Ashish KothariMake flourishing your competitive edge

Is "I don't know" the most powerful tool in your leadership toolkit?

16 Apr 2026 · 0 min

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0:19

Ashish Kothari argues that leaders who say "I don't know" unlock their team's collective intelligence. When a leader admits uncertainty, it gives team members permission to surface their own ideas and experiment together to find solutions.

The chances of you having the full answer is off. And unless you're able to say, I don't know, you don't give permission to the 10 other people around you who might not know perfectly what the answer is, but they might have hypothesis that collectively we can sense into and experiment and try.
Yeah, it unlocks so much with the team when the leader says, I don't know, because they're engaged in, well, let's figure it out together collectively.

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