Are You the Smartest One in the Room (SOITR)? Does it matter?

Being the smartest person in the room isn’t an advantage in system change unless part of your brilliance is in collaborating with others who have different expertise than yourself, and supporting them to collaborate with each other.

Even the smartest person in the room cannot and never will understand all parts of a complex system. It takes all types of expertise and experience to identify leverage points, and then to design and implement change initiatives.

Early in my career, a senior faculty member pulled me aside to offer advice for my fledgling faculty development center. She told me that she was going to lead the college into the future. “The train is leaving the station” and I (and presumably the rest of the faculty) could either get on it or be left behind.

In my naivety and practicality, I asked her, “If your train leaves the station without most of the faculty on board, how will the changes you’ve envisioned happen?” On that day I unintentionally made an enemy. She eventually took her vision to another institution. Her train left the station with only her on board.

Leaders or small groups who make decisions without engaging with and learning from others are likely to:

have inaccurate assumptions and simplified views of the current system, leading to ineffective interventions,
unintentionally increase resistance to change and/or backlash during implementation,
reduce trust necessary for the next round of change initiatives, and
ultimately waste time by creating more problems that need solutions.

Collaboration isn’t a luxury in system change, it is a necessity. Sustainable system change requires that all parts of the system align. If they do not, the unaltered parts of the system will negate or deform the interventions.

Whatever expertise you have in your system, it is necessary, and it is also insufficient. We need each other. If you’re the smartest person in the room, I ask that you use your brilliance to invite, welcome and support the other types of expertise necessary to shift your system. If you use your brilliance to shut others out or down, your train might be leaving the station, but you’ll be traveling alone.

To read about being the smartest person in the room from a c-suite perspective, check out my longtime friend & collaborator’s post of the same title, Are You the Smartest One in the Room (SOIRT)? Does it matter? at patrickfarrellconsulting.com.

If you’d like to comment or contribute your own view on this title, please join us on LinkedIn at KatherineSandersPhD and PatrickFarrell.