Aug 9
2010
The Wikileaks story is provocative because it suggests a world of radical transparency. If transparency is defined as access to information, and clarity as understanding information, how should businesses, schools and governments address this issue going forward?
Do you think it is more important for leadership to value transparency or clarity?
David gave the final word
Maybe the role of the leader in a transparent organization is to provide the framing, context, and culture which lets clarity emerge out of the data, and to provide a measured counter to the (sometimes simplistic) calls for radical transparency.
Monday, August 9 at 2:10pm
While there is little doubt that clarity is a critical component for understanding the nature and complexity of government and social issues and actions, I want to come down on the side of transparency. Ultimately the question becomes what are we yearning for or creating clarity about, and getting the facts on the table is simply the necessary starting point. To suggest that we first need clarity and context is to treat citizens as children — and has become a excuse, as Alan Webber so wisely notes, for our journalists to sidestep the necessary first job of delivering the facts.
I’d like to extend this conversation into the zone of design and social enterprise. How are we going to learn and share knowledge around social innovation (both successes and failures) when the complexity of processes and programs is hidden behind the proprietary walls of design firms, foundations and NGOs? The same values of transparency are necessary and essential to creating progress around the key issues of our times, whether it be water or food or the environment, and all parties should find ways to publish both raw data, process reports, and ultimately all material related to outcomes — good or bad. This is the only way progress against these challenges can be accelerated.
Friday, August 13 at 2:37pm
As usual, context makes an enormous amount of difference in thinking about transparency and clarity as a trade-off.
While the internet has made it harder for us to imagine secrecy as a possibility, nonetheless major institutions still seem to think its in their own best interests to withhold information, to issue misinformation or disinformation, and to lie about information.
I know: this comes as a shock–but it’s true. And frankly, the problem, which has real and serious consequences in the lives of people and the prospect of preserving democratic principles, has only been made worse by media operations that see nothing wrong with practicing the same tactics in the way they treat the news. They become conduits for doctored video tapes, out and out lies about people, policies, and programs, and blatant mis-representations of the truth.
In this context, transparency is Job #1.
Having access to original documents, having the chance to review raw material gives all of us the chance to learn in an unfiltered way the actual facts of a corporate or governmental practice.
In the absence of real transparency, as citizens we end up being treated to the particular glosses that competing media outlets seek to apply to the events of our time. The media, increasingly, has decided that its job is to interpret the facts for us; it is supposed to supply “meaning” to the events of the day, create a “narrative” that “explains” not what happened, but how to make sense out of what happened.
The result is, sadly, that we end up with neither transparency nor clarity.
We end up with professional opiners telling us what they think about the things we should be thinking about for ourselves.
Increasingly, the “news” is a series of interviews in which journalists interview other journalists.
The value of transparency is that it not only offers us the opportunity to use our own intellectual muscles–it virtually requires it. Then, we become the providers of our own sense of clarity. Which is ultimately enormously rewarding and inherently healthy for a fully-functioning democracy and for a well-informed citizenry conducting a serious national conversation.
Thursday, August 12 at 6:25pm
I think you’re really getting to the heart of the issue here. As much as transparency is idealistically lauded, it often makes leadership harder. A great leader inspires people to be better than themselves, to unite and be more than the sum of their parts. How do you do that when the data is stacked against you? Do you transparently tell your troops they are outnumbered, or inspire them to obliviously give everything and overcome the odds?
Data is rational and quantitative, people are irrational and qualitative. Rob Kalin, the CEO of Etsy, once told our class that part of being an entrepreneur is excitedly presenting a risky idea to investors and employees so they will get on board and help the company in the big picture. He said, “you are lying to reveal the truth”. I love that quote.
At the risk of a Mozilla mutiny ;) — Have you found yourself in this situation, John?
Friday, August 13 at 12:58pm
I haven’t been in that sort of situation at Mozilla, no — we’re an organization that values transparency extremely highly, so there’s never really a debate on what’s appropriate.
But Rob’s right in general — in that there’s a fine line between being completely transparent about how you feel about risks and challenges and cheerleading enough to get support so that as a team you can overcome those challenges. It’s a hard balance to maintain.
Friday, August 13 at 2:00pm
I think clarity is more important for the public. Most people won’t read the details, they just want to understand. Though as David points out, it’s important to transparently show the roots of the information being framed.
