If you were to pore over a typical boardroom transcript, the word ‘transparency’ would feature prominently. Earlier in June I noted, albeit briefly, how transparency is increasingly becoming a non-negotiable in business, especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Especially in government, a lack of transparency is always suspect when it comes to the government. Furthermore, all recent COVID scandals share in one thing: obscurity. As a result, when we have the government in front of the mic we want to hear, “What numbers are we doing today?” “What are the efforts being led?” “Where did the money go?” and no less. For gov’t, transparency is binary. It’s either the gov’t is transparent or there’s a 98% chance of a scandal cooking. The case for transparency doesn’t differ much for the private sector. For example, consumers want to know how companies are handling their complaints, reacting in the face of a pandemic and how it treats its staff. Imagine how messed up (of the leadership) it would be to hear what your company is upto in the media before any internal communication. But you’d have to go beyond scratching the surface to find the fault. Transparency doesn’t build itself; transparency compounds on the values of our upbringing. In an ideal world, we should have an unconditional (re)view of moving components of a system, the end goal being able to make sense of a system’s truths. Any less shouldn’t come close to the definition of transparency.

We are all born with some drive for transparency as a blueprint. Naturally, we mostly spend our childhoods trying to peek under the hood, breaking to figure things out and all meek trickery. It’d be quite worrying if that’s not how anyone spends theirs. Personally, I took apart most (if not all) of my toys and broke a few bones. “I thought you were going to be a mechanic.” My mum recently recounted. Looking back, I am not too far off from it. I spend most of my weeks doing ‘mechanic work’. I often wonder what could be the case if I had an alternate childhood. Regardless, I try to spend most of my time exploring my curiosity, and with it comes budding transparency. For example, if I took apart a toy car it meant that I had some level of transparency on how a rudimentary motor worked. On the contrary, being meek with toys would mean I wouldn’t figure out a basic motor would work—and this would carry on in my adult life, that it’s very okay to know how things work.

Could this longing for transparency be an unconscious innate need to know how things work, and that’s suppressed as we age? Our temperament is such that if something is peculiar there are some slightly ajar doors that need to be opened. Just recently, I had my 10 year old cousin explain to me how he manages his YouTube channel, “Yesterday’s video was more of an apology video. We usually post 3 videos a week so yeah.” While explaining he showed me how the channel performed when they were consistent; more consistent posting featured higher views while irregularly spaced posting had less views. Instinctively, they are wired to be transparent to their vision, YouTubing. In this instance, a lack of consistency is punished with less views. I thought to myself, ‘Wow, these youngins are already figuring out this transparency thing (albeit via an algorithm) better than most adults do!’ However, secretly, I fear for the depreciation of their need-to-know which is followed by a lesser need/appreciation for transparency. This depreciation of needing to know and asking questions depreciates to a point where as they become adults a lack of transparency is ‘normal’. Stubbornness could be their only short-term redeemer. As they grow up, the friction could dampen their curiosity and as a result diminish their need for transparency. This friction is co-related to how often they pursue or outrightly ask ‘grown up questions’.

During my time, the classic was the ‘Babies come from the supermarket’ when you got way ‘too curious’. We grow up with most things censored, mostly with innocent intentions, and that censoring becomes normal for us in our adult social and professional lives. From then on, it’s a marathon of how fast we unlearn and the people we meet along the way. This was true when I met Zach, founder of Hack Club, at a conference in Saudi Arabia in 2018. Starting his streak after dropping out of his first year of high school, I was intrigued by the work he does with Hack Club, a network that facilitates computer science learning among high school students.

I’ve been a fan of Zach’s work with Hack Club since then. Sometime this year, they open-sourced their nonprofit’s finances—pretty much to the wildest dreams of any non-profit leader I know of. Consequently, this has led to an increase in trust with his stakeholders. So much that they gained Elon Musk’s trust with a USD 500,000 donation amongst a chain of many. As at writing this, Hack Club maintains a public dashboard of what their members are working on. Zach and his team are personally a big, big inspiration for me and what can be achieved. Thinking about them made me imagine what ideal (radical) transparency could look like in the next 10 years? If transparency is defined as a process easy to perceive and make useful analysis of, then radical transparency could possibly allude to openness as a culture for growth, empathy and coexistence. Companies leading from this front would look like Buffer, who have their salaries and projects open-sourced, Apple who publish a transparency report annually and Circuit whose CEO, Jack, sends monthly revenue updates in a newsletter. Taking a closer look, we could learn a few fundamentals from each of these companies.

