The Power of NACK

Ask for forgiveness, not permission.

I learned the term ACK at Palantir, a strange and wonderful place with a corporate vocabulary woven from equal parts tech jargon, Lord of the Ring references, and military terminology. In Palantir-speak, ACK stands for “acknowledgment” and means you’re in sync with how someone is proceeding.

When I started at Palantir, I leaned heavily on the ACK, asking my manager and other stakeholders to affirmatively approve my every action. But I soon found this approach was slowing me down; sometimes people got back to me with their stamp of approval, but more often than not, they ignored me when I wasn’t asking about a burning issue.

Finally, someone suggested that I embrace the NACK.

NACK is the opposite of ACK and stands for “negative acknowledgement.” A request for a NACK is basically a friendly, “Hey, this is how we’re doing this unless you pull the emergency break.”

When I started using the NACK, everything changed. Decisions got made faster because the number of decision makers (ACK-ers) was smaller. I looked like a competent, take-charge person who trusted her own strategic impulses, which in turn instilled confidence in myself, creating a virtuous feedback loop. And ironically, I started getting a higher rate of feedback on my NACK requests than I had on my ACK requests. (Probably something about FOMO and the reverse psychology of telling people oh, your opinion isn’t needed, actually.)

Suddenly I understood where I’d gone wrong in prior jobs, running every minor decision by my bosses. Over-relying on ACKs meant either that decisions didn’t get made (because the asks weren’t important enough for them to respond to). Or it meant that managers who loved to roll up their sleeves revisited even minor decisions, turning them into doors to be reopened, seams to be unpicked. ACKs just created more work and more decision points — stressing my bosses out more than when they just did the work themselves.

Not every boss will like the NACK approach. Some will even explicitly tell you not to use it, that they want to be involved in the nitty-gritty. This is a trap (at least for mid-level and senior roles). You generally DO need explicit ACKs from your direct manager, and you especially need their buy-in on your overall approach to a project. But this is different from asking them to affirm every decision you make along the way.

With line managers, I like to verbally check in with them on the strategy early on to make sure you’re aligned. (Literally say that: “It sounds like we’re aligned on taking X approach here. I’ll work on the detailed plan and share it with you when I have a draft.”) Tell them if your overall strategy shifts in the process of creating a more detailed plan. Then share them on your draft plan once you’ve already synthesized feedback from a few key stakeholders, so you can tell your manager that legal flagged a certain risk but the business thought the tradeoff was worth it (or whatever).

Basically, you want to frame your request for an ACK from your manager in a way that makes it incredibly easy for them to say yes. Framing it this way will turn your manager’s ACK into an implicit NACK. The default assumption is that they’ll say yes unless they have major objections — and they shouldn’t have major objections, because you’ve gotten their buy-in at multiple checkpoints along the way; really, ACKing your work is just agreeing with themselves.

From there, you can share the plan for a NACK (or, more commonly, “for vis”) with a wider group. Just remember that the people who need visibility into what’s happening are not the same as the people who need to sign off. Your NACK audience is not your ACK audience.