Ideally I think clarity should be upfront, with easy access to the raw information beneath — A system similar to references, citations, footnotes, inlines, etc. where communication is in parallel with sources. These examples still follow a distracting process of jumping around and cross-indexing mentally though.
The big challenge for businesses, schools and governments is how they clarify the information and present transparency. A lot of documentation is dry and excessive, even in summarized form. Rich-media, information visualizations, interactivity, layered explanations, humanized interfaces, etc. would all be helpful and far more engaging. Transparent, clarified information offered in an unattractive form is invisible.
One of the best examples I can think of is how Scott Thomas and his team designed the Obama campaign. Using a similar approach to business, school and government information could create an easily navigable, adaptable, and attractive system that not only informs the public, but encourages the public to seek information, care, and act.
Wednesday, August 11 at 8:06pm
I agree clarity is the tool that communicates transparency. Wikileaks is the best example for radical transparence, but it is the journalist who is even more provocative by creating clarity through editing and shorten the 92,000 classified documents. Transparency is not useful if it is not clear.
Thursday, August 12 at 2:22pm
John, good question. I think the public mostly cares about clarified explanations. Most people will not spend the time reading through Wikileaks documents, instead they want a broad overview to understand the situation and where the government has been contrary.
This curation must be done by humans, and thus will be biased. But if the raw data is transparently presented in parallel, the bias will be minimized and up for debate. People can see the clarified explanations, but also have the raw data to fact-check. I think Alan makes a similar point below.
So I don’t think raw data is less “important” per se, instead I think the clarified explanation is more immediate and widely read than the data below, and there’s a lot of room for improvement in how we clarify. Smarter systems should be designed to unite the clarified explanations to the data below, with engaging models for the public to analyze. That’s why I suggest visualizations, interactions, interfaces, etc.
Words are simply not enough for today’s world, and they can be the most biased of all as we’ve seen in countless political speeches. I long for the day when politicians present in front of interactive projectors, perusing the data as they explain and debate their points.
Friday, August 13 at 12:37pm
David gave the Final Word
Thinking about when one might have to make that choice, I can come up with examples where “raw” transparency leads to lack of clarity due to missing background, framing, contextual information, or misunderstandings due to jargon or the like.
It seems also true that clarity without transparency can be suspicious to a cynical audience which tends to distrust clear statements from leaders as likely spin or sophistry. So transparency can make clarity more effective.
Wikileaks is notable in that while it is a clear example of transparency, the leadership that I appreciate most in the last release is the fact that it was somewhat moderated transparency, with collaboration with old-school journalists to ensure that transparency brought clarity, not just transparency for its own sake.
Maybe the role of the leader in a transparent organization is to provide the framing, context, and culture which lets clarity emerge out of the data, and to provide a measured counter to the (sometimes simplistic) calls for radical transparency.
As John Maeda points in his post on the topic, the leader is effective if s/he can provide clarity based on the constituency’s trust in her/him. Transparency can be an organizational hedge to ensure that the trust is warranted.
Monday, August 9 at 2:10pm
I think this is exactly right — I know that I sometimes use transparency when I should be trying to get more clarity on things. That is, when I’m having trouble expressing an important concept in a way that’s understandable, I say “Well, here’s the data; make your own conclusions.” That’s clearly a crutch — clarity of thought, strategy, direction with as much transparency as you can have to back it up seems like what you want. I do worry that sometimes radical transparency isn’t very efficient — it means that many more people are looking through first sources to figure things out; you lose the advantage of trusting another’s analysis.
Thursday, August 12 at 11:39am
Keywords
Selected list of words appearing in this and other conversations.
Sarah Froelich
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Hi John.
Ultimately, I believe transparency is much like a tool and clarity is the method by which this tool is put to work. With this in mind, it seems transparency, radical or not, is both essential for making leadership work better, but it can also break down leadership and make it weaker.There are many ways to look at this topic, perhaps so many that everything gets a little cloudy.
It seems that transparency works very much like a recipe and the success of transparencies are dependent upon their combination and the tastes or reactions of those who are governed by them.
Some critics of transparency might say that some areas are not meant to be transparent, and, for example, some areas of government or society will always be unspoken or secretive.
So, for me, I think it is interesting to think about why we are so interested in transparency today and what this interest will produce for this generation. As part of this exercise, I would like to mention that I wrote a little bit on this topic for the Cooper-Hewitt’s design blog last week. You can check it out through this link: http://blog.cooperhewitt.org/2010/08/04/on-transparency.
Thursday, August 12 at 6:33pm