When Change Asks Us to Stop Being the Person With the Answer

I’ve spent a lot of my career wanting to be prepared enough that no one could question whether I should have a seat at the table.

Not in a dramatic way. More in the very practical, very familiar way many professionals learn to operate: read ahead, know the context, anticipate the question, have the answer, be useful.

There is nothing wrong with preparation. I still love preparation. If you know me at all, you know that I’m a fan of a clear agenda, a logical workflow, and the kind of meeting notes that make future-you want to send past-you a thank-you card.

But somewhere along the way, many of us learned to connect competence with certainty. If we knew enough, we were credible. If we had the answer, we were valuable. If we could solve the problem quickly, we were doing the job well.

Continuous change complicates that story.

I was thinking about this recently after listening to an HBR IdeaCast conversation with Nilofer Merchant about the skills leaders need to navigate continuous change. A few ideas from that conversation stayed with me, especially the difference between accountability and ownership, the need to normalize discomfort, and the leadership shift from knowing the answer to being willing to build the answer with other people.

That sounds simple enough until you realize how much of our professional identity may be wrapped up in being the person who knows.

For those of us who built much of our careers before AI became part of the everyday workplace conversation, knowledge often felt like one of the main ways we proved our value. We knew the process. We knew the history. We knew which spreadsheet mattered, which person had the missing context, which step always got skipped, and which system was technically the source of truth (but perhaps emotionally very much not trusted).

This knowledge still matters. Institutional memory matters. Experience matters. Context matters.

But the role of knowledge is changing. Information is easier to access than it used to be. AI can help summarize, draft, search, compare, and organize at a speed that would have felt almost absurd not that long ago. But human work does not disappear because of that. If anything, it becomes more important.

Your value increasingly lies in knowing how to ask the next useful question, interpret what comes back, connect people and ideas, and help a team build shared understanding together.

That is not a loss of competence. Rather, it’s a different expression of it.

The discomfort of not knowing yet

For leaders, especially experienced leaders, “I don’t know” can feel surprisingly vulnerable.

It can bump into imposter syndrome and stir up the old worries:

• Shouldn’t I already know this?

• Wasn’t I hired because I know how to handle this?

• What if people think I am not prepared enough, strategic enough, technical enough, decisive enough?

The pressure to know can be especially strong in small and mid-sized organizations because so many leaders are carrying multiple roles at once. The executive director is thinking about funding, staffing, board communication, program delivery, and whether the donor database is quietly becoming a haunted house. The managing partner is trying to serve clients, support the team, improve pipeline visibility, and figure out why the CRM only seems accurate when one specific person updates it. The department-of-one is building the plane, flying it, writing the maintenance manual, and occasionally being asked if the plane could also post more consistently on LinkedIn.

In that environment, admitting uncertainty can feel risky. However, pretending to know too soon can create a different kind of risk.

When we rush to certainty, we may solve a problem we can see instead of the problem that actually needs attention.

The presenting problem is often only one piece

In operational and change work, the first problem people name is often real. It’s just not always complete.

A leader may say, “Our HR platform isn’t working.”

And they may be right. The platform may be messy, underused, inconsistently updated, or full of fields that made sense when the organization was smaller and everyone could still remember who handled what.

But after a few conversations, the picture often gets more interesting. Managers may be entering information differently because the fields do not match how employee changes actually happen. HR may not trust the data, so they maintain a separate spreadsheet. Leadership may want better visibility into hiring, onboarding, or retention trends but has not clarified which decisions the data should support. Someone may have become the unofficial translator of the whole system, not because it is their role, but because everyone knows they are the person who can “just figure it out.”

At that point, the HR platform is still part of the problem. But it is not the whole problem.

The same thing happens with employee onboarding. The organization may say, “We need better documentation.” And yes, documentation may help. But the deeper issue might be unclear role ownership, inconsistent manager expectations, scattered information, outdated templates, or a process that depends heavily on whoever happens to remember how things were done last time.

A communication issue may turn out to be a decision-rights issue. A workflow issue may turn out to be a role clarity issue. A technology issue may turn out to be a trust issue. A “people are not following the process” issue may turn out to be a process that was designed without enough input from the people expected to use it.

I have written before about what happens when the real problem is not the one on the agenda. This is a related pattern. The surface-level issue matters, but it may only be one piece of the mosaic.

This is why curiosity is not a soft skill in change management. It’s part of the work. Before an organization can solve the right problem, it has to gather the missing pieces.

From accountability to ownership

One of the ideas from the HBR podcast conversation that resonated with me was the distinction between accountability and ownership.

Accountability often sounds like, “Here is the plan. This is your part. Please complete it by Friday.”

There is a place for that. Work does need owners, timelines, and follow-through. I am not suggesting we replace project plans with vibes and a bowl of trail mix (though trail mix is yummy and always welcome).

But accountability alone does not always create commitment. A person can be accountable for a task without feeling any real ownership of the outcome. They may comply while the pressure is present, then drift back to the old way as soon as the attention moves elsewhere.

Ownership is different.

Ownership sounds more like, “Here is the direction we need to move. Here is what we understand so far. Help us see what we may be missing. What would have to be true for this to work in practice?”

That kind of involvement does not mean every decision becomes a committee decision. It doesn’t mean leaders abdicate responsibility or invite endless debate. It means the people closest to the work are treated as sources of intelligence, not just recipients of instructions.

