Not having the answer might be the answer

You probably know the script. Someone asks a hard question. You sit with it for half a second, then produce an answer that sounds clean and committed. The room moves on. You feel like you did your job.

What you actually did was shut down what might have been some of the room's best.

"Often the best thoughts come from a moment of silence"

In 2003, General Stanley McChrystal took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force (JSOC) in Iraq. His force had overwhelming advantages. The best-trained soldiers, the most advanced technology, vastly superior resources. Al Qaeda in Iraq had almost none of these things. And yet JSOC was losing.

McChrystal eventually identified the reason. Every significant decision travelled up the chain of command to him. He was being woken in the night to approve actions his teams in the field understood far better than he did. The wait for his approval was not producing better decisions. It was producing slower ones.

So he changed his role. He stopped being the decision-maker and became what he called the gardener. The person who creates and maintains the conditions in which others can act. He shared information radically across the organisation, built trust between teams that had never spoken, and pushed decision-making authority out to the people closest to the ground. He set the direction, then deliberately got out of the way.

JSOC became faster, more adaptive, and more effective than the organisation he had inherited. The outcomes were shaped not by what one commander could envision, but by what thousands of empowered people could see from where they stood.

THE IDEA

The assumption that leaders should know both the destination and the route is not just limiting. It is inaccurate.

No leader has full visibility of what their team is capable of, where their motivation lives, or what they can see from where they stand. When you say I don't know, you are not confessing incompetence. You are accurately locating where the best thinking is (not with you...).

Schein spent fifty years on this. He called it humble inquiry. Leaders who ask genuine questions they do not already know the answers to build deeper trust and extract more useful information than those who tell. A 2024 study found it's not whether you admit uncertainty but how you frame it: locate it in the situation ('it isn't clear yet') and you keep your credibility; 'I don't know' reads as honest but costs you on perceived competence. Edmondson's psychological safety research and Hutchins's work on distributed cognition both converge on the same insight. Leaders who model not-knowing activate the team's thinking. Leaders who project certainty shut it down.

There is a deeper cost leaders underestimate. When a team is expected to tell the leader what they want to hear, they learn to. That information cascade strips disagreement from your view at exactly the moment you need it most.

I think of it like some of the strawbale houses I worked on when I was much younger. Most owner-builders came to site with detailed plans and strong opinions. The outcome was always a direct expression of their vision. Some visions were extraordinary, which is great, but most were ordinary. None surprised the person who had commissioned them.

One job was different. The clients brought in skilled craftspeople because they trusted what those people carried. They set direction, held structure, built checkpoints. Within that, they gave every tradesperson permission to create in a way they genuinely revelled in. The stonemason made decisions about stonework. The sculptor was given walls to play with. The result exceeded what any of them had individually imagined, and what none of them could have defined in advance.

That house was not built to a vision. It was built beyond one.

The one thing

The single thing to try this week

This is the week to do something you might find a little scary. Pick one decision on your plate that you have been defaulting to answering yourself. Take it to the people closest to the work.

Say one of two things. Either 'I don't know the right answer here, and I want your thinking before I take a position', or 'I have a view, but I would rather hear yours first.'

Then hold the silence. Long enough that someone has to fill it.

The leaders who insist on knowing everything end up leading teams who bring them less.

Saying I don't know is not the absence of leadership.