devise a plan to get it!

Now with a little bit of aspirin, some caffeine, and the knowledge that no one knows the answer to our questions, we're much better off than we were 3 weeks ago, when these pseudo-answers had us running around like frantic decapitated chickens.

Our problem is still up in the air, but hey, it's progress!