Future Here Now: Transparency, the Business Superpower

Updates and Insight

Before we get to today’s post, four updates for you:

1. Don’t forget to join me this Thursday at noon eastern time for this week’s Future LIVE on Winning the Transparency Argument with your Lawyers. Tune in on YouTube, LinkedIn or Facebook — and bring your questions!

2. In a few days I’ll be launching a new Future Ready Business assessment — a questionnaire that helps you evaluate whether your organization is ready for the realities that are facing us. I wil be sharing the beta version with a few testers — if you want to be one of them, let me know!

3. I’m booking talks and workshops for this fall — and I’ve got a few spots left for late spring as well. If your organization or team would benefit from some exercises in transformation and resilience, let me know.

4. For you full paid subscribers, don’t forget that you can get a free coaching session or master class with the link in last Friday’s email! Not a full subscriber? You can become one - for less than half the price most people will pay for one of those coaching sessions. And you get that benefit, plus more. Sound good? Upgrrade your subscription right here -
   

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5. A transparent business can handle just about anything.
   

   We’ve all been taught that it’s weak to admit when you’re wrong. That confession, while perhaps necessary for the soul, should only happen in private.

   But we’ve also encountered the legal-ese response to a company’s misstep, a boss that told us to do what we’re told and don’t ask questions, a corporation that kept its employees in the dark about its crumbling until it was too late.
   
   And we know, in our minds and in our guts, that the way they handled these situations…

   Bred mistrust.

   Made them look shady.

   Cost them the dedication and insight of their employees and customers.
   
   This assumption - that we have to hide the truth - is another of our damaging Industrial Era assumptions. An honest look at the blunders of hundreds of companies in recent years should make clear to us that hiding the truth almost always does worse damage than coming clean. But our business standard operating procedures tell us to limit information, to hide behind lawyers, to bar the gates. And our Industrial Era brain’s assumptions go along with it.

   The problem here, as in so many situations, is that the ground conditions changed when we were’t looking. Hiding something - anything - has never been more difficult in human history. If someone wants to find out what you’re trying to hide, and they have either basic internet skills or access to people with those skills, chances are they’re going to find it. And since you’re dependent on human creativity to buy your products, solve your problems, create your next money maker, you’re subject to human nature. And humans have a pretty strong aversion, overall, to any hint that they might be getting scammed.
   

   Businesses that operate as transparently as possible lessen their risks in a whole host of ways. Transparent communications, especially when there’s a problem, heads off distrust and makes it much more of a stretch to accuse the business of anything shady. Transparent operations give employees more information, helping them to help look out for opportunities and head off challenges. And a business with a reputation for transparency, built over time, can weather bad times because they have earned the trust of their employees and customers.
   
   But trust is incredibly fragile, especially when we have learned to distrust for so long, and when we have the power to uncover the truth so easily. Businesses that commit to transparency have to hold the course. If the transparent facade turns out to be a scrim painted to look real, then the backlash is likely to be worse than if they had obfuscated in the first place.
   
   So one of the core challenges of a Future Ready Business is to build the mindsets and systems that enable transparency, and the discipline to stay transparent when the truth, sooner or later, isn’t the kind of facade anyone wants to present.
   
   Tomorrow we will look at a few reent stories of businesses that have thrived - and failed - because of how they handled this demand for transparency.