Three special words.... 'I don't know'

Why “I don’t know” feels dangerous – and what it costs

When leaders talk with me about why they don’t say “I don’t know”, what sits underneath is usually a mix of things. It might be that you hold a strong sense of accountability, that the job is to absorb uncertainty on everyone else’s behalf and turn it into a clear plan. You might feel the need to deliver without hesitation so that people who depend on services don’t miss out. Perhaps your career is built on being the safe pair of hands, the one who can walk into a mess and make sense of it. Admitting “I don’t know” can feel like betraying that identity, or confirming a private fear of being an imposter. Or maybe you work in an organisation where uncertainty has been labelled as weakness. People have seen leaders punished for changing their minds, or for surfacing risks too early. They learn that it’s safer to sound certain than to be transparent. 

The understandable response is to tighten your grip: answer quickly, decide alone, project confidence. Over time, that comes with serious costs. 

• You become the bottleneck
  If you’re the one who’s meant to know, everything flows through you. Decisions wait for your input. Staff come to you for answers rather than taking the next step themselves. 
• Decisions get narrower and safer
  When you’re under pressure to sound sure, you’re less likely to explore uncomfortable options, test assumptions or involve people who might disagree. The organisation becomes more risk‑averse at exactly the time it needs to be adaptive. 
• Psychological safety erodes
  If the leader always has an answer, people stop bringing half-formed ideas, emerging risks or dissenting views. They edit themselves down to what looks tidy and certain. 
• You get more isolated and depleted
  Leaders often tell me the hardest part isn’t the workload, it’s the feeling that they can’t show doubt to anyone, not the board, not their peers, not their team. That isolation is a fast track to burnout. 

So while the reluctance to say “I don’t know” is completely understandable, it’s also unsustainable.

 

Using “I don’t know” in a way that builds credibility

When we work with this in coaching, the aim isn’t to get you saying “I don’t know” all the time. It’s to help you use it deliberately, as a way of being truthful about uncertainty without abandoning your role. 

In practice, that often sounds like:

• “I don’t know yet. Here’s what we do know, here’s what we’re assuming, and here’s how we’ll find out the rest.”
• “I don’t know on my own. I want us to think this through together, because the implications are big.”
• “I don’t know with the level of confidence I’d need to approve this. Let’s slow the decision down enough to do it properly.”

Three shifts sit underneath those sentences:

1. You name reality instead of pretending.
2. You stay in role, you don’t handball leadership, you shape the process.
3. You link uncertainty to action, what we’ll test, who we’ll involve, what decision standard we’re using.

Over time, people experience you as both human and solid: not someone who has all the answers, but someone who won’t hide the unknowns and will help the organisation navigate them. 

 

When your team says “I don’t know”

On the other side of the conversation, your team will say “I don’t know” for different reasons. In my work with leaders and teams, I tend to hear people using it when they’re overwhelmed (“There’s too much in my head to even think right now”), afraid (“If I guess and it’s wrong, I’ll be blamed”), de-skilled (“You’ve usually had the answer, so I’ve stopped stretching my own thinking”) or they genuinely don’t know (“I don’t have the information, skill or mandate”).

Your response can either reinforce those patterns or shift them. A few simple coaching moves:

• When they’re overwhelmed: “It makes sense you don’t know yet – this is a lot. If we zoom into just the next week, what feels most important to get clearer on?”
• When they’re afraid: “This isn’t about catching you out. Let’s explore options together and see what might work.”
• When they’ve stopped thinking: “Before I share my view, what are two or three ways you could approach this? They don’t have to be perfect.”
• When they genuinely don’t know: “Okay. This one needs an answer. What’s the best way to find out – who else do we need, what data, what decision rights?”

Sometimes the right move is to tell – “Here’s the call and why.” Sometimes it’s to consult – “I’ll decide, but I want your view first.” And sometimes it’s to coach – “This is yours to lead; I’ll help you think it through.” The discipline is pausing long enough to choose, instead of reflexively stepping in. 

 

How I work with “I don’t know” in coaching

In leadership coaching sessions, “I don’t know” is often the moment we move from surface problem-solving into the real work. 

Sometimes it comes early:

• “I don’t know what my role should be now the organisation’s grown.”
• “I don’t know how to keep going at this pace without burning out.”

• “I don’t know how to get the board to focus on the right things.”


Sometimes it shows up when we get beneath the surface of a familiar story. A leader will start with a concrete problem - a performance issue, a tricky funder, a restructuring - and then reach a point where the old scripts don’t quite fit anymore: “Honestly, I don’t know what kind of leader this organisation needs me to be next.”

From there, we can work out what needs to change: what story you tell yourself about leadership, how you frame issues with the board, what you delegate, what you stop carrying alone, and what support or data you actually need. The goal isn’t certainty; it’s a more honest, sustainable way of leading in a complex system. 

 

What I do with “I don’t know” as a coach

In those moments, I don’t rush to fill the gap. Instead, I might:

• Stay with the pause: “If we just sit with ‘I don’t know’ for a moment, what feelings come up?”
• Tune into your intuition: “If you did know, what would you do?”
• Look for the edge of knowing: “What do you know up to this point? Where does it start to get fuzzy?”
• Widen the frame: “If you zoomed out and looked at your role over the last 3–5 years, what patterns do you notice?”

• Bring it back to purpose and values: “Given what you stand for personally and as an organisation what feels like a non‑negotiable here?”


Often “I don’t know” is the doorway to a more honest conversation about fear, values, power and limits. In a sector that asks a lot of its leaders, having a confidential space to do that work, away from internal politics, board dynamics and performance reviews, can be the difference between sustainable leadership and quiet resignation.

 

A small experiment 

If you’d like to play with this in your own practice over the next month, you might try:

• Notice one moment each week where you’re tempted to fake certainty.
• In one of those moments, test a different response:
  “Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t. Here’s how we’ll find out.”
• With one team member who often says “I don’t know”, swap a quick answer for one good question and see what shifts.