A room full of smart people doesn't produce clarity by default. It produces volume.
I'm talking about storming, the stage a working group hits right after it forms, when everyone in the room still believes their own read of the problem is the correct one.
From the outside it looks like ego, people talking over each other, nobody conceding an inch. Underneath, it's just a group that doesn't have anything real to agree on yet.
Let me tell you about a room I sat in a few weeks ago.
I'd just been added to a small digital team set up to rebuild how a discipleship programme I volunteer with runs on the inside. The room was a proper mix: someone who maps business processes, two other product managers, a designer, a couple of developers, someone who does content, two people who build with low-code tools. On paper, a group that should move fast.
For the best part of an hour, it didn't. Everyone had a strong opinion about what the programme needed, and every opinion sounded finished, like it had already been tested somewhere else. We circled the same three or four points. Nobody built on what the last person said, they restated their own version of it, a little louder. I sat there quietly frustrated, watching a room full of capable people mistake repetition for progress. (Note to self, when you find people doing this in the future, introduce the 'Yes, and... or Yes, but' framework)
Then one of the other product managers said something that actually moved things: "I think we need to really understand and map out the flow of each department." (he echoed what the other product managers were advocating for as well)
I cannot recall how but the room agreed to actually do it, each of us would go and talk to the departments the programme touches, and come back with what we found rather than what we assumed. For the department I had to understand, my scheduled calls didn't land until later in the week than I'd have liked, but by the time I'd got through most of them, then had a longer conversation with someone who'd been close to the programme's day-to-day for years, the picture I had was a different shape entirely from the one the room had been arguing over a few days before.
Once I stepped back from it, the actual problem split cleanly into two halves. One half was measurement: nobody had a clear way to say what success looked like week to week, or to hold onto that information long enough to spot a pattern across a full cohort, let alone several. Things were happening. Almost none of it was being measured against anything, or kept in a form anyone could study later. The other half was experience: the tools people used day to day gave them no reason to actually open them, and did nothing to make anyone feel like they were growing, only to remind them of tasks outstanding.
None of that was in the room that day. Nobody in it was short on intelligence. They just hadn't gone and looked yet.
It's easy to read a looping, opinion-heavy meeting as proof the people in it aren't working well together. Storming is a stage every working group passes through on the way to functioning. A group in it isn't broken, it just hasn't found its footing yet. The mistake isn't having that meeting. The mistake is trying to solve the actual problem inside it, before anyone has gone out and checked what the problem is.
I'm not saying a room like that is wasted time. You need it to work out what's actually worth going and checking. But a room full of opinions is a list of questions, not an answer.
When was the last time your team stopped debating long enough to go and actually check?
We didn't get there because we were disciplined. We got there because one person asked a better question than the rest of the room was asking, and the rest of us had the sense to go quiet and do the work.