Embracing Smart Transparency: A Systems Thinking Approach

In today's rapidly evolving world, the workplace has become an intricate web of interconnected processes, decisions, and collaborations. Perhaps, it has always been this way. However, the complexity is higher in today's environment due to the distributed nature of teams and engagements with external partners, as well as challenges in shaping team culture within a somewhat transient workforce. 

It is easy to fall into the trap of transactional relationships when organizations regiment the approach to information flow, employee engagement, and knowledge development. Despite the investment into surveys and well meaning management communication plans, good intentions are often capped within some form of a “survey trap” that focuses on subjective proof of performance as opposed to a proof of value. 

While it is popular to talk about transparency and building a great culture, how do you measure if enough is being done in your organization? Relying on one-to-one conversations with key employees is neither fool-proof nor scalable. Similarly, survey related methods are associated with latency of information and confirmation bias. 

This article, the second in this series, examines practical approaches to building effective and smart transparency. In the first article, we considered the topic of creating an environment of authentic psychological safety. The proposed solution was in the form of distributed and confidential reflection spaces that could channel measurable and contextual data points into a common systems thinking picture of what is truly going on.

Transparency breeds inclusivity and trust in the workplace. It must be nurtured everyday at work, at every level. Introducing transparency should be done in stages; the steps outlined below are from a real world example. Feel free to re-use and adapt them per your context.

Step 1 : Explain the concept to executives and grassroots

Here is an example of a communique or a wiki you can create as part of facilitating the conversation and educating your teams about what transparency means in real terms.

Everything we do in {YOUR ORGANIZATION} is for the purpose of achieving better {OUTCOMES AND SUCCESS MEASURE}. Our knowledge base is a result of learnings; it represents organizational intelligence based on experiential data collated over a period of time. 

Your day-to-day experiences and observations are “information” (data points and feelings). A well functioning system of Transparency will convert this “information” into a reusable “knowledge base”. Transparency can help evolve the organization and our culture. As such, the discipline of transparency needs to be introduced as a gentle rain versus a hailstorm. Smart Transparency is about being mindful about the delivery and expression of the experience as measurable and contextual data points. The intent is to create unavoidable conversation triggers that result in positive change.

The flow and principles for cultivating smart transparency and creating an intelligent knowledge base are as follows:

• Information you possess
• We create a safe environment within our organization where people feel safe to bubble up data points
• People are invited to push measurable and contextual reflections directly from Slack or MS Teams into a higher level team wide journal, or confidential spaces per team / project
• Psychological safety options exist for people to feel safe when pushing feedback
• All feedback is measurable and contextual, and therefore this flow is not a “complaints channel” but rather a feed into the systems thinking brain of your team
• The medium for your knowledge
• Business-as-usual task management task like information is captured in {YOUR BAU SYSTEM}; Examples
• Tasks in Jira for agile teams
• Tasks in Salesforce for CRM like activities
• etc. 
• Feedback on challenges and wins is captured in Neelix; Examples
• Capture feedback within confidential spaces per team, with ability to aggregate measurable reflections across all spaces
• Capture feedback in a team-wide space if the wider team has already matured to accept transparency as the normal expectation
• The culture you create
• The combination of measurable and contextual reflections on experiences allows your teams to communicate more effectively with clients and internal stakeholders 
• Evidence-based and real-time information flow enables the team to abort wasteful activities or change tack quickly when it is needed
• Experiential data points, truthful reflection and self-optimising continuous improvement initiatives result in a culture of mindfulness (a.k.a. The Systems Thinking mindset)
• Crowd-sourced and evidence-based data points assist with challenging the status quo, avoiding group think or individual biases
• Authenticity of leadership - caring about true experiences and the journey of teams
• Leaders of the organization taking into account the journey and authentic experience data points when developing strategy and the approach to winning hearts and minds of employees
• Leaders finding opportunities for engaging employees in strategy development
• Knowledge
• Bias-free, measurable, and context-aware experience data points result in an always-on measure of Team Morale - escape the survey trap and focus on proof of value
• Outputs of our culture and process improvement initiatives result in experiential IQ and an evidence-based knowledge base in the form of 
• Reusable processes continuously refined through empirical evidence
• Reusable templates refined through continuous feedback
• Jointly agreed internal social contract/s
• Jointly agreed social contract with other teams