3 Principles: 1 – Transparency
Every organization can become more transparent
NOTE: This short essay was conceived as part 2 of a full essay, (where I have copied this) which you can read here.
I am convinced that every organization can become more transparent – as long as their aims are legal and moral. Truly, we should all demand more transparency from companies, governments, and any communities we participate in. A lack of transparency might only indicate a lazy communication strategy or an entrenched culture of closed-door control, but it can also hide plans and motivations which are not in the best interest of the purported constituents, customers, or members.
Look, everyone has the right to pursue their own desired ends (if they are legal), but it isn't fair to hide the true purpose from people who are being asked to trust and work with the organization. (This includes employees as well.) For example, if a company's true goal is to make billions of dollars by manipulating people and selling their personal data, it's obnoxious to tell those users that your aim is “community and friendship.”
There's nothing wrong with a profit motive – without it many goods and services we enjoy today wouldn't exist – but it disrespects people to pretend that money isn't a primary goal of an organization when it obviously is. Sensible people recognize that it takes resources for us to have things that we want. We understand that paying for a bag of apples keeps the store where we purchase them open, provides supplies to the farmer growing the apples, and pays for the people to pick, pack, and ship those apples.
Similarly, being a member of a club or religious institution involves paying dues or donations because these services won't be available if no one is paying for the website hosting or the building maintenance. When organizations open up about how they are able to pay for the things necessary to operations, it creates understanding, trust, and support.
Transparency goes beyond financing, however. It also means letting people know what changes are coming, why certain decisions have been made, and even in some cases how decisions are made. If there is a board of trustees or an executive team, being open about who exactly are in these groups is important.
Transparency creates trust, so whatever an organization can reasonably share should be shared. Certainly, there will be some things which are confidential or trade secrets and not open to general sharing, but organizations would do better to share more, rather than less, whenever possible.
Some companies will insist that all their value lies in secrets they can't share, but unless you are involved in national security or law enforcement, it's likely that your secrets are less valuable than you think. Ideas are pretty worthless without implementation and anything which eventually becomes public can be emulated by competitors.
An interesting example of transparency enhancing rather than inhibiting value is open source software. As its name suggests, this is software that anyone can view, download, and edit the source code for. It might seem crazy that giving away all the secrets of the software would increase its value, but it does. Many people specifically choose to use certain software because it's open source. Its operation and implementation are visible, so they can be sure that the software isn't doing anything with their data that they don't approve of; any calculations or algorithms in the software can be examined and verified; there is no mysterious “man behind the curtain” in open source software.
Even for people who don't understand the source code this transparency is beneficial because there are plenty of people who do understand it and who can vouch for its stability, security, and accuracy - people who are NOT the software's founders.
If you have influence within a company or other organization, ask yourself: How could we be more transparent with stakeholders? What could we be more open about? Our aims? Our processes? Our decisions? Pick something and put it out there. See what feedback you get.