Leverage Weekly #55 - Achieving transparency
tl;dr - Transparency takes effort but yields many benefits
I used to be a critic of transparency. This was not because I was opposed to accountability; rather, it was because I worried that the stress that might come from being under a microscope would degrade performance. I was won over by two things. First, discussions with my colleagues showed me that I was essentially always imagining a hostile or disingenuous audience, clearly evidence of trauma from my past. Second, my positive experiences doing things like writing annual reports showed me that the process of translating things for the public could actually increase the quality of the thought. These steps turned me into an advocate, rather than critic, of transparency.
Creating a budget and releasing it to the public is one step towards achieving transparency. However, there are many different ways to compile or present a budget, and even with an illuminating budget, many aspects of an organization may remain opaque. To understand how to make an organization more transparent, it is useful to understand precisely when and why transparency is desirable. One can then pursue transparency for the sake of its actual benefits, yielding both greater transparency and greater benefit as a result.
The purpose of transparency is, quite naturally, to allow people to see in. There are several reasons why people seeing in can be beneficial. The most obvious is for the sake of accountability; this is why many people advocate transparency. Accountability, in turn, is useful for increasing one’s own reliability, which can then can engender trust. People can trust you in cases where you are transparent, since they can see what you are doing, and can trust you where you have not yet achieved transparency, since they can infer a lot about what you are like from your genuine efforts to share more and more.
Transparency has other benefits. If one is sufficiently secure in one’s capacities, having an audience can lead one to rise to the occasion, increasing the quality of performance. The continual effort to communicate also increases the quality of communication over time and helps one understand better what one is communicating. There is also a substantial benefit with respect to coordination: the more people outside the organization understand what the organization is doing, the more people inside the organization will understand as well.
If transparency is such a good thing, why aren’t more organizations transparent? As it turns out, transparency takes a lot of work. Sharing information often takes extra steps. Extra steps, even ones as simple as a few extra keyboard commands, can be tedious or onerous to execute reliably. In many cases, achieving transparency may involve building special systems to make transparency easy, or even building the organization to be transparent from the ground up.
The extra work involved in making something transparent often includes more than just copying and pasting information into a shared channel. Data is often opaque, reams of data even more so. In order to not simply be “burying people in data,” information often needs to be formatted and designed in a way people can digest. Transparency, therefore, requires understanding one’s audiences carefully and taking the time to work out what they want to know that has not yet been communicated.
If it seems difficult to really get people to understand what your organization is doing, keep in mind that it is possible to achieve transparency step by step, realizing the benefits it brings over time. In fact, there can be so much to communicate, there may be no other choice. If you’re unsure where to start, being with things you know other people care about, like the budget, for instance. Once you’ve shared a little, it’s possible to build out from there. Eventually, the challenge will be figuring out what crucial things you haven’t shared to help people better understand your organization’s efforts.
Despite its benefits, transparency is not called for in all cases. In particular, transparency can sometimes cut against privacy, which itself can play an important role in the development of organizations and individuals. Getting the benefits of both transparency and privacy requires striking a balance; if one does this well enough, the people in one’s organization will help adjust it the rest of the way. On the topic of privacy, and how to mesh it with transparency, more next week.
Transparency takes effort but yields many benefits.
Last week, the Quantum Biology Institute (QBI) team, aided by Leverage, published a draft of its proposed budget for 2025. The budget is meant to be transparent, first, in that it includes all of the relevant information we’ve been able to gather, and second, in being understandable. Budgets are often places that people try to hide things. We helped to avoid that by having intuitive categories like “Scientists,” “Instruments,” and “Lab,” corresponding to the costs for the scientists, the instruments they’ll use, and the lab they’ll use them in.
The next big challenge for Leverage will be helping QBI in the domain of logistics. In order to make sure that instruments and supplies are ordered at the right times, that people show up where they need to be, and so we don’t have multiple-week delays as we wait for a person or thing to become available, we’re going to build out as much of a plan for the next year as we can. We’ll almost certainly release the plan or some version of it publicly, the increased transparency making it easier to understand the project for people on the outside... and the inside as well.
Apart from supporting QBI’s efforts, Oliver began articulating some excellent thoughts on the topic of scientific dysfunction. Melinda continued work on the Introspection videos and booked lodging for the team’s Q2 retreat in April. Geoff wrote a draft of a piece on trauma for the Introspection program and took some time off to learn more about DeSci.
Going forward, one challenge Leverage will face is communicating the techne of transparency, i.e., how to actually do it, to its partners and other stakeholders. It is easy enough to affirm the value of transparency. Learning how to implement it is a further challenge.