Some Ideas About Transparency

Experimenting with subversive strategies.

Photo by Elisha Terada on Unsplash

I serve on the board of director’s of Bartram’s Garden, the oldest botanical garden in the country and a unique pocket of nature snuggled into a historically neglected zip-code in Philadelphia. Much of the neighboring land is taken up by decaying sites of industry. It’s a dynamic, magical, and multi-faceted place grappling with ideas of justice and equity, nature and access, repair and sovereignty.

We’re in the beginning stages of the next strategic planning cycle, and one of the ideas that’s surfaced in our conversations is around transparency as a subversive tactic. Not subversive as in sneaky, but as in inverting power dynamics.

The norm in business and organizations is to carefully manage information; scripting communication; limiting what employees know or have access to; keeping numbers tightly under wraps.

Opaque as an orientation is, at the end of the day, about control and holding power. Not sharing compensation information allows companies to do whatever they want with compensation…say, paying men more than women.

But even in a less “evil corporate overlord” sense, more benign forms of information control pop up all the time:

• Leaving fee or rate information off of a website

• Carefully scripting and managing sharing challenging or negative news with employees

• Restricting who on a team gets to see what data and metrics

There are certainly reasons to employ the strategies above! But what I notice is that they are all inherently defensive moves: what if I scare potential clients away with my pricing? What if my team freaks out and quits if I tell them revenue is down this year?

So, here’s a small collection of ideas about transparency. These are mostly financial, and mostly public-facing, because they’re easy to link to ;)

Take these as a sort of provocative mirror, if you will. Not as advice or suggestion, but as prompts to explore.

What sorts of blocks and objections spring up when you imagine implementing something like these ideas in your own business? 

What do you imagine would go awry? What consequences do you anticipate? 

Sharing almost everything

Social media management company Buffer has made themselves quietly famous for their transparency— they’ve been sharing salaries for their entire team for years.

Their transparency practice has evolved into an entire section of their website devoted to sharing all sorts of numbers, from salaries and profit sharing numbers for the team, to a breakdown of their expenses and spending year over year, to detailed information about customer and user numbers.

A public profit & loss & a profit calculator

garden3d

is the venture arm of a small group of collective studios, including Sanctuary Computer, and they have published their annual P&L every year since 2015 (2023 isn’t up yet).

SC has also created a public profit calculator, where you can plug in variables, use real data or a mock up, and calculate hypothetical employee profit distributions.

Every project fee since the beginning of time

I worked with Mike and Jennifer of Self Aware Studio a few years back, and so I was particularly delighted to see the trajectory of their pricing and project fees when they published a database of “Every Project We’ve Ever Charged For” .

This is brave, and I love it because literally everyone’s business has a version of this trajectory; there was some point where you didn’t charge enough, and now (hopefully) you’ve evolved your pricing. We’re all so cagey and touchy about pricing, and so I friggin love this as a thought experiment.

( When they first published this list, the twitter post literally said “Fuck it”. My hunch is that this idea will strike more fear and objections in the hearts of readers than any of the others, please lemme know if I’m right! Personally, makes my stomach feel weird to contemplate. )

An entire team handbook

Cooperative enterprises tend towards transparency as a core operating principle— democratic management requires information sharing after all— one area in particular that many coops share publicly is governance policies and business handbooks. Here’s two to explore:

Loom.io’s cooperative handbook

Guerilla Translation’s Governance Handbooks

And a red flag: transparency that is actually control.

The inverse of transparency that creates more trust or inverts power norms is transparency as control.

Remote work and digital communication tools, when combined with management mandates, far from creating accountability and distributing power, create top down big-brother vibes.

Pre-pandemic, the luggage manufacturer Away received a flurry of bad press around it’s exec’s behavior and the company’s chaotic and toxic culture; one policy in particular that caught a lot of attention: a company ban on email and private Slack messages— every communication needed to be accessible for all to see— which in practice meant “all communication for management to see.”

I don’t think it’s hard to see the difference— controlling employee communication, even, and especially, when wrapped in the faux gauze of “we have no secrets here” serves those in power (paranoid that someone might complain about them), not the employees. (see also, Basecamp)

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Comments are open to all for this post, or hit reply to this email. I would love to know:

Do any of these ideas freak you out? Which ones and why? 

Do you consciously practice transparency in your business or org? What does that look like? 

Any other examples of transparency as a business practice to share?