On working with people who know more than you

There is a particular kind of professional discomfort that nobody really prepares you for: sitting in a room, or on a call, with people who are deeply expert in something you are not. Not as a student or an observer. But as a peer, expected to contribute something.

It happens more than you'd expect. And when it does, it kind of stays with you.

I've found myself in rooms with salespeople who have spent decades learning how to read a conversation. With engineers who think in systems so complex they have their own vocabulary for them. With people whose entire professional identity is built around a domain I can only partially understand. In those moments, the temptation is to focus on what you don't know and quietly shrink. Somewhere along the way, though, you realize this gap can actually be useful.

When we stop trying to keep up and start paying attention instead, things become interesting. We start absorbing ideas that have no obvious application to what we do, but that quietly rewire how we think. Three things have stayed with me in particular.

The first: that complexity usually signals something unresolved, not something sophisticated. This one came from watching people build things. When something is genuinely well-designed — a system, a process, a message — it tends to be simpler than you expected. When it's overcomplicated, it usually means someone hasn't finished thinking yet.

The second: objections are information, not obstacles. When someone pushes back, they are telling you something. About what they value, what they fear, what they need. The professionals who understand this don't argue. They listen more carefully.

The third: that the person asking the questions controls the room. Not in an aggressive way, but in an attentive one. Asking the right questions, it turns out, is a skill of its own.

None of these are marketing lessons. Yet they can shape how we work almost as efficiently.

The same dynamic plays out on the other side, with smaller clients and independent business owners. These are people who often don't have the vocabulary for what they need. They can't always write a brief. They sometimes struggle to explain what makes their business different. But they have been living their business; observing it, adjusting it, following instincts they've never had to articulate or justify. There is a kind of knowledge in that which no consultant arrives with. They know which customers are loyal and why. They know what almost worked and what definitely didn't. They know the things they should change but are afraid to.

The job, in those moments, is not to bring knowledge in. It's to help draw it out.

Working with people who know more than us, in their field, in their business, or in their lived experience, requires a specific kind of discipline. We have to resist the urge to fake expertise we don't have. We have to ask questions that might reveal our ignorance. The key is to stay genuinely curious rather than strategically curious.

It's not a comfortable skill to develop. But it does often come in handy.