I’ve never believed that leaders should hold back information. Every time I’ve seen strategy hidden, it wasn’t to protect people - it was to protect comfort. The intent might have been good, but the result was predictable: confusion, speculation, and a slow erosion of trust.
I think organizations should be maximally transparent. Every plan, goal, and risk should be visible by default. Not to perform openness, but because the absence of information creates more damage than its abundance ever could. But maximal transparency isn’t chaos. It’s design. Without structure, openness collapses under its own weight. People drown in updates instead of acting on them. The leader’s job is to make transparency useful.
Openness as design, not communication
Most organizations treat transparency as a communication practice: send more updates, host more all-hands, write longer newsletters. But that approach doesn’t scale. It creates noise, not clarity.
Transparency is a design problem. It’s about where information lives, how it connects, and when it becomes visible. It’s a system, not a ritual.
That’s why I look to systems like GitLab’s handbook or GOV.UK’s service manual. They don’t just publish everything - they build information architecture. The goal isn’t to communicate more; it’s to make context discoverable. You can trace a decision, see who owns it, and understand why it happened without interrupting anyone.
That’s the kind of transparency that scales: open by default, structured for humans.
Why maximal transparency matters
The argument for openness is not moral; it’s operational.
When everyone has full context, alignment becomes self-sustaining. People make better decisions faster because they
don’t have to guess the constraints behind them.
You don’t need daily status meetings when progress is visible. You don’t need layers of approval when reasoning is public. You don’t need a culture deck when behavior is modeled in writing.
Maximal transparency removes the invisible tax of uncertainty. It frees people from decoding leadership intent and lets them focus on the work itself.
But the impact runs deeper than speed. Radical openness equalizes trust. It removes the hierarchy of information - who gets to know what, and when. When everyone sees the same data, people stop managing perceptions and start improving the system.
The old assumption - that too much openness causes confusion - doesn’t hold. What causes confusion is bad design: unlabeled information, missing context, and shifting definitions of truth. Structure fixes that. Transparency doesn’t fail because it’s too open; it fails because it’s too messy.
The leader as architect of context
In transparent organizations, leadership is less about control and more about context design. Your job is to make sure that anyone, at any level, can understand how their work connects to purpose. That requires clear layers of information and stable anchors.
Think of it as three circles of visibility:
- Strategy - goals, direction, and priorities. Should always be open, stable, and linkable.
- Decisions - reasoning, trade-offs, and ownership. Should be visible as soon as they are made.
- Execution - daily work, metrics, and progress. Should flow naturally from the tools teams already use.
When those layers are connected, people can answer almost any question about why something is happening without needing a meeting or permission. Transparency becomes infrastructure.
This shifts what leadership looks like. It’s no longer about “communicating vision.” It’s about curating discoverable truth.
The discipline of maximal openness
True openness requires discipline. It means writing decisions down instead of summarizing them in Slack. It means linking data to reasoning, not just to dashboards. It means exposing risks before they are mitigated, even when it’s uncomfortable.
It also means designing your systems to handle sunlight. If publishing an internal document would cause panic, the problem is rarely the information - it’s the fragility of the culture around it. A transparent organization is one that can afford to be seen.
This kind of transparency also forces coherence. When everything is public, inconsistencies show up faster. Teams can spot contradictions between words and actions. That’s uncomfortable for leadership, but it’s exactly what makes it powerful. Transparency is not a brand; it’s a mirror.
Radical transparency is not noise
The most common argument against full transparency is that it overwhelms people. But noise is not a function of openness; it’s a function of design. The solution isn’t to share less - it’s to make what you share structured, layered, and discoverable.
A well-designed open system lets people pull what they need instead of receiving what others think they need. That’s the difference between clarity and flood. The goal isn’t to reduce information; it’s to improve signal.
The most transparent organizations don’t overwhelm people with data. They give them maps.
What it changes
Once transparency becomes systemic, leadership itself changes. Authority stops being about access to information. Power shifts from gatekeeping to synthesis - from “who knows” to “who connects.”
In those environments, people trust leaders not because they are the source of truth, but because they maintain the space where truth can live in the open. That’s a quieter, more durable kind of influence.
It also changes how trust is built. When people can see reasoning, constraints, and trade-offs, they may disagree with decisions but still respect them. Disagreement becomes collaboration instead of suspicion. Openness doesn’t erase conflict; it civilizes it.
How to start
If you want to test this, try an internal rule: assume every document you create could be made public tomorrow. Strategic notes, meeting summaries, metrics. Then ask: what would have to change for that to be safe and useful? Write and structure information with that future in mind.
You’ll quickly discover the rough edges of your system - the places where reasoning is missing, ownership is unclear, or language is too vague. Fixing those makes the organization stronger, not more exposed.
The goal isn’t performative openness; it’s confidence in your own transparency.
Next
6/6: Measuring Transparency - Finding the Balance
Sources
- GitLab Public Handbook, transparency and decision logs
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ - GOV.UK Service Manual, “Make things open: it makes things better”
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/make-things-open-it-makes-things-better - Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (Penguin Press, 2020)
- Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations (Nelson Parker, 2014)