In small and mid-sized organizations, that distinction matters. The person closest to the donor workflow, the client handoff, the onboarding checklist, the intake form, or the reporting process often knows something leadership needs to understand before the solution is fully designed.

Not because leaders are out of touch or careless. Rather, because no one person or department can see the whole system from where they sit. What you see depends on where you stand.

This is also why decision clarity matters so much. When every small choice has to travel back to one person, change slows down and ownership gets thinner. I explored that pattern in When Every Decision Finds Its Way Back to You, and it shows up here too: people cannot fully own work if they are unclear about where they have room to decide.

Finding enough clarity to move

So what does a leader do when the team needs to move, but the full answer has not emerged yet? There is a phrase I have seen used in different contexts that feels useful here: “minimum viable clarity.”

It borrows from the idea of a minimum viable product: the simplest useful version that can be tested, improved, and built upon. I do not think of minimum viable clarity as a proprietary framework or a magic phrase. I think of it as a helpful way to describe something many teams need during change.

They may not have the whole answer yet, but they need enough shared understanding to take the next useful step.

That might include:

• what problem they believe they are solving

• what they know so far

• what they do not know yet

• who sees the issue from a different angle

• what decision is actually in front of them

• what needs to be protected from the current way of working

• where people need choice, input, or support

• what a first workable version could look like

This kind of clarity is not the same as certainty. It is also not a reason to stay stuck in “analysis paralysis” forever. The goal is not to gather every possible perspective until the calendar gives up and leaves the room.

The goal is to slow down just enough to avoid solving the wrong problem quickly.

Minimum viable clarity gives a team a way to move without pretending the unknowns are not there. It makes space for learning while still honoring the need for progress. In that sense, it connects closely to the discipline of short feedback loops: move with enough clarity to learn, then use what you learn to adjust.

Curiosity needs structure

Of course, “be more curious” can become its own vague advice if we are not careful.

Curiosity needs structure. Otherwise, it turns into a very long meeting where everyone shares thoughts, three new subcommittees are born, and no one is entirely sure what changed except the number of tabs open in the shared document. I have attended enough meetings about future meetings to know this is not where momentum lives.

Structured curiosity might look like asking:

• Where does this process break down most often?

• Who experiences the friction first?

• Who experiences it later?

• What workarounds have people created?

• What does the current process make harder than it needs to be?

• What are people afraid we might lose if we change this?

• What decisions are unclear?

• Where are we asking technology to compensate for a people or process problem?

• What would make the first version useful enough to try?

These questions do not remove discomfort. They make the discomfort more productive. They also help leaders model something important: not knowing yet is not the same as being lost.

A team can be uncertain and still be well-led. A leader can be honest about what is not yet clear and still provide direction. In fact, that honesty may be what allows the team to stop performing confidence and start building real competence together.

This is part of the invisible work that makes change stick. It’s not always visible on a project plan, but it shapes whether people actually understand, trust, and use the new way of working.

The human work of creating shared understanding

AI may be able to help us gather information faster. It may help us summarize meeting notes, draft process documentation, compare tools, brainstorm implementation risks, or organize messy inputs into something more usable.

That is very useful.

But AI does not automatically create shared ownership and understanding. It does not understand the quiet history behind why one department does not trust another department’s data. It does not know that the “temporary” workaround from 2021 has become the emotional support spreadsheet of an entire team. It does not decide which tradeoffs fit the organization’s values, capacity, and relationships.

People still have to do the work of meaning-making.

That means communicating clearly, listening for what is not being said, connecting dots across functions, naming tradeoffs, and helping people understand not only what is changing, but why it matters and how their work fits into the larger picture.

This is where experienced leaders still matter deeply. Not because they can personally hold every answer, but because they can help the organization hold the right questions long enough to learn from them.

A different expression of competence

I am still someone who values preparation. I still believe leaders should do their homework, understand the context, and respect people’s time. “We are figuring it out together” should not become a charming excuse for being unprepared.

But I am also learning to loosen my grip on the idea that competence has to look like immediate certainty.

Sometimes competence looks like pausing before naming the solution, or inviting the person closest to the workflow into the conversation earlier, or saying, “I do not think we understand the whole problem yet.”

And sometimes it looks like creating a first version, learning from it, and improving it with the people who actually have to use it.

In a world of continuous change, the person with the answer may not always be the most valuable person in the room. Increasingly, the value may come from the person who can ask the question that helps the room see the whole system more clearly.

For those of us who built our confidence around knowing, that can feel uncomfortable. It can also be incredibly freeing.

Because the work was never really about proving we knew enough to belong. At its best, the work has always been about helping people move from confusion to clarity, from isolated effort to shared ownership, and from scattered pieces to something that can actually hold together.

That is a form of competence worth growing into.

If this is showing up in your organization

If your team is facing a change that seems simple on paper but keeps getting stuck in practice, it may be worth pausing before choosing the fix.

The missing piece may not be effort, buy-in, or even the tool itself. It may be that the team has not yet had the right conversation about what is really changing.

Mosaic BizOps helps small and mid-sized organizations connect the dots between people, process, technology, and communication so change feels more manageable, human, and sustainable. Contact me for a conversation about building a culture of curiosity in your organization.