I get to work with some incredibly smart people….most recently, folks who are the best I’ve seen in the communications space.

I used to think communicating was obvious…but it’s very hard to do well. Think about the time you were asked a difficult question, and you felt tongue-tied in your response.

Often people struggle with communicating when they are unsure what is going to happen. Because the questions tend to be about the future (which often changes), our instinct is to say nothing, plead ignorance, or be vague.

I learned a useful way of thinking about this: weather forecasting.

You can probably predict today’s weather and be accurate. But your prediction accuracy is going to diminish as you go more into the future. People understand that. So the strategy is to communicate with certainty what you know now, identify what is probable, and what’s probably not going to happen.

The objective is not to answer every possible question definitely, but to limit speculation.

My own habit:  Before I go into meetings, I think about the hard questions that might come up, and I write down what I want my answer to be and I review it. I don’t want to be scripted, but I want to be authentic and articulate.  I am not as good when I “wing it” compared to thinking about something ahead of time.