Nobody Knows Everything About AI. Including You.

How to turn admitted uncertainty into the most trusted thing you do

I’ve spent most of this month in interviews. Close to 40 healthcare leaders now.

I ask every single one of them a version of the same question.

What is not being said out loud in your organization right now?

The specifics vary. But underneath almost all of them sits the same answer.

People aren’t admitting what they don’t know.

And look, I get it. Nobody likes to say “I don’t know.”

Some are better at it than others, but nobody likes it.

Because in most of our heads, not knowing something means something is wrong with us.

Not that the task is hard. That we are lacking.

Everybody carries some version of this. Even the people who look the most sure. (Especially them, sometimes.)

Here’s where it comes from, near as I can tell.

Somewhere early in your life, you got told you weren’t good at something. Math, let’s say. You were six, 2+2 made no sense, and instead of “this is hard for me,” what settled in was “I’m not smart.”

Nobody meant for it to stick that way. A teacher, a parent, the kid at the next desk. It just stuck.

Fast-forward 40 years and the lesson has hardened into a rule: if I’m not naturally good at something, I’d better act like I am.

I call these nuture-based “rules” Survival Patterns.

They are the ways we learned to get through life without being seen as not enough. And for the most part, they worked, which is exactly why we kept them.

They’re also still running the show, decades later.

Now put AI on top of all that.

None of us knows everything about AI.
Not most of it.
Not even close.

I’d go as far as to say it isn’t possible to know everything about it (and that’s not something I say often).

And it isn’t only that AI as a tool may be hard to use, understand, and/or keep up with. It’s that the tool hands you things.

Answers you couldn’t have produced yourself.
Answers you can’t check.
Sometimes answers you’re fairly sure are wrong and can’t prove it.

And your name is on whatever you do with them.

For a brain wired since age six to read “I don’t know” as “I’m not enough,” that is a five-alarm fire.

So we perform. We nod. We sound sure. We move the meeting along.

And in the worst version, we leave the people around us feeling like they’re the only ones who didn’t get it.

None of this makes anyone a bad leader.

We all do it.

It’s just showing up more often now, and louder, because certainty is a rare thing these days.

But I want to name what it keeps getting confused with.

Performing certainty is not the same as being steady.

From the outside they look alike for about a minute. Then they don’t.

The steadier move, the one almost nobody seems willing to make, is to just say it.

“I don’t know yet.”

Out loud. In the room.

And here’s the part that surprises people:

Right now is the safest moment in years to say “I don’t know” because everyone across from you is holding the same not-knowing.

I can nearly guarantee it. I hear it in every interview.

Saying “I don’t know yet” doesn’t hand back your leadership. It proves it.

You can pause until you learn more.
Bring in someone who actually knows.
Crowdsource it from your own team.
Take the week you need.

Then say which one you chose, and why.

That’s the leadership. Deciding how to move through the not-knowing.

Not standing at the front of the room pretending you’ve got it handled while everyone can see you don’t.

There’s a version of leadership that looks like never getting caught not knowing.

And there’s the version that looks like being the steady pilot on a bumpy flight.

Not because the air is smooth and steady, but because your hands are steady.

You can be completely certain in how you talk about uncertainty.

That’s the whole thing. Because how you show up was never really about the words themselves. It’s about how you are with yourself, and with the people watching you.

So the question I’d leave you with:

Where are you performing certainty right now, when the honest thing is that you don’t know yet?

Navigating the uncertainty with you,

Eva

P.S. If you’re the one holding this for a whole team or org right now, and the not-knowing is loud... one conversation can change the frame. 30 minutes, no agenda, no pitch. Just your situation. Book here.