23.22: Make it transparent

I wrote earlier that radical transparency is major shift in perspective, and I’m not putting my SSN on the web (or even my Horizon record). But as a professional practice, transparency has the potential to cut off the oxygen of many of the most pernicious practices in business organizations globally. When processes and decisions are in the open, there are no fiefdoms, no robbing Peter to pay Paul, no vindictiveness, no private agendas, no prejudice. And focus on how to explain, spin, and portray initiatives is replaced by focus on the initiatives themselves.

Utopian? Well sure -- but it seems a bir more grounded to be Utopian about the potential of transparency in organizations that to be Utopian about the potential of say, a gaming console or of flickr.

Of course, as AskAway shows, transparency does require respect… courage… candidness ... and shared commitment. But if we collaborate fully, those are things we’ll learn.

So you’re blogging – keeping a web diary. Your thoughts and feelings about business, technology and life are on the web. If you’re a teen, your blog has likely replaced the diaries and journals kept by previous generations. Remember diaries? Those personal documents bore an aura of secrecy strong enough to spur countless brother-sister spats, “you just don’t trust me” screaming matches with parents, and Young Adult Novels. Those have been replaced by blogs, repositories as private as today’s Washington Post.

And you’re flickring – posting photos from your world to the world’s most famous photosharing site. Time was, your snapshots were carefully wrapped in opaque envelopes at the Rite Aid. The clerk would hand them to you and you would inspect them with a certain sense of circumspection. If someone was standing behind you, would you hold the pictures close, because your photos, your life, was private?

One thing seems clear, the definitions or personal and private are changing. It isn’t the tools themselves that change our understanding of privacy, it is the human behaviors and choices that the tools enable. Some bloggers hold personal information, and personal insight close, others become publizens or open humans. Some flickr users protect their photos to ensure only friends and family will view them, others, including those who are working as artistic or professional photographers, post photos that let the Internet look quite closely at their lives and interests. More and more, people are choosing transparency over privacy. The tools make this choice easy, but I don’t think they actually motivate it. If you’re moving towards Radical Transparency, it is offering you some value – intellectual, emotional, professional, business.

So for 23 Things there’s the value of the prize, the value of the learning, and the social networking value of others reading your posts. For flickr-ites, there’s social networking, potential selling of photos/services, and the coaching you’ll see in the comments of high-end pictures. For blogs? Well, perhaps we all dream of being the next Wonkette, or Daily Kos, but for most bloggers I think it’s more that people want to be heard. They say 51% of the Millenial Generation plans on being famous-- and perhaps they will be.

The tools make it easy, the zeitgiest makes it acceptable, the variety of blogs diminishes shyness (as bloggers must think, “oh, I’ve seen goofier blogs than mine”), and the downsides are not immediately evident - especially not to Millenials. So if there’s value to you, be transparent.