I’ve written before about what to do when you’re the one saying “I don’t know” — how to treat it as a starting point rather than a dead end, and how leaders who model that kind of openness create space for real curiosity on their teams.
This is the other side of that conversation.
Because “I don’t know” doesn’t just show up as something leaders say. It shows up as something leaders hear — from their teams, in their one-on-ones, in conversations about why something isn’t working or why someone is behaving a certain way. And when it shows up there, it’s doing something different. It’s not an invitation to embrace uncertainty.
It’s almost always a signal that a conversation hasn’t happened yet.
In my experience, when “I don’t know” shows up in an organization, it almost exclusively points to a communication problem. Not a knowledge problem. Not a capability problem. Not something that requires more data or more analysis or more time.
A communication problem — specifically, the absence of a conversation that would answer the question.
Think about what leaders actually don’t know when they say it. They don’t know how someone is feeling about a change. They don’t know why a team member made a particular decision. They don’t know what’s driving the tension in a relationship, why engagement has dropped, or what someone actually needs to perform at their best.
Every one of those things is knowable. Not through guesswork, not through analysis, but through the simple act of asking the person who has the answer.
If you’re saying “I don’t know,” the first question that should follow is: how do I find out? And the answer is almost always: ask someone.
What gets in the way is usually not the absence of a path to the answer. It’s the reluctance to take it. Sometimes, because the conversation feels hard. Sometimes, because asking feels like admitting you should already know. Sometimes, because the leader has decided — consciously or not — that they’d rather operate on assumption than risk what the real answer might reveal.
So they guess. They build strategies on top of unknowns. They make decisions about people based on interpretations that have never been tested against reality.
And when Jurassic Park did that, it went really badly:
“Will this frog DNA work?”
“I don’t know.”
Most organizational “I don’t knows” aren’t that dramatic. But the dynamic is the same. Assumption replaces inquiry. Unwarranted certainty too often fills the space that curiosity should occupy.
The antidote isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable. Ask the question. Have the conversation. Find out what’s actually true instead of operating on what you’ve decided must be true.
And when your team uses the same phrase, teach them to ask the same curious question.
“I don’t know” is a signal, not a conclusion. And the leaders who treat it that way — who hear it as an invitation to get curious rather than a reason to stop — or worse, make something up — consistently make better decisions, build stronger relationships, and create environments where the real information actually surfaces.
