Transparancy in the workplace
While I was working for the state of Utah, I wrote the following blog entry. I have had opportunity at my current employer to revisit my thoughts on this topic. The interesting thing is they have not changed one bit, in fact my demands from myself, as well as from my team/peers, to work transparently has streghtened measurably.
Here is the orginal posting:
As I was lying in bed last night trying to go to sleep, I began to contemplate what it meant to work transparently. I see it this way, as a worker you fall into one of three categories: Transparent, Tinted or Opaque. If you are truly working transparently, then outsiders know exactly what you are doing, why you are doing it as well as where and when it will be completed. If you are working tinted, then outsiders may have some idea of what you are doing, but they are not quite sure of why, when or where you are doing it or what the outcome is expected to be. And finally, if you are working opaque, outsiders have absolutely no idea about what you are doing, not to mention the why, where or when. Working opaque means that a person is working in a complete communications vacuum, while working transparently means that you actively seek out opportunities to communicate your challenges, contributions and successes with fellow co-workers.
Let me give you a real world example of this. What got me started thinking about transparency in the workplace was a report that I heard on NPR (I am a huge fan of NPR) earlier in the day. The subject of the report was a NASA Engineer had sent an email to his supervisor three days before the terrible break up of the shuttle Columbia warning NASA of a potential problem. He stated that he was concerned that since they had lost the tire pressure readings in the left side landing gear, that there may have been a hull breach. Unfortunately, this warning never made it to Mission Control, and hence nothing was done to investigate this issue further. Now the Engineer was working transparently, as evidenced by his willingness to send the email warning of a possible catastrophe to his manager, but unfortunately his manager was working opaque. While this situation is somewhat extreme in that people lost their lives, similar scenarios play themselves out each and every day all over the World.
I realize that there are situations or jobs that require you to work opaque, such as working with information that is sensitive to personal or national security or to the competitive health of an organization. I am not naively suggesting that everyone throw the windows open wide and let the Sun shine in helter skelter, but what I am saying is that if you do not have a defined reason to work opaque, then you need to reevaluate why you have chosen to work that way.
Here is another example of where the difference of working transparent versus working opaque came into play. While I was at the State of Utah, there was a very talented programmer who was directly responsible for key mission critical systems, and was working opaque to the detriment of the entire organization. This particular Engineer did not produce detailed documentation about the systems that he had created or the programs that ran those systems. He preferred to work with a very select group of people, that were themselves working opaque, so the problem was compounded by that fact the there was not a transparent avenue to see what he was doing. Because of his opacity, the rest of the organization suffered through many issues that could have been prevented if only this Engineer would have chosen to work transparently instead of opaquely.
The reason I even point this out is to bring up the fact that we have a choice in the way we approach our job duties and co-workers. We can either be open (transparent), guarded (tinted) or secretive (opaque) in our work, and depending on what we decide; serious problems can arise.
8:39:12 AM 
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