Your team is not confused. They're watching you.

A client told me last month that his team had "gone weird". Slack had gone quiet. People were asking oddly specific questions about the runway. Two of his best engineers had started taking their calls from home.

He wanted to know what had changed. Nothing had changed, he said. The numbers were the same as they were in January.

What had changed

He had. In February his largest customer had gone quiet, and he had made a decision — a good one, a responsible one — not to worry anybody until he knew more.

He then spent six weeks being very slightly different. Answering a bit faster. Smiling a bit harder at standup. Working the weekends and mentioning it lightly, as a joke.

The maths of it

His team did not know about the customer. They knew, precisely and correctly, that something was wrong and that he had decided not to tell them. And so — being intelligent, well-paid adults with mortgages — they made up something worse.

What to do instead

Tell them the shape, not the detail. "There's something I'm working through with a large customer. I don't have the full picture. When I do, you'll have it within a day. Here's what I want you to keep doing until then."

That's it. Nine seconds. It doesn't require you to be vulnerable, or brave, or any of the other words that make operators wince. It requires you to say the shape of the thing out loud, so that nobody has to invent it.