“I Thought You Knew”
Is How Risks Reach You Late.

When did you last hear "I thought you knew"?

It goes like this. Someone on your team brings you a risk. It's real, and it matters. But the deadline is close now, and most of your options are gone. So you ask them, how long have they known? A few weeks, they tell you. And then they say it. "I thought you knew."

They guessed that you already knew, and their guess was wrong. You might make that same guess about your own boss. And an executive team might make it about its board. That's what this episode is about. "I thought you knew" is how risks reach you late.

There's a second half to it. Someone brings you a risk you already knew about, you thank them, and you say, kindly, "We knew about that one." And what they learn from that is to bring you fewer. Next time, they hold it back.

Put those two halves together. Everyone on your team is guessing about what you already know.

This is The Autistic Leader. I'm Uday Kiran Bolusani. Each week, I take one piece of advice every leader already gives, and I give you one skill that makes it work for every kind of mind.

So here's the advice. Everyone's heard this. "Raise it early, no surprises." Anyone who's led a team has said some version of it, right? I give it real credit. Because of it, every team learned that bad news costs more the later you hear it. And on a team that's worked together long enough, people do learn what their leader needs to hear.

In fact, in 1980, John Gabarro and John Kotter wrote an article called "Managing Your Boss," and they rightly made it each person's job to find out which problems their boss wants to hear about, and when. What I'd add is who writes those answers down. You do, because you're the one making the call. You write them down once for each decision that keeps coming back.

Now, that one sentence on its own, "raise it early, no surprises," leaves three things out.

The first is what actually counts as early. Early depends on the decision. Moving a launch date might need a month's notice. Moving an internal review might only need a day. So your people have to guess which, even if that sounds simple.

The second is what you already know. Your people can't see what's already reached you, so they guess.

The third is what would surprise you. That often depends on history, on things that happened before some of your people even joined the company. So they guess that too.

And each of these seems small, but they compound into guesswork and translation work in your organization. So one day, a risk somebody held back turns out to matter, and someone asks why nobody said anything. Learning all those three elements the hard way can take years in your company.

People learn those three things by one of two routes, and either route could get them there. Some pick them up by intuition. They watch how you react, and over time, they get a feel for it. Others work them out on purpose, step by step. I'll come back to that in a minute.

Either way, each person on your team is working out answers you could write down once. All that guessing is what I mean by cognitive load. It's the thinking your people spend working out what you want, before they can even think about the risk. And your organization pays for every hour of it.

Okay, so here's my story. I'm autistic, and I process explicitly, which means I'm one of the step-by-step people I just mentioned.

Early in my career, there were many times I'd see a risk and not know what to do with it. Do I raise this? Do I not? Does somebody already know? And if they know, do they see the dependency I'm seeing, the other work this is going to touch? Or maybe they know, but they only see the isolated impact, just this one piece. And on and on, just like that.

Each of those questions that I was asking myself took real effort. And it takes your team real effort. And all of it happens before I used to say a word and anyone on your team says a word.

What I learned came from the best leaders I had. They told me, don't worry about being sure. Raise the risk, and raise your thought process with it. Even if they already knew about it, they said, raise it. They told me it was about the risk, and it was about also helping me grow. And if they already knew, it gave us a chance to talk about how I was thinking.

Think about what that did for me. I could bring all those questions with me when I raised a risk, and they became what we talked about.

I kept that with me. When I grew into leadership roles myself, I made it my own neuroinclusive practice. By that, I mean a way of leading that works for every kind of mind on the team. Raising a risk was about getting the work done. It was also about developing people, and making sure every way of thinking on the team actually got heard.

Someone on your team may be asking those same questions this week. Do I raise this? Does someone already know? With the skill I'm about to give you, you answer both of those in writing, before anyone has to guess.

So here's the skill. And it's gonna sound simple, but it's critical. It's two lines and a name.

Start with one decision your team makes again and again. For example, it might be whether a project's date still holds this week, whether a new hire is on track, or whether a customer is going to renew. For that one decision, you write two lines, one time. You put them at the top of your team's risk list, or wherever your team tracks the work.

The first line says how much notice you need to change course. That's what early means for that specific decision.

The second line says what you already know, and what would surprise you.

And under those two lines, you write one name. That's the one person who checks each new risk against your two lines. When a new risk would surprise you, or it leaves you less notice than you need, that person tells you the same day.

That's it. That's the whole skill. For each decision your team makes again and again, you can end the guessing game by writing down how much notice you need and what it is that you already know.

Let me give you three examples, from three kinds of teams, so you can hear how this sounds in real life.

The first one: a project's about to go live. So say your team is moving your customer records to a new system, and the go-live date is set. The decision you keep making is whether the date still holds. Your first line reads, "I need four weeks' notice to move the date without paying a penalty." Your second line reads, "I already know the vendor's dates move, and two weeks of slippage, that fits the plan. But anything that could put customer records at risk, that would surprise me." And under that, you assign your project leader the accountability to make sure those risks are raised.

