To succeed at companies with a high concentration of brainiacs you need to be willing to go toe to toe with brainiacs and those who envision themselves brainiacs. How do you tell an intelligent person they are wrong? With a healthy serving of hubris.

Why does telling an intelligent person they are wrong require hubris? Because it assumes one of four things (1) the person does not have information that you have (2) the person did not process information that you have (3) the person processed the shared information incorrectly or (4) the person reached the wrong conclusion through some other fault. In most contexts, you do not have enough information to identify which of the four factors are at play, yet it doesn’t prevent you from deducing another individual is incorrect.

This challenge is in circles of intelligent individuals and communities of practice. The embedded hubris of these environments tramples upon others without equal hubris or hierarchy. In these situations, experts are rarely questioned except for in deferential tones because they are well– experts. The embedded hubris can be seen in online communities as well, how much expertise or hubris it takes to edit a Wikipedia entry or respond to a Quora post- knowing your edits are going to live on to scrutiny to both those who know more and think they know more than you do.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because many of the people I think can make strong contributions to my work or their discipline’s discourse are discouraged from engaging. The embedded hubris of intelligence can be unforgiving to outsiders. But what opportunities do we as a society forego if others are not encourage to participate in the discourse that shapes our disciplines, our society and our world? The embedded hubris of intelligence encourages learning only at the helm of an ‘expert’ and only participating in the ‘discourse’ after you have paid enough tuition or gained enough credentials to participate.

Instead, what if we simply teach people how to participate in the ongoing discourse shaping our world? Even I need to learn to isolate the hubris of my professional interactions, to draw out information and discussion from those who have not researched using the same methods I have.

This is an ongoing challenge but it first starts with acknowledging that our communities of geeks, smart people, and high achievers have an embedded hubris that shuts out participation of outsiders.

Even if in many respects, this is by design.