Two Kinds of Confidence
A feature request came through on my team while I was pulled into another project. The ask was simple - expand notifications so everyone on a team got them, not just people who had directly interacted with the item. Nobody flagged that some of these teams had hundreds of people, each dealing with hundreds of items a day. The feature got built, went live, and notifications jumped from a few hundred per day to nearly 100,000.
I've been thinking about this kind of thing lately - what it takes to be the person who speaks up. I wrote recently about learning to say no and about what happens when a team loses the person who used to fill that role. Both of those are about a particular kind of confidence: being willing to add friction. To be the person who says "I don't think that's right" or "we've tried this before and it didn't work."
But there's another kind of confidence that I think is just as important, and it looks almost like the opposite. It's the confidence to say "I don't know."
I've been in plenty of meetings where someone is explaining an approach and the heads around the room are all nodding. And I'm sitting there not entirely sure what they're proposing. The instinct is to stay quiet. Everyone else seems to get it, so it must be me. But I've learned that some of those nodding heads are thinking exactly the same thing. When I've said "I'm not clear on what you're proposing - could you help me understand?" I've had people come up to me afterward and say they were glad I asked.
People worry about looking like they don't know things. And I get it - it feels riskier when you're newer or quieter in a group. But in my experience, the risk is usually smaller than it feels. If you're someone who's active and engaged on most topics, admitting you don't follow on a particular one doesn't cost you much. And if you're not yet that person, asking a good question is one of the fastest ways to become one. Either way, it shows you're paying close enough attention to notice when you're lost, rather than nodding along to keep things comfortable.
Both kinds of confidence come from the same place. You have to be willing to be the person who adds friction to a conversation. Saying "I think there's a problem with this approach" and saying "I don't understand what you're proposing" are both moments where you're choosing to slow things down instead of letting them slide. In my experience, people avoid both for the same reason: they don't want to be seen as a problem.
There's a third possibility, too - one where nobody has either kind of confidence because nobody has the full picture. While I was away on the other project, the same team made a change to drive a page's behavior from configuration instead of code. One side effect was that a previously required field became optional, which broke form submissions. The fix was quick: mark the field as required in the configuration. But that configuration was shared with another system, and the change quietly prevented a third party from submitting updates on their end. Nobody caught it for eight days, until the client called in.
That one's harder. It's not that someone knew and stayed quiet, or that someone was confused and didn't ask. It's that the connections between systems weren't visible enough for anyone to realize there was a question to ask. Which is maybe the most practical argument for both kinds of confidence - the more normal it is for people to say "I'm not sure I understand how this connects" or "what else does this touch?", the more likely those invisible links get surfaced before they break something.