What’s Worse – A Bad Answer Or No Answer?

I was conducting focus groups with doctors, and without giving too much away, at one point we were talking about the effects of certain nutrients on a chronic disease. Two participants got into a heated disagreement about what is known about this topic. Here’s a somewhat edited version of their exchange:

Doctor 1: The data we have says …“blah, blah, blah.”

Doctor 2: Yes, but that data is from retrospective, observational studies and is of very poor quality, so you can’t draw conclusions from it.

Doctor 1: Retrospective data is 90% of what we have. If we throw that out, we’re left with almost nothing.

Doctor 2: If that’s the case, we should be honest about what we actually know. If we don’t know much for sure, patients should realize that.

Doctor 1: That’s not realistic. Patients and doctors need definitive answers.

Doctor 2: I’d rather tell a patient I don’t know then make a recommendation based on nothing.

What these doctors were really arguing about was this – what’s worse, a bad answer or no answer?

When no answers are available, bad answers are seductive. Not having an answer is uncomfortable. When I worked in CPG marketing, it was genuinely unacceptable. Admitting not having an answer to a question about your brand could damage how you were perceived by management. As a result, I saw some disastrous decisions regarding new product launches and brand communication made based on bad answers.

When you acknowledge not knowing, you give yourself a gift: the opportunity to keep learning. When you settle for a bad answer, you’re cheating yourself of the opportunity to discover new knowledge. That’s one reason qualitative researchers ask open-ended questions. Closed ended questions are built around assumed knowledge – things we believe we know; open ends assume little or nothing, which requires admitting you don’t know.

So, to give ourselves the opportunity to discover new insights, we need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. We must be willing to say we don’t know yet. That word – ‘yet’ – is important. It communicates that the process of inquiry is ongoing, and that acknowledging not knowing now eventually leads to better understanding.

This principle goes beyond market research. I wish public officials would be more willing to admit ignorance, rather than feigning knowledge. Perhaps, someday, that will become politically feasible. So, don’t settle for a bad answer just because you don’t have a good one. Admit that you don’t know  – yet – and continue to strive for understanding.