When was the last time that you admitted that you didn’t know something?

It’s a rather uncomfortable feeling.

Particularly in business, where our experience and competence are often associated with having the answer. Where we are expected to make decisions, provide direction and, quite simply, know what we are doing. Admitting any uncertainty can feel somewhat like admitting we haven’t done our piano practice.

However, when it comes to science, uncertainty is a rather fundamental part of understanding what we are looking at. It forms the basis of our investigation, setting in motion hypotheses, allowing us to gather evidence and test our assumptions.

Gathering that evidence and data is only part of the process. Then comes the rewarding, puzzle-solving aspect of interpreting it, recognising the limitations, what it can inform, and what remains, as yet, undiscovered. After all, without that, how can we decide what to investigate next?

Perhaps we overlook the value of that nuance in a business context.

Particularly where, rather than a lack of knowledge or experience, we merely fail to fully recognise where what we know ends and what we have been assuming begins.

The brief that never asked the question

I find it fascinating how often marketing teams work with a predetermined deliverable in mind before they have clearly understood the objective.

Picture this. You are sitting in a board meeting, where the topic of the website has finally made its way onto the agenda. “We need a new website.”

A statement that can set a whole multi-month, resource-intensive project into motion. It is likely that whoever was at the end of making that statement are right – it is a reasonable ambition. The existing website may be ten years old and held together with a series of plugins, tape and hope that nobody particularly wants to touch.

Integrating, well anything, is beyond impossible with workarounds around the workarounds to keep it somewhat functioning. However, somewhere between recognising that the website needs replacing and commissioning its replacement, there’s a conversation that fails to kick off.

People can create a perfectly reasonable and functioning brief based on what they know. One that is workable, commissionable and possibly even has some success metrics attached to it. All without recognising what they haven’t even considered.

No criticism intended. It is understandable and defensible.

A team that is experienced – and comfortable – in generating and managing content would prioritise a better content management system that helps them structure and find things. A product team may focus on building their entire infrastructure around the product. Someone focused on branding may emphasise appearance. A sales team may want more leads and expect forms left, right and centre, while leadership may want something that looks more like the competitors.

It is easy to exclude a question you never realised you had to ask.

In the end, a new website can be launched on time, look fantastic, and meet every requirement set in the brief. That still doesn’t mean that it meets the needs of the business if the original brief overlooked important commercial or customer considerations. Failure isn’t necessarily in the delivery as it may well have been built into the brief before work even started.

This is clearly not limited to websites.

What we know, assume and haven’t established

Great, I hear you say. Now that we acknowledge that we don’t know what we don’t know, what can we actually do about it.

For starters, bringing in other perspectives can add significant value and something I consistently and confidently recommend. Someone from another function, another market or outside the business that doesn’t share the same assumptions. Distance and a different vantage point can work wonders to notice something that those looking at it with proximity have long taken for granted.

Listening to those for whom the project or product is meant to service. A.k.a. our customers – be they external or internal customers. Their experience may be quite different from the experience of those project managing or maintaining it.

Thirdly, keeping observations separate from explanations. Knowing that enquiries have declined is one thing. Assuming and assigning that the very appearance of the website is responsible, is another. One contains evidence, the other contains an explanation that may be worth investigating further.

The challenge of course is knowing when to stop, and I am certainly not advocating that you question everything ad nauseam infinitum. That would continue to be unproductive, and not much would ever get accomplished or over the line.

There will always be another question, piece of information or possibility that could be investigated in depth. The intention is not to eliminate all of the unknowns before moving forward, rather, to try and identify the unknowns that could make a fundamental impact on the decision at hand.

Making room for uncertainty

A brief, project statement or hypothesis provides the direction. It shouldn’t, however, remove the opportunity to query the underlying assumptions that set it in motion.

Recognising, and acknowledging, what we don’t know is neither a sign of a lack of knowledge nor incompetence. Uncomfortable? Possibly. However, it also creates an opportunity to uncover and question those underlying assumptions we might otherwise have accepted without a thought.

It does not mean extending analysis paralysis indefinitely to try and answer every question before moving forward. There is value in being able to distinguish between what the evidence demonstrates, what we (reasonably) believe to be true, and what information we are still missing.

There will always be uncertainty. That is rather inevitable. Recognising which uncertainties could change the decisions we make, though, helps change the narrative. Being willing to investigate the uncertainties that matter even more so.

Sometimes, that means asking the question that wasn’t in the brief to begin with.

Photo by Stefan Ionita on Canva Pro