The smartest guy in the room

A little while back I found myself addressing a group of about 30 or so individuals.
 
Was I the smartest person in the room?
 
Being the smartest in the room usually means having access to more or better information that everyone else and as I was there to impart information which nobody else knew about, I guess I was the smartest.
 
But what happens when I share that information?
 
Does it make me less smarter?
 
After all, the audience now knows as much as me. I might have a whole raft of other information and knowledge which they still don’t know but none of that was relevant to the discussion so it didn’t really count.
 
The interesting thing is that the group then had the chance to ask questions and comment on my initial presentation and guess what? 

They had ideas I hadn’t thought of.
 
What’s more, by sharing those ideas and breaking off into smaller sub groups they were able to spark off of each other and come up with even more ideas, some of which were better than my initial thoughts.
 
I was no longer the smartest in the room but as I now had more information and ideas than when I walked in, I was definitely a bit smarter.
 
In fact, we were all a bit smarter.
 
We’d come together so that I could share specific information and ideas with this group; I was the expert.
 
But through co-operation and discussion we all created further ideas and a deeper understanding of the subject.
 
So, no I wasn’t the smartest in the room. That title must go to the one who came up with the most new ideas.
 
Who was that?
 
It didn’t really matter because we were sharing information rather than competing for it or trying to keep it for ourselves to prove we were smarter than the rest.
 
As a group we were better than the sum of our parts.
 
Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that this happened in a school, a primary school with a group of 9 year old kids and, as I’ve shown, they were definitely smarter than me!