Transparency, Clarity, and Trust (and Truth)

John Maeda and Becky Bermont (from the Rhode Island School of Design) wrote a nice blog post about transparency and clarity.

I've written about transparency before, suggesting, as some others have, that radical transparency would have value. I have implied on more than one occasion that our leaders and our organizations are not as transparent as they could be. I get a lot of resistance when I say these things, even though I always add the caveat that I'm not actually suggesting extreme transparency and revealing everything all the time. 

Maeda and Bermont point out that complete transparency is not only impossible, it is also often just confusing. If you give people all the raw data, they won't know what to do with it or how to make sense of it. Or worse, they'll interpret it incorrectly. Instead of transparency, people need CLARITY.

Transparent and clear can be defined the same, of course (you can see through it), but their distinction in an organizational context is important. Clarity requires a certain amount of transparency (back to my original point: more transparency than you're delivering now, I bet). But it also requires selection and interpretation, in order to make things really clear. That, by definition, is less than complete transparency, because you are choosing to reveal some things over others in order to promote clarity.

Maeda further notes that in order for this to really work, the person who is doing the revealing and interpreting (in his case, the President of a School), needs to be trusted. How do you build trust? By being transparent! This sounds circular, but I don't think it is. 

There are two types of transparency going on at the same time. One is the kind Maeda is talking about: revealing (and interpreting) vital information about the organization or about the leader that is relevant to certain constituents (employees, the public, the market analysts, the members, etc.). This does not require full transparency, but in order to achieve clarity, you'll have to share a lot. Think about your organization. Where do you withhold information in ways that make things opaque. Where people end up thinking "I'm not clear as to what is happening or WHY it is happening." Honestly, when I suggest making salary figures open, it's in the service of clarity. What do we value and why. If we were clear on that, maybe we wouldn't need to make salary figures open. 

The second kind of transparency is more broad and has to do with trust. I may require distilled information when it comes to being clear on some areas of an organization, but in the bigger picture, a more expansive experience of transparency is what makes the distilled version possible. When I know that the organization or the leaders are routinely sharing a wide variety of relevant information, then I am more likely to trust their distillations. 

At one level, that's why it is valuable to know, via Twitter, what you had for lunch. That and what you think of the news, or what issues you're struggling with, or what you think of someone's blog post, or what conference you are at, etc. The more information you give me about you, the more rich and textured the story in my head about you will be, and that has huge implications for whether or not I believe you in those moments where it is critical that I believe you.

In my new consulting and coaching program on truth in organizations, there is a whole section about "talk," that gets at this issue of transparency. People in authority positions in organizations are the ones who need this trust, thus it is their statements that are scrutinized. It is the stories people have in their heads about these people that drive truth and its power in organizations. So if you're in these positions, you will have to manage both aspects of transparency (the focused, distilled kind as well as the broad kind).

Comments

[Maddie Grant]

"The more information you give me about you, the more rich and textured the story in my head about you will be, and that has huge implications for whether or not I believe you in those moments where it is critical that I believe you." - that's the a-ha moment, isn't it!!

It's all the contextual "other" stuff that swirls around and creates the whole of our digital identities that is the basis for trust. Without it, you're just a spokesperson speaking with someone else's words.

Awesome post.