Since May 26th I’ve been traveling; first to Munich, then to Tbilisi (in Georgia), and then to Milan where I will be keynoting a conference on the future of work mid June. Thus far it’s been an exciting trip. My family is actually from Tbilisi and hasn’t been back in almost 40 years so my grandmother, mother, and now fiancee (who I proposed to in Tbilisi) traveled there to see where they grew up and what has changed. Georgia is a beautiful place but there is a of corruption and political instability which leads to a high unemployment rate and poverty level. One of the things that the current president of Georgia did was to create a glass administration building so people could see what goes on at the government level. It’s not purely transparent from the outside but I’m told that once you go into the building it’s easy to see into offices and rooms throughout the building. That got me thinking, how open is too open?
We talk about openness, transparency, and sharing, but how far would we be willing to go with it? Would you feel comfortable working in an all glass building where people can see everything you do and every move you make? I do believe that organizations need to be much more open and transparent but there’s a balance that needs to be struck here. There’s a big difference between showing everything to everyone vs making things open to people should they want to see it. To use an analogy it’s the difference between constructing a glass building vs constructing a regular building that just doesn’t have locked doors.
Can everything always be open to everyone? I’m talking about product development, financial statements, investor meetings, etc? I’m not too sure actually; especially at the enterprise level. It might be a bit idealistic to expect that a company like Apple, Disney, or GE will just open everything up to everyone internally. This is the key difference between building a present day company from the ground up based on the idea of openness and transparency vs trying to make an existing enterprise more open and transparent. I’ll explore this more in an upcoming post.
Being open and transparent is a scary yet interesting thing but as with everything else there needs to be a balance. In a more corrupt country like Georgia, extreme measures are taken to force transparency but this approach would do more harm than good in many other parts of the world.
But, what is the purpose of being open and transparent to begin with?
This topic alone can easily take up several blog posts but simply put the purpose is to:
- Keep everyone on the same page
- Build trust and foster better relationships
- Allow employees (and customers) to contribute ideas and value where they see the opportunity to do so
If the strategy and approach that your organization is taking isn’t doing these things you may be doing more harm than good.
So, let me ask you. How open is too open?
Because I am not an open person, so I think sharing too much personal information can be considered too open.
Tackling the question from another angle works for me Jacob (though I dont claim to have the answers). What should people do with information they obtain through transparent processes? Too much transparency of non-relevant information just becomes noise, of which there is a lot. Not-for-purpose uses of the information can be a bad thing right (trying not to spark a debate but the wikileaks / Snowden / Manning issues are a current example of this).
The balance is probably somewhere in between where transparency leads to constructive and innovative actions. Therefore, to your point, what and how do we decide to share? Do we apply a filter when information is going out (government style) because in-coming filtering is difficult without creating noise – if so who decides on those filters? Or do we throw it all out there and come what may? Then to add another element, how do you apply the right filtering processes for different people – in this I’m not talking about security clearances etc but users ability to consume varying levels of information easily? A skilled researcher is far better at filtering than your average mum & dad on the internet!
Economics 101 principle of full and open information between all parties is irrelevant if those parties have differing skills in consuming it.
Tough call no matter which way you look at it.
Congratulations on your engagement Jacob!