… but it gets better when paired with “… yet here’s how I intend to find out!”

The action: Neither you nor anyone else needs to have all the answers. What you do need is a willingness to experiment.

The long form: We think we are supposed to perfectly forecast the future. When our boss asks: “What should we do?” we’re afraid we are expected to proclaim with certainty: “Invest in a new market,” “Increase prices,” or “Hire a head of Sales.”

But that’s placing us in an impossible situation. We can’t know any of these things. Yes, some people have a good intuition, and some people may even have good intuition and turn out to be right – something they won’t neglect to tell us repeatedly.

Maybe a better approach is instead to nurture a culture of experimentation. Instead of trusting in the most confident guessers, the company learns scientific thinking. Ask, “How can we learn more about our customers, about the way our industry works, about what brings out the best in our people?”

A concrete way to do this is to use the learning conversations of Toyota Kata (see How to coach improvement – First Forty). The book’s original title was “Beyond what we can see”, and it shows how life is full of questions we can not possibly know the answer to. But we can be humble and:

• Encourage small experiments.
• Don’t be afraid of not having an answer immediately.
• But do have a plan for getting to an answer.