A technique for building credibility and rapport by openly admitting ignorance and asking the other person to explain, rather than pretending to already know.
Illustrated by the speaker's father, who sold Polaroid cameras by telling customers "you tell me what it does, I don't know" and asking them to explain the product back to him — which doubled as an informal interview into how customers actually understood and used it.
Applied to stakeholders: when you lack expertise in something a stakeholder knows well, say so directly and ask them to explain it. People generally respond with help, not ridicule, and admitting what you don't know is, per the source, "the biggest credibility booster you can possibly have." Overlaps with Stakeholder Interview as an informal variant that doubles as a discovery method.
At Wiz (then "Beyond Networks"), VP Raaz Herzberg was running 10-15 customer calls a day early in the company's life. Weeks in, she admitted — to the team, not just to herself — that she still didn't understand what they were building. That admission, rather than any of the calls' surface-level positive reactions, is what triggered the company's pivot from network security to cloud security.
She attributes the ability to say this out loud without shame to the founding team's culture: the four co-founders share roughly 22 years of history (army service, a prior company sold to Microsoft) — see Founding Team's Pre-Existing Shared History as a Trust Accelerator — which she credits for a flat culture where "I don't understand" is normalized rather than treated as a competence failure.
Из тем: Stakeholder Power and Trust