Ask HN: How do you say “I don’t know, but I’ll get back to you” confidently?
In meetings im often asked to answer a question or solve a problem on the fly. I hate to do that because it doesn’t give me time to fully think through what needs to be done, the best way to do it, and any implications.
What I try to do is tell people I’ll take a look and get back to them. But I never found a good way to do it confidently, in a way that doesn’t make it seem like I can’t be trusted that I know what I’m doing. Particularly if they want me to do the task in front of them.
Any advice?
58 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 63.0 ms ] threadIn addition, you need to write down the question, and to enforce your commitment, read it back to confirm. At the least if you do not read it back, email them what you think the question is.
You can also offer a "back of a napkin" answer if it's appropriate, but make it clear that you will give it the proper consideration and give a better considered answer. Maybe specify a large margin of error.
All that said, not everything requires rigor. In some cases, "fuzzy" answers are good enough. Learn to identify them and not to waste time giving less important things extra attention.
So I have written scripts to check out all repos under a given org for github, so I pre clone before meeting with them. For questions like how much of the site is such and such a thing, I wrote a thing to run some spark jobs over our logs every week or so and add some nice meta data and show it in a tabular portable and filter able format. I have even generalized the spark thing so I can answer many many questions from the logs in a day.
I tell people when I don't know, but I enhance my ability to find out (and then try to get teams to productize similar tools when I think it is of general value)
Truth be told, Claude code excels at these sorts of tools, much more than at production high thru put applications.
What will give you confidence is actually following up and getting back to people and closing the thread.
Then people will trust you as well.
They key isn't how you say it, the key is that you consistently do it so that people learn that when you say it, you mean it.
An intermediate answer you can give is something like "I would take such and such steps, but I'm not sure this will solve the issue and I need to verify this offline". Don't bullshit people, it's a small world, it's almost never worth it.
I probably end up slightly wordier...
"Hmm, not sure. My best guess is that we're probably pulling some values from context and then using that to determine the behavior you're seeing, but I know my manager has a few contacts on that side of the org, I'll reach out to her and get back to you, probably in the next few days"
And then yea, just... delivering on what you say you're gonna do or updating if there's some bends in the road you didn't see.
As far as how to do it confidently? The same way you say "that is a tree" when you're looking at a tree. You're 100% sure you don't know, just say it. The rest is probably in your head. That's been my experience at least.
If you keep your word consistently, people will trust you and the conversations will become easier and easier.
Because how do you challenge this? Insist someone should know an answer without thinking? Insist their guess should be the same as a thoroughly thought out answer. At the same time you're not being evasive, or saying that you have no idea. You're stating you want to deliver a high quality answer first time round.
Even if people push back on this, you made it clear you're offering a guess, not a considered opinion. Nothing wrong with providing a clearly labelled guess, then changing it later.
If they don't believe you, tell them Derek Sivers, the CD Baby creator is also a slow thinker https://sive.rs/slow
Instead, I'd spin it to say you need more time to investigate thoroughly to give them an accurate answer.
1) Questions for which you can recall the answer off the top of the head, or by sharing an _existing_ note, document, link, etc.
2) "Questions" which cannot be immediately answered from memory / existing records, and are in fact a request to do _new work_, be it research, analysis, writing some document, etc. etc.
Hopefully, you are sufficiently well organized, keep notes, and anticipate obvious inquiries such that that many questions are of type #1. Think of those as L1 or L2 cache hits.
Then, for the remainder that are #2, you can say "sorry, I don't have anything to hand, haven't thought about that, but I could look into it and get back to you with something in X amount of time, if that's useful. should we create a ticket, and prioritize this alongside other priorities?".
The thing that will inspire confidence is not saying this all the time, but only for the non-#1 things, and that many things are #1 and get an immediate response.
It's also powerful to build these constructs into questions of other people. You could ask "Hey, Bob - I'm wondering, do you know, off the top of your head, where the code that does X is?".
Ideally, Bob can then say, "oh, yes, I was just looking at that yesterday, it's here: http://....", or alternatively "Hmm. Actually, no, sorry.".
An annoying non-answer would be "No, but it's probably in place X, because Y, or maybe it's Z, or it could be found using git history or blah blah blah..." - that's not helpful, because if it needs to _searched for_, you can do that just as well as Bob, the question was whether he had it _to hand_, not whether he could make some guesses about where it _could_ be...
Or if it's another developer and it would be useful: "I don't know, but let's find out." (and then we can look at the code together).
If you're actually confident about your version of reality, you can say it in any words you want and it will seem confident and stand up to scrutiny.
With your emphasis on 'confidently', it sounds like you're looking at social consequences. I find that stopping the conversation with 'I don't know' and getting on with what I'm doing, socially 'reads' as authoritative. I'm sure part of it is my lack of equivocation: if I went 'I'll get back to you, I promise I swear I'll be able to know eventually, soon, I promise, pinky swear I will honest!' there would obviously be no authority, I'd be grovelling.
I could probably double down, unethically. 'I don't know, what a stupid question, why would you even ask that malformed question, that's not a real question'. I think that would lead to suspicion, though.
'I don't know' can be a power move, if you HAVE the confidence to mean it and let it lie there. I guess that's the answer. "I don't know. This is what I'm actively doing now…" This relies very much on there being many things you do know…
or, similar
"That's needs some thought. I'll get back to you about it."
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I think there's no avoiding "I'll get back to you" or something substantially similar. After all, the whole point is to tell them that that's what you're going to do.
But "I don't know" is the bit I think you have a problem with. It seems to suggest that someone else would know: if only they were here, they would be able to just "look up" the answer from the right corner of their brain. But you want to communicate that this is a problem that actually needs solving, whoever is doing it. "needs thought" is the best I can think of for that.
I don't know, but I'll find out and get back to you." is fine. If you're really anxious, you can say "I want to give you a good answer, so let me think on this and get back to you. Is an email/slack convenient for you or should we reconvene at <datetime>?"
A couple of pointers:
1) Make sure you understand what they really want. It is common for a person to ask "can your hardware run on 12V", for example. But what they really want to know is something like "can I use this on my solar powered RV that will be parked in a 122F desert". This is just one of a billion examples from my career. You need to determine things like do they mean a stable 12.000V from a power supply, or a really variable 12VDC vehicle system that can range from 11-15V commonly. And then there is the whole ruggedness of the hardware issue. You need to be able to look ahead a bit and often assume the person isn't really asking the question they want an answer to.
2) The best way to be successful in business is to predict the future :) By this I mean determine how to set achievable expectations. If you feel confident that you can get an answer by COB, then state that and do it (predict the future, make it come true).
3) Communicate commitment and honesty. It is ok to tell someone you don't know, but you can say this in a lot of ways. Depending on all the variables, saying something like "this seems possible, but I need to check with X", or "I believe we did something similar for another situation, let me get more data internally and get back to you by tomorrow morning", etc.
If you want to setup a coaching session I'm happy to do a 30 minute zoom/whatever.
It sounds like you're suffering from imposter syndrome. I promise you, no one thinks about you nearly as much as you think about you.
By the time you uttered the words, your team's mind has already moved on to something else.
Say the words and then follow up later.