This transcript was produced by robots and left as-is. Accuracy and elegance are not guaranteed.

Okay, so we’ve been talking about communication failures. In episode 18, we talked about too much in real time. In 19 too much on paper. This one pivots same concept, opposite failure mode, under communicating. Specifically, what happens when you don’t know yet?

Engineers don’t lie about what they don’t know. They go quiet. The instinct is responsibility. Don’t speak until you’re sure. Don’t put something out that you can’t defend. That’s the right approach for technical work. you don’t sign off on a calc you haven’t verified. You don’t release drawings you haven’t checked yet.

but it’s the wrong approach in leadership. Silence during uncertainty is not the same thing as not commenting. It’s a signal.

The problem is the room fills in that silence either way. When you go quiet on a stakeholder, they don’t think, well, she’s being thorough. They land on one of three things. Things are fine, things are bad and she’s hiding it, or she doesn’t know what’s going on. None of those is the truth. The truth is usually

I’m working on it and I don’t have a clean answer yet. That information is useful. Silence is not.

For a long time, I’ve worked with a colleague and the running joke about him was that when you gave him an assignment, two weeks later, one of three things was true. He hadn’t bothered to start it. he’d finished it on the first day and just didn’t tell anyone or he was dead in a ditch somewhere. That last one was never true.

the other two you couldn’t tell from the outside. That silence cost him assignments he would have excelled at technically. People stopped handing those things to him. Stakeholders raised concerns to management because they didn’t know what was going on and damage control became part of the job. He ended up painting himself into a corner.

basically sitting in a cubicle by himself doing solitary work.

Maybe that was his goal, but his potential was never quite reached because no one knew what it was. His silence had a price.

Three failure modes typically show up. The first is the dark progress update. Two weeks of nothing because there’s nothing definitive to add. The stakeholder doesn’t hear anything, so they fill in the gap. The second is the parked question. Someone asked you something. You don’t have a clean answer right now.

so you wait to respond until you do. By the time you get around to it, the question has rotted and the stakeholder has already passed judgment. is the unraised risk. This is the most dangerous one. It’s something you notice early.

But don’t flag because you’re not 100 % certain. By the time you’ve confirmed it all the way, the window for the cheap fix is gone.

Now all three feel like professionalism from the inside. From the outside, they look like absence. They look like you’re ghosting the stakeholder.

Communicating uncertainty is not admitting weakness. It’s giving stakeholders information they can act on. I don’t know yet is a complete sentence. It’s also useful it doesn’t lower your credibility. Saying it and then resurfacing with the answer when you said it would raises it.

What your stakeholder actually wants is not certainty. It’s a model of what you know, what you don’t, when they’ll know more.

three components, not a script, but a pattern. What I know, what I don’t know yet, when I’ll know more and what I’m doing in the meantime. That last piece is the part that really matters. I don’t know without a next step, sounds like a shrug. I don’t know, here’s how I’m finding out and you’ll have an update Thursday, sounds like an engineer doing their job.

This pattern is also where the dark update gets solved. Even a weekly note that says nothing definitive yet, still working on it, is doing the job. The stakeholder knows you’re engaged. The signal exists.

This is the same calibration as the decision triage episode. You’re not waiting for airtight answers. You’re being appropriately specific about the limits of what you currently have.

Now here’s something to try this week. Pick one situation where you’re sitting on an unfinished answer right now. A status update you’ve been delaying. A question someone asked that you haven’t responded to. A risk you noticed but haven’t named. Send the three-part version. What you know, what you don’t, when you’ll know more. Then notice the response.

Most engineers expect pushback or doubt. What usually happens is the opposite. The stakeholder relaxes because they have something to work with. But one caution, when you tell them you’ll have it on Thursday, deliver it Thursday at the latest. Promising Thursday and not even letting them know it’s going to be late is a sure way to kill your credibility.

This episode was about communicating uncertainty when you’re the one holding the information. Next episode, we’ll talk about what changes when the room changes. When the same information for a different audience completely changes the job. That’s where we’re going next.