Now, say the vendor slips a week. Your project lead looks at your second line. You already know vendor dates move, and a week fits the plan. So your project lead adds it to your team's risk list, where you'll see it.

The second example is a hire. Say you're hiring for a new role, and the work that person will do is already waiting. The decision you keep making is whether the hire is still on track. Your first line reads, "I need three weeks' notice to move the start date, so I can plan around the work that's waiting." Your second line reads, "I already know final interviews slip a week when calendars fill up, but that fits the plan. If our strongest candidates get hard to schedule, or start to sound hesitant about the role, though, that would surprise me." And under that, you assign your recruiter's name.

So, say your recruiter notices your strongest candidates are getting hard to pin down for interviews, and a couple of them sound hesitant on the phone. Nobody has said no yet. Your recruiter checks your second line, sees that this would surprise you, and tells you that day. It might point to something inside your organization, or to the market for that kind of talent, and you still have time to find out which.

The third example is a customer renewal. Say one of your largest customers comes up for renewal in the spring. The decision you keep making, month after month, is whether that renewal is on track.

Your first line reads, "I need six weeks' notice before the renewal date to bring in anyone who can help us keep this customer." Your second line reads, "I already know this customer pushes back on price every year, and that's normal. A new decision-maker on their side, or a complaint that reached their leadership, that would surprise me, though." And under that, your account leader is named.

So when the customer's long-time contact leaves and someone new is going to sign the renewal, your account lead, they know what to do. Your second line says that would surprise you, so your account lead tells you that day.

So think of one of yours right now that's happening in your organization, a decision your team makes every week or every month. For your first line, ask yourself how many weeks you'd need to change course without it costing you. For your second line, ask what goes wrong on this kind of work so often that your plan already allows for it. That's what you already know. Then ask what would make you stop and rethink the whole plan. That's what would surprise you. Last, ask who on your team sees new risks on this first. That's the name you write under your two lines.

And you're like, okay, but my team makes a lot of decisions. So start with the ones that keep coming back, the most frequent ones, or the ones that are the biggest impact, where a late warning really costs you.

Now think about how much care your organization already gives its IT systems. Think about the alerts it sets up on a budget tracker, or an AI tool that flags unusual invoices. Somebody decides in advance what should trigger each one. And guess what the same organization gave the people on your team? One sentence. "Raise it early, no surprises."

So when I talk about putting one name under two lines, that comes directly from my Decision Charter framework, which I used to call DecisionOS. That's your early warning system that you built into IT systems, for your people. And it's pretty simple. It's my framework for who does which job inside a decision. In it, reading the risks and making the call are two separate jobs. That's because the person with the clearest view of a risk is rarely the person who decides. So the person you name reads the risk, and you make the call.

So what stops happening once those two lines are in? Your people can look up what early means for each decision. Nobody has to say "I thought you knew," because your second line already says what you know. Your people get to spend their attention on the risk itself. And if a test run ever loses customer records, your project lead tells you the same day, while you can still move the date.

And when someone does bring you a risk you already know about, you still thank them. And then you ask, what made you flag it? What did you see it connecting to? That's the kind of conversation my best leaders had with me, about how I was thinking.

The essay puts all of this on one card, the Operating Brief, in four parts.

So, the moment. That's a risk that shows up late, or it shows up as news you already had.

The inherited design in organizations. Your team got one sentence, raise it early, no surprises. Then each person was left to work out, on their own, what early means to you.

So how do you redesign for this? For each decision that keeps coming back, you write down once how much notice you need, what you already know, and what would surprise you. And then you name one person who checks every new risk against those parameters, those lines.

So, Monday, this is the test. Pick one decision your team makes every week or every month. Write its two lines, and that person's name, at the top of your team's risk list. It needs nobody's permission.

The essay also prints a prompt. Take out people's and customers' names first, then paste it into the AI your organization has approved for its documents. It helps you draft your two lines and walks through each risk with you. The AI gathers what's known, and you judge which risks matter. That split comes from my AI Cognitive Strategy Matrix, my framework for which parts of the work go to AI and which stay with the human for judgment.

The essay is on the site, under the title "Raise It Early" Needs Answers Your Team Can Look Up. The go-live's two lines are printed there, so you can copy them onto your own risk list and change them to fit your decision. The Operating Brief is there as a card to share with your team. And the prompt is printed, so you can copy it rather than type it out.

So here's my ask. I built this show to help leaders who think differently reach senior roles, by changing how organizations are designed. Every person who subscribes is one more leader this work reaches, every week. So please subscribe to the Substack, and take each week's skill to your team. And if you'd like, follow the show wherever you're listening.

And this week, take the decision you thought of a few minutes ago, write its two lines, and put one name under them.