Envision this:
A rockstar team. Everyone is brilliant.
- Strong résumés.
- Years at companies everyone recognizes.
- Real capability in the room.
- Books published.
- Core contributions to programming languages.
Yet they’re completely misaligned.
I’ve sat in those rooms. Core contributors. People who wrote the books. Names that still open doors in Rails.
Also egos big enough to stop listening. Phones out. Laptops on another thread. Owners treating a high-stakes meeting like noise on the calendar.
Everyone nods. Meeting ends. Everyone leaves “aligned” — and builds something else.
Working with many teams I’ve learned an important thing:
It doesn’t matter who’s at the table — always ask questions and request clarification.
It will surprise you how much misalignment there is, even for “simple” tasks.
Intelligence fills blanks
Intelligent people should understand each other, right?
They’re supposed to be the top performers, the top teammates, the best of the best.
The problem is that intelligence doesn’t guarantee alignment. Sometimes it makes misalignment worse.
When there’s a lack of clarity, smart people tend to fill in blanks really well.
You start saying something and haven’t finished, and they’re already completing the sentence in their head.
They infer. They extrapolate.
The worst part is they do it so smoothly that they never notice they filled in something different from what you meant.
Four hearings of one sentence
“CEO: We need to increase utilization (worked vs sold).”
What everyone heard:
- Eng VP: more hours out of engineers
- Sales: sell more projects
- Product/QA: more projects in the pipe
- Finance: fill sold hours — even if nobody worked them
All reasonable. None was the root.
What was actually going on:
- timers paused / hours not logged
- idle after done, or blocked by the client
- billing rules (QA unbilled; design/PM priced differently)
- “capacity” on paper, no people for new work
Empty:
Increase utilization.
Clear enough (COO job):
Find why utilization is low by segment — timekeeping, idle-or-blocked, billing rules — then fix the root together. Don’t “solve” it by only selling more or only asking for longer days.
The trap of confidence
Intelligent people are confident in their inferences.
They don’t second-guess. They’ve been right before and trust their judgment.
They stop asking as they infer your meaning. They stop listening at all. They move with conviction.
And because they’re capable, their plans are solid — within their interpretation.
Blind trust in a résumé is still a blank filled in for you.
I’ve watched rooms hire the books-and-talks profile, then treat nodding as knowing. Months of “we met, we reviewed, we aligned.” Almost no “we shipped X.”
And the same bias runs the other way: if you’re the “genius,” you stop listening — the room already decided you know.
Trust isn’t granted by reputation. It’s earned by outcomes — not by the volume of actions. That holds from IC to the top of the org.
The other side of the coin
The opposite is real too.
When you work with smart people, you assume context is shared.
So you talk less. And they don’t spell things out.
“Of course you understand what I mean. You’re a genius!!”
Intelligence doesn’t give telepathy powers.
Clarity and intelligence are orthogonal. You can be brilliant and unclear. Thoughtful and still wrong about what the other person meant.
Slowing down
Aligned teams have something interesting happening:
High performers slow down on purpose.
They don’t skip clarification because everyone is smart. They do it because everyone is smart.
They know smart people can infer in different directions. So they slow down for one beat.
They ask:
“When I say X, here’s what I mean. What do you hear?”
They use one simple technique: wait in silence for the answer.
Recap. Round-robin. “Explain it back.” Notes with action items. Boring. Cheaper than three weeks of forked brilliance.
They only move when they’re actually aligned, not when the nods look aligned.
The teams that fall apart are the ones where everyone assumes they understand. Where intelligence becomes an excuse for skipping communication.
Brilliance in different directions
Sadly, the smarter the team, the worse the misalignment can get.
When things go wrong, it takes longer to see why. You can’t blame incompetence — everyone is competent.
The problem must be something else.
You built brilliantly in different directions.
Intelligence is table stakes.
Alignment is a practice. Something you build into how the team works. Not something that emerges from smart people sitting in the same room.
Inference without a check is how capable rooms quietly fork.
Knowing how to infer isn’t the same as wanting to check. Hunger asks. Assumed mastery nods.
I’d rather work with people who want to do the things than with people who know how to do the things. Those who know how might not want to. Those who want to — even if they don’t know yet — will find a way.