How to Talk to Your Leadership Team About What You Don't Know

Expert insight by Dr Neal Hansen and Mitchell Cooke, faculty members of Managing Uncertainty & Risk in Pharma Marketing & Planning

Most pharma marketing professionals are trained, explicitly or implicitly, to project confidence. Confidence in the forecast. Confidence in the strategy. Confidence in the plan. Leadership expects it. Reviews reward it. And over time, teams learn to present certainty even when certainty does not exist, and to neglect communicating where it does.

The Confidence Trap

True credibility comes not from projecting certainty, but from demonstrating that you understand your market deeply — including the parts that are still unclear. A leader who presents a plan that acknowledges key uncertainties, explains how they were identified, and describes how the team is monitoring and managing them, is far more credible than one who presents a plan as though nothing could go wrong.

The confidence trap works like this: teams feel pressure to present clean, strong narratives to leadership. Uncertainties are noted briefly in an appendix, if at all. The base case becomes the only case. And when something changes — as it always does — the team is left explaining not just what happened, but why they did not see it coming.
 

"The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty from your communication. The goal is to show that you are managing it."
 

The One Rule That Changes Everything

Before specific techniques, there is one principle that underpins all effective communication of uncertainty:

❌ Without the plan
"Revised guidelines will be released just before launch and we are unsure how favourable they will be to our product"

This hands an open problem to your audience.

✅ With the plan
"We are not sure, therefore we have built scenarios for what they could be with distinctly different implications, and defined what we will do should any of them become a reality."

This demonstrates structured capability.
 

Communicating Up and Down the Organisation

Effective uncertainty communication looks different depending on the direction, and both are frequently neglected.

• Communicating upward means giving leaders the full picture they need to allocate resources appropriately, adjust timelines, or provide backing for contingency plans. When teams filter out uncertainty before presenting upward, they prevent leadership from making better-informed decisions faster.
   
• Communicating downward means helping teams understand which parts of the plan are stable and which are genuinely uncertain. Teams that have this context adapt better, stay more engaged, and contribute more effectively to early signal detection. Keeping uncertainty hidden from teams does not protect them — it leaves them less prepared when things change.
   

Six Practices That Work in Practice

The following approaches reflect how effective pharma marketing leaders handle uncertainty communication in real planning cycles and leadership reviews.
 

1. Say explicitly what you do not know. Distinguish between known unknowns — things you are aware of but cannot yet resolve — and unknown unknowns, where the landscape itself may shift in unpredictable ways. Naming this explicitly builds more trust than glossing over it.
    
2. Pair every uncertainty with a plan. For every significant uncertainty you name, describe what you are monitoring, what scenarios you have prepared, or what decision criteria you will use. This transforms uncertainty from a concern into a managed process.
    
3. Tailor the message to the audience. A C-suite audience needs strategic implications and decision points. A team leader needs operational clarity. The field team needs to know what is stable and what may change. The same uncertainty requires a different frame for each group.
    
4. Replace the big reveal with regular check-ins. Annual planning cycles create pressure to present a finished, certain plan. Where possible, replace this with shorter, more frequent updates that track how key uncertainties are evolving. This keeps leadership informed and reduces the shock of unexpected changes.
    
5. Be explicit about what is in and out of your control. Framing uncertainty as something the team is actively managing — rather than something happening to them — shifts the dynamic. Explain the factors you can influence and those you can only monitor.
    
6. Create space for dialogue. The people you are presenting to often have information or signals that you do not. Framing uncertainty openly invites that input. A plan that invites challenge is stronger than one that discourages it.

"The marketers who build the most credibility are not those who are always right. They are those who show they are always thinking."
 

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