I Don't Know.
IDunno, remixed.
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I was watching The Sum of All Fears (2002) the other night. You may remember it. Its one of many films featuring CIA agent Jack Ryan who is a character from the Tom Clancy novels, portrayed by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Chris Pine and John Krasinski. Youâve probably seen at least one. In this version, one of my favourite actors, Ben Affleck, takes on the role. I think heâs been in my top 5 since he played âButtmanâ in Mallrats in 1995. Niche reference for you there.
Anyway, the plot of this movie, is about Ryan trying to stop the plans of a Neo-Nazi faction that threatens to incite a catastrophic conflict between the United States and Russia by detonating a nuclear weapon at an NFL game.
Early in the film, Jack Ryan is trying to get his voice heard within a big meeting of senior government heads and his CIA Director mentor Bill Cabot, played with his usual effortless gravitas by Morgan Freeman. Cabot turns to a young, eager Ryan and delivers a line that cuts through all the noise:
âDon't be afraid to say you don't know. Choose your words carefully, words have a habit of being turned into policy.â
Simple. And in a film about nuclear escalation and geopolitical catastrophe, itâs somehow the most important thing anyone says.
Cabotâs telling him that in this work, a single analystâs overconfident assessment can influence a Presidentâs decision. Which in this case, mobilise armies. The most dangerous thing you can do is embellish, or blag it. Words shape policy. Confidence, misplaced, can start a war.
Of course, Ryan ignores Cabot, jumps in, bullish, and offers a half arsed assumption which is met with immediate scepticism. At that pivotal moment though, the blag falls flat and is rejected by the people who hold the decision making power.
Your meetings probably donât have life or death stakes (although by the behaviour of some leaders, they think it is) but youâd be surprised how much additional unnecessary work is done in organisations every single day by people who canât bring themselves to say three simple words.
âI donât know.â
Annoyingly though, most workplaces have quietly, systematically punished people for saying it.
You come up through the traditional ranks being rewarded for having answers. The person who speaks with confidence in the meeting gets the nod. The one who hesitates gets talked over. So you learn, pretty quickly, that appearing to know is almost as useful as actually knowing. Sometimes more so, short term.
The problem is that short term habit of appearing to know in that moment, can create long term chaos.
Think about the last time someone gave you a half-baked answer in a meeting rather than admit they werenât sure. What happened next? Probably one of three things: a decision got made on bad information, potentially impacting hundreds, if not thousands of people, someone had to go away and redo work theyâd already done, or a chain of emails got fired off to a million people who didnât need to be involved. All of it entirely avoidable. All of it seeded by three words nobody said.
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who has spent decades studying psychological safety in teams, found that high-performing teams actually reported more errors than low-performing ones because they felt safe enough to admit them. Saying âIâm not sureâ or âI donât know, let me find outâ wasnât career suicide at all. It was how they got better faster.
The irony is that âI donât knowâ is one of the most efficient things you can say in a workplace. It stops a bad decision before it starts. Iâm sure youâve been the victim of a bad decision done weeks before off that back of inaccurate info. It prevents the downstream avalanche of meetings, one-pagers, and re-briefs that follow when someone blagged it and got found out three weeks later when the thing is already in motion.
And in theory, shouldnât we be hearing more âI donât knowâsâ right now? Everything is so ambiguous that anyone with any certainty on anything should be treated as suspicious. How social media algorithms work, what will happen with AI, the 10 things you should stop doing right now. Iâm sure youâve heard it. Certainty on anything without data to back it up may be a bit performative at this point.
It also, quietly, builds trust. People who admit the limits of their knowledge are actually rated as more credible over time, not less. Research from the Journal of Consumer Research found that admitting uncertainty in a specific area actually increases perceived expertise overall, because it signals you know the difference between what you know and what youâre taking a wild guess at.
Thatâs a different framing, isnât it? âI donât knowâ as a boundary marker. Itâs you saying: this is where my knowledge on this exact thing ends, for now, until I get more. And thatâs useful intelligence for anyone making a big decision.
Thereâs a version of this thatâs even more practical. Instead of treating âI donât knowâ as a full stop, use it as a comma. âI donât know â let me find out by Thursday.â Or, âI donât know, but Sarah in operations would.â Now youâve not just been honest, youâve moved things forward without inventing an answer that may set someone off to launch a bunch of F15s into your workplace.
Ignore the IMDB 6.5/10 rating, I think itâs a good movie.
Relentless Updates
Donât forget to pre-order your copy of Relentless: The Power of Doing Less in a Workplace that Demands More.
If you want copies for your whole team, just message me and my publisher can sort you the tastiest of discounts.
In the last newsletter, I announced the first endorser for my latest book Relentless, the olympic legend that is Colin Jackson CBE. He said it was âEfficient, entertaining and effective.â Thanks Colin, couldnât agree more.
So now let me introduce you to the second endorser and one of my new favourite authors, thought leaders, whatever labels weâre using now for ordinary people who do extraordinary things.
Bree Groff.
Bree is the author of an amazing book called Today Was Fun: A Book About Work (Seriously)
It was one of my favourite books I read last year and I was so pleased she agreed to put her name to Relentless.
She says this;
âRelentless is the permission slip you didnât know you needed to stop doing work that just doesnât matter.â
Lovely. I agree.
Her book and whole ethos is definitely something we need right now, as the fun at work seems to have been eroded away with all the busyness and burnout. In fact, it sparked memories for me in my early call centre days when we didnât have access to email, so in the downtime where there were few calls coming in, probably because we were so damn efficient (maybe), that we had to kill time somehow without pings and memes.
We built 5 player battleships across cubicles.
Highlighters detailing where our ships were, rulers to create the exact same âseaâ grid shape for everyone, even the prep was glorious. As the calls trickled in, we could see who had received one as they would sit down at their desk and do a professional job helping out the customers, however if a call got too long, youâd see someone pop their head up above the cubicle, cover the mic on the headset and shout âD7!â. To which we would all look at our maps and confirm a hit or miss but just over emphasising the mouthing of it, or a simple look that determined whether we were annoyed if one of our boats got trashed.
Similarly, as the game would continue, people would rise up out of their chair, cover their mic and respond âMISSâ to keep the game flowing.
The team never missed a call that day, no complaints, everything done on time and fun had by all. We did need to re-order a whole bunch of highlighters but thats about it. Ah simpler times.
Anyway, highlighly recommend Breeâs work if you need to inject a bit of fun back into your business. She also has a substack so plenty of great options and stories for everyone.
Have you got any fun stories from your work?
Relentless is out soon, pre-orders matter, so get yours now.
Relentless: The Power of Doing Less in a Workplace that Demands More.
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