The reflex
A customer, an investor, a director asks a question. You do not have the answer. The pressure to answer fast can push you into offering an explanation you have not checked.
If that explanation gets picked up as a fact, the uncertainty disappears from the story.
The builder’s reflex
“I don’t know. I’ll check and come back to you before tonight.”
Why
A wrong but plausible answer is more dangerous than no answer, because it travels. Someone repeats it in a meeting. It lands in a document. It gets used to set a price. Three months later nothing is left to say it was improvised in a corridor.
Said to someone two levels up, “I don’t know” sounds like a confession when it is in fact the exact answer. On its own, the sentence really does sound like giving up. “I don’t know, I’m looking at the logs, you’ll have it at five” is a complete answer, and it is the second half that does all the work.
So pick a deadline that accounts for the time checking actually takes. When the answer sits with a vendor whose support opens as your day ends, eight hours away, “at five” is a promise you cannot keep, and you have traded an improvisation for a broken commitment. Say tomorrow midday, and hold tomorrow midday.
If a decision has to be made before you can check, give a range when you can back it up, with its source and its limits. Otherwise say which information is missing and what risk an immediate decision would take. You can ask for help from someone better placed to check.
Try this
Have the wording ready, so you are not hunting for it under pressure.
I don’t want to give you a finger-in-the-air number on that. I’ll check and come back to you tomorrow morning.
Then come back at the agreed time with the answer, or with where the search stands and a realistic next point. Check that the person knows what they can use as fact and what is still uncertain.
From where you sit
- Engineering: an estimate dropped under pressure becomes a date in a plan. Give the source with it.
- Founder: account for the vendor’s time zone before promising an answer.
- Management: what happens to the person who says I don’t know decides whether you ever hear the sentence again.
- Customer relations: say what you can check and give a realistic time to come back.
- Recruiting: ask what the candidate knows and how they would check the rest.
To discuss
Which claim has been circulating here for months without anyone knowing where it came from?