Brando Miranda — September 2026 · ~3 min read

TL;DR. A safe environment for people to “fail” is crucial to research. We have different backgrounds, bandwidths, health, and missing context, and the work itself has high uncertainty. I want people to ask the fundamental question, admit they need catching up, and tell me when something didn’t work. Including when I’m the person who needs catching up.

Someone I work with recently told me they felt embarrassed about needing a catch-up before we could dig into a project together.

My reaction was: absolutely no worries. That’s what the whiteboard is for haha.

I’m always open to questions, especially the fundamental ones. So don’t be shy. Or be shy, be yourself, but ask anyway :)

I meant that last part. You shouldn’t have to become a different person before you get to participate. If asking feels uncomfortable, I want there to be room for you to ask while feeling uncomfortable. We can start wherever you are.

Over my years in research, I’ve come to care a lot about this: people need a safe environment to “fail.” To forget something. To misunderstand the setup. To have an idea that doesn’t survive the first experiment. To say, “wait, I don’t actually understand what we’re doing.”

We all have different backgrounds, bandwidths, health, etc. Something obvious to me might depend on six months of context you weren’t there for. Something obvious to you might be the exact thing I’ve been missing for six months. Catching each other up is part of working together.

And research == high uncertainty. We are trying to find out something we don’t already know. So really, none of us know what the heck we are doing some of the time. It’s fun to pretend we do 😎. But I’d like us to be able to drop the act at the whiteboard.

What happens after someone admits it?

I think the revealing moment is the response to an admission of uncertainty.

Someone says they don’t understand. Do you explain? Do you get curious about where you lost them? Or do you make them regret opening their mouth?

Imagine a leader responding to a basic question with ridicule, or treating an unsuccessful experiment as proof that the person running it is inadequate. I worry about what happens in the next meeting. The question might still be there. The experiment might still have failed. But now there is a reason to keep that information out of the room.

That seems like a terrible bargain for a research group. We need access to what people actually think, including the awkward parts. If I make it expensive to tell me I’m wrong, I should expect to find out later than I could have.

This is the part of leadership I wish we took more seriously. A title doesn’t make your assumptions correct. Being brilliant doesn’t make every impatient reaction useful. If you have power over someone’s next opportunity, even a casual dismissal can carry weight you didn’t intend.

I want to be careful with that weight myself.

Back to the whiteboard

I still want us to do careful work. Check the result. Understand why the experiment failed. Notice when we keep getting stuck on the same thing and change how we’re approaching it. We can ask a lot of each other while being kind about the fact that we’re human.

The response I want to practice is pretty simple: thanks for telling me. Let’s work through it. Where should we start?

And when I’m the one who’s lost, I hope you’ll do the same for me.

Be shy, be yourself, but ask anyway. Looking forward to the chat :)

@misc{miranda2026beshybutaskanyway,
  author = {Miranda, Brando},
  title = {Be Shy, but Ask Anyway},
  year = {2026},
  month = {September},
  howpublished = {\url{https://cs.stanford.edu/people/brando9/2026/09/17/be-shy-but-ask-anyway.html}},
  note = {Blog post}
}

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the people I work with who ask questions and make room for mine.