Buffer, a social media analytics company, stood out the most for me. Not only did they make their salary compensation transparent but they also made their diversity efforts and product roadmap(!) dashboard open source. For an industry which derives value from social media, it might have sounded like a bad idea but now it isn’t. In hindsight, it’s done them well. But who is the kind of person[ality] to fit in a Buffer-like environment right out of the box? For someone who’s grown up in an environment where a whole lot of stuff is censored, this Buffer-like environment is a no-go zone. What’s revealing is that for this person, they are likely to be more surprisingly productive in a ‘closed’ work structure. To further allude to this, Ethan Bernstain, a Harvard Business School associate professor did a study that highlights the transparency paradox, what he calls “The Transparency Trap”.

Summarized, transparency structures with intense visibility and tracking make co-workers uncomfortable to collaborate, and as a result will most likely hide beneficial work to avoid disappointing people. Most of the time there’s nothing hideous that they’re up to—they work just as hard as the others but this god’s eye somehow short circuits their productivity in the interest of making everyone ‘happy’ or ‘content’1. Unfortunately, schooling is part of this equation.

Just like school when doing an assignment or class in-session—the more the teacher focuses on you (if you’re doing nothing illegal), the more likely your train of thought goes haywire but you have to appear calm so the invigilator hopefully moves on. Remember the drill: Make people content and most importantly don’t cause problems. To better understand how transparency as an ideal could function in a school environment, I asked a couple of professor friends. The responses were pretty interesting. There was one surprising response however. One professor shared how his University made all professors’ teaching activities transparent via Google Docs for a year. The result? “Many senior male professors were doing a lot less teaching.” Apart from generating gossip, my biggest takeaway from my conversation with this professor was the power transparency had in highlighting gaping disparities. I can only imagine the loopholes that could be exposed with transparency in public colleges, or even amongst students. Selectively, an element of obscurity helps in variated circumstances especially if they jeopardize the safety of those involved.

Especially today, there’s a growing line between transparency and a breach of privacy. How do we know what shouldn’t be out there? Who decides? Beyond doubt, transparency that divulges delicate and personally identifying details (causing harassment, endangerment of life etc) is a blatant breach of privacy. For example, a company open-sourcing their payroll together with personally identifying details like addresses and names would be a violation of privacy.

In a somewhat similar situation, selective transparency for philanthropy is understandable. While public giving has varying benefits, anonymous giving is mostly guided by personal principles. A deserving anti-thesis would be that public giving evolves through sharing successes and failures while anonymous giving rarely does—there are limited ways to measure if at all.

If I had the luxury of time to go back and choose the environment I grew up in I would choose a scrappier one, one of shrewd engineering. A childhood of slightly harder things to figure out like “How could this broken phone work again?” Because ultimately, every problem is an engineer’s oyster. Also, I would happily choose one where a No was a ‘No because of x’, not ‘No because No.’ Today’s newest parent might not know that how the next CEO, scientist, artist—you name it— responds to the next coronavirus pandemic is in their hands, quite literally.

We are still at the crack of dawn for a transparency driven world. There are at least two pieces of the puzzle that need to click: both our immediate environments and institutional structures, the failure of which is transparency becomes a mirage and an annoying buzzword. Institutions and environments leading on this front need our attention if we are to collectively progress. In a world of ideal transparency, endless problem solving and opportunity are all up for grabs.

So 10 year olds have a clear idea of transparency - why can’t our government? Financial transparency prompts investors and customers to earn more trust in companies. Transparency reveals corruption, reveals the ways that systems fail. Just like any game, transparency has it’s “Out of Bounds” zone. Obviously transparency is not the only path towards good governance, but just one way to keep ourselves accountable to our visions.

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Appreciation to my editor2 for crossing t’s and dotting i’s.

Footnotes:

  1. I find that this category of people are often the most talented. More often, they just need a small nudge. I have a deep admiration for their efforts/struggles because I share in most of them. ↩

  2. Editor prefered to stay anonymous. ↩