Your smartest people are protecting their image

There's this moment that keeps happening. Someone asks a question in a meeting. The room goes quiet. Then someone who clearly doesn't understand says "yeah, makes sense" and the conversation moves on.

Nobody admits confusion.

The pattern is consistent: your most credentialed people are the worst at saying "I don't get it." The senior engineer with the Google background doesn't ask basic questions. The designer from that famous agency doesn't admit when the product strategy is unclear. Your VP who came from a unicorn nods along.

They're not stupid. They're protecting something.

Here's what I think is happening. Smart people built their careers on being the person who gets it quickly. That's how they got hired. That's how they got promoted. That's literally their professional identity.

So when something is genuinely confusing, they have two options:

Almost everyone picks option two.

I've watched this play out in technical architecture meetings where nobody admits the proposed system is incomprehensible. In strategy sessions where the actual strategy is unclear but everyone acts like it's obvious. In product reviews where the core user problem hasn't been defined but people are already discussing solutions.

The cost is invisible but massive. You make decisions on top of a foundation nobody actually understands. You build features based on unclear requirements. You argue about implementation when the goal itself is fuzzy.

Started paying attention to who asks clarifying questions. It's almost never your most senior people. It's the newer folks who haven't fully internalized that confusion is shameful.

I watched one team for three months. The junior engineer asked questions in every meeting. The senior engineers rarely did. But after meetings, those senior engineers would pull the junior aside and ask them to explain things. They were using the junior person as their confusion proxy.

Think about that. You have experienced people who won't admit confusion in group settings, so they're outsourcing their learning to someone with less experience.

The junior person wasn't smarter. They just hadn't learned yet that appearing confused damages your status.

I started an experiment with one founder. Told him to say "I'm lost" whenever he was actually lost in meetings. Just try it for two weeks.

First meeting, he admits the technical architecture doesn't make sense to him. His CTO stops, backs up, re-explains it differently. Turns out two other people were also confused but didn't want to say it.

Second meeting, product review. He says "I don't understand who this feature is for." The product manager realizes she doesn't either. They spend 20 minutes actually defining the user. Feature gets rebuilt completely. Would've shipped the wrong thing.

Third meeting, someone's explaining the go-to-market strategy. He says "this feels complicated, am I missing something?" Turns out it was complicated. They simplified it.

After two weeks, he told me the whole company started asking more questions. Once the founder admitted confusion, everyone else felt safer doing it.

The quality of discussions changed. Less posturing, more actual thinking. Decisions got clearer because people stopped pretending to understand things they didn't.

Big companies can't do this. If you're at a scale-up and you don't understand something in a meeting, admitting it might actually hurt your promotion chances. The system rewards appearing competent over being accurate.

But you're building something from scratch. You don't have the luxury of pretending to understand things. Every confused decision compounds. Every unclear foundation makes the next layer shakier.

The advantage of being 15 people is you can actually stop and say "wait, what are we doing?" You can admit when something doesn't make sense. You can rebuild the foundation before you're 150 people deep into the wrong thing.

Most founders waste this advantage. They import big company behavior where everyone protects their image. You end up with a small company that moves like a big one.

Here's the part that bothers me most. Every time someone pretends to understand something, they're skipping reps.

Understanding comes from wrestling with confusion. From asking the dumb question. From admitting you don't see how the pieces fit together.

When you skip that and just nod along, you don't build the mental model. You memorize the conclusion without understanding the reasoning. So when the situation changes slightly, you can't adapt because you never actually got it.

I've watched senior people become less effective over time because they stopped admitting confusion. They stopped learning. They just got better at appearing like they understood things.

Meanwhile the people who kept asking questions, who stayed comfortable being confused, they're the ones who actually got sharper.