How to answer a question you cannot answer

The moment comes in almost every Q&A, board meeting and interview. Someone asks something you have no answer to, and there is a silence with your name on it.

What you do in the next three seconds matters more than the answer.

The short answer

Four steps, about fifteen seconds:

1. Pause. Two seconds of silence.
2. Acknowledge the question, without flattering it.
3. Say the part you do know, if there is one.
4. Say what you will do and by when.

“I don’t know, I’ll find out and come back to you by Thursday” is a complete answer. It only sounds weak to the person saying it.

Why waffling is the expensive option

Almost nobody chooses to waffle. It happens because silence feels intolerable and words arrive to fill it.

The cost is not the wasted thirty seconds. It is that a room can always tell, and what they conclude is worse than “he didn’t know”. They conclude that you will produce plausible-sounding material under pressure, which means everything else you said today is now provisional. One evasive answer retroactively discounts a good hour.

A confident wrong answer is worse still, because it eventually gets checked.

Whereas “I don’t know” costs almost nothing when it is attached to a plan. I have sat in rooms where a chief executive said it twice in an hour and nobody thought less of them, because both times it came with a date.

The four steps

Pause

Two seconds. Actually two, which will feel like six.

This is the whole difference between an answer that reads as considered and one that reads as caught out. The room interprets an immediate response to a hard question as either rehearsed or defensive. A short silence reads as thinking, which is what you want them to believe is happening, and which is also true.

It is the hardest part, because adrenaline makes you want to start talking immediately. The pause is a decision rather than a skill, which means you can simply do it.

Acknowledge, without flattery

“That’s a fair question.” “That’s the thing we’ve been arguing about internally.”

What to avoid: “that’s a great question”, which is now so universally understood as a stalling device that it announces the thing you are trying to conceal. Everyone in the room has used it themselves.

Say what you do know

Rarely is the honest answer a complete blank. Usually you know the shape and not the number, or the position last month and not today.

Give that part, and be explicit about which part it is. “I know we were at around eighty per cent in August. I don’t have this month’s figure and I’m not going to guess at it.” The precision about the boundary of your knowledge is itself reassuring, and it is the opposite of what a bluffer sounds like.

Say what you will do, and when

This is the step that turns an absence into a plan, and it is the one most people leave off.

“I’ll have that by Thursday and I’ll send it to the group.” Name a date you can meet. Then meet it, because the entire value of this move is spent if you do not.

The three variants worth distinguishing

You do not know. The above.

You know and cannot say. Different, and the room can tell. Say so: “I do know, and I’m not able to share it before the announcement.” Pretending not to know something you obviously know is the version that damages you, and it is transparently obvious from the outside.

The question is built on a false premise. Correct the premise first, politely, then answer the real question. “I’d push back on the framing slightly. The delay wasn’t a supplier issue, it was our own scoping. On your actual question…” Answering a loaded question as asked concedes the loading.

In a hostile interview it is slightly different

Everything above assumes a room that is broadly on your side. A journalist is not, and silence there is an invitation rather than a virtue.

Pause enough to think and no more. Do not leave a long gap, because a journalist will fill it, usually by restating the question more sharply, and you have handed them the initiative. Finish your answers with a clear downward tone so the end is unambiguous, and do not add a nervous coda after you have finished.

That is a different discipline and it is what executive media training works on.

Practise it, because it is the one thing that is easy to practise

Write down the six questions you least want. Draft an answer to each, once, in your own time. You are not memorising, you are converting improvisation into recall, and the conversion holds under pressure far better than confidence does.

For the ones you genuinely cannot answer, rehearse the fifteen-second version out loud. It feels absurd. It is also the only way the pause survives contact with a real room, because in the moment the instinct to fill silence is stronger than any intention you formed beforehand.

Having a short CAR ready helps for the questions you can answer: challenge, action, result, in thirty seconds. A shape to pour an answer into is worth more than the answer.

Where this sits

This is the part of speaking that most rewards preparation and gets the least of it. Q&A and hostile questioning run through the whole of the public speaking course, and there is a lesson on it in the free course.

If the question you cannot answer arrives in a board meeting, how to present to a board covers the rest of that room.

Common questions

Is it acceptable to say "I don't know" in a meeting?

Yes, provided you attach what you will do about it and by when. Senior people use it constantly. What damages credibility is the confident guess that turns out wrong, because it makes everything else you said unreliable too.

What do you say when you are asked something you cannot answer?

Pause. Acknowledge the question. Say the part you do know. Say what you will do to get the rest and by when. Four steps, about fifteen seconds, and it reads as control rather than evasion.

How do you buy time when answering a hard question?

Silence, not filler. A two-second pause before answering reads as considered; "that's a great question" reads as stalling and everyone knows what it means. If you genuinely need longer, ask them to say more about what they are after.

What is the difference between not knowing and not being able to say?

A great deal, and the room can tell them apart. If you know but cannot disclose, say that: "I do know, and I'm not able to share it before Thursday." Pretending not to know something you obviously know is the version that costs you.