There are three words rarely heard in a boardroom. Not because they are not true—they almost always are—but because we have built a culture where uttering them aloud is perceived as a sign of weakness. As a crack in authority. As something that someone occupying that seat should not say. Those three words are: I don't know.
It's a costly paradox. Leaders who project the most real authority are not those who always have a ready answer. They are those who have the serenity of not needing one. Those who understand that their value does not lie in feigning omniscience but in building the best possible judgment, including, when necessary, recognizing what they still need to know.
And so, one of the most expensive silences that exist settles into organizations: the silence of those who know they don't know but prefer to keep quiet rather than expose themselves. That silence protects no one. It protects appearances and leaves the organization unprotected. Decisions are made based on assumptions that no one verifies. Strategies advance on questions that no one asks. And the cost of that silence, when it comes, is always greater than that of any uncomfortable question.
There are environments where this pressure is especially intense. Contexts where demonstrating knowledge is an implicit part of the role, where doubt is interpreted as a sign that someone is not up to what is expected of them. In these contexts, silence is not a conscious choice; it is a conditioned response. And it is precisely there where it does the most damage, because it becomes invisible, systematic, part of the landscape.
Because the problem is never not knowing. The problem is believing that one cannot not know. And the difference between those two things is enormous.
"Curiosity is one of the most strategic and most undervalued competencies in current leadership"
The leader who admits they don't know activates something that the one who pretends to know systematically kills: curiosity. And curiosity is, in my opinion, one of the most strategic and most undervalued competencies in current leadership. I refer to curiosity as a governance tool. As the ability to enter a room, a market, a conversation, with a genuine willingness to be surprised. To discover something you didn't know you didn't know.
Leaders who operate from that curiosity are the ones who ask the question no one has dared to ask. The one everyone thought but kept silent for fear of what others would say. The one that questions the status quo not to discomfort but to enlighten. That question that at the moment seems naive, the so-called "silly question", and which is often the smartest in the meeting, because it goes straight to the core of what everyone was taking for granted without ever having verified it.
I have been in meetings where that question changed everything. Where someone, with the serenity of someone who doesn't need to prove anything, asked something no one had asked before. And the entire room, in that moment of initial discomfort, recognized that they hadn't asked themselves that question in a long time. That the answer was no longer obvious. That the assumption on which an entire strategy had been built deserved to be reviewed. That wasn't done by someone who knew everything. It was done by someone who had the lucidity, and the courage, to admit that they didn't know.
There is a fact that is not surprising but worth remembering: leaders who ask questions generate more trust in their teams and more performance than those who only give instructions. Not because questions are magical, but because they point to something fundamental about how they understand their role. They are not there to have all the answers. They are there to make the whole group arrive at the best possible answers. And that, which seems like a subtle distinction, changes everything.
If we pretend to know everything, we block ourselves. We close doors before opening them. We give up learning at the exact moment we need it most, which almost always coincides with the moment we feel the most pressure to show that we have everything under control. Intellectual humility is not the absence of judgment. It is exactly the opposite: it is judgment solid enough not to need to pretend what one does not have.
"The cities and business environments that innovate the most are not those that accumulate the most certainties, they are those that generate the most good questions"
Barcelona has managed to build part of its attractiveness as an ecosystem precisely from this logic. The cities and business environments that innovate the most are not those that accumulate the most certainties, they are those that generate more good questions. Those that create spaces where questioning is welcome, where doubt is the beginning of the process and not an alarm signal. That culture of intellectual interpellation, which has deep roots in this city, is one of the least visible and most valuable assets of its ecosystem.
In the end, the real authority of a leader is not measured by how many answers they have. It is measured by the quality of the questions they are capable of asking themselves, and of asking others. The future does not belong to those who believe they have all the answers. It belongs to those who have the lucidity, and the humility, to keep asking questions. And that begins by having the courage to say, when appropriate, three words that change the level of a conversation: I don't know.