Lawrence Lessig wrote an interesting article for The New Republic recently named Against Transparency. Lessig is a professor of law at Harvard, has a unique and often copied presentation style, and is on the Board of Directors of Creative Commons. In his article he writes about the “naked transparency movement” and cites some examples in both the government and healthcare sectors where total transparency could not necessarily be a good thing.
The internet can provide incredible tools for transparency; easy access to large volumes of information, wide distribution to anybody with an internet connection or a library card, and indexing mechanisms to make search easier. In the case of government, it would be trivial to provide access to campaign donations, and then cross reference the voting patterns of any elected government representative. Lessig argues that the massive amount of information needs more context, and with the decline of the newspaper industry (and therefore the decline in investigative journalism), there are fewer outlets to provide it.
In the healthcare sector, it wouldn’t be too difficult to be able to discover information about your doctor to find out which drug companies are paying her airfare to conferences, or a stipend to be a reviewer of potential new drug research (if such information had mandatory reporting requirements).
Where a member of Congress acts in a way inconsistent with his principles or his constituents, but consistent with a significant contribution, that act at least raises a question about the integrity of the decision. But beyond a question, the data says little else.
This is the heart of Lessig’s argument. There is a huge difference between information and insight.
The answer lies not in less transparency but in more effective public metafilters. In a socially calibrated business, effort is made to filter the vast amounts of information available. You must purposefully turn data into actionable information. There is certainly a public corollary.
Public metafilters could be non-profit organizations or “think tanks” meant to distill the mountains of data into meaning. They could be investigative journalists, although the fact that their paychecks come from large corporations could taint their findings. Public metafilters could be bloggers, and others with a passion for the subject matter.
One other big challenge for public metafilters is the scarcity of attention in today’s attention economy. Some issues are incredibly complex, and can’t be boiled down into a sound bite, 140 characters, or even a 500 word blog post. The more complex the issue and the analysis, the smaller the audience for it becomes.
While the decline in the total number of investigative journalists in the newspaper business may cause the ship to tilt to the port side, we have to hope that market forces will create more public metafilters to right the ship, rather than a decrease in transparency.
We welcome your comments on this issue. When is transparency appropriate in your organization?
|
Microsoft Goes All The Way With Social Business in Sharepoint |
Bryan, nice to see some continued thinking on the social business. My view on transparency, coupled with my thinking on metafilters as an archetype is linked. I feel due consideration needs to be given to the organisation and the individual. We all know that organisations are made up of individuals – but we also know that a majority of individuals are not engaged at work. In this lies a few challenges. Take for instance the notion of metafilters (which is the archetype I am probably least convinced about!)…individuals will chose to observe, orientate, decide and act on information that interests them or serves their interests. Not all individuals are interested in applying ‘filters’ or a rigid process to the act of sorting the wheat from the chaff. And the same applies for transparency. Customers and stakeholders and other staff for that matter will always experience differing levels of transparency. I like your idea of thinktanks – and actually believe that organisations as a collective do not think enough. Call it the hivemind, or something else, but this is the element of social business design I am most intrigued by; concentrating and harnessing the collective thinking of the individuals within an organisation. To capture the best thinking within in an organisation is not difficult (workshops, intranets, offistes, game mechanics etc etc), but to harness this thinking is another thing. This is where a systems approach to filtering and transparency is flawed! This is where instinct takes over, and the best leaders are those that act more on gut and less on analysis. Does social business design mean that ‘by design’ we may see a reduction in instinct and ‘gut’ and more toward a systematic approach to filtering and sharing of information? If so, I fear that the very notion of a social business may be lost!
Luke,
I like your area of interest. Innovative ideas are certainly easy to capture, but few people have the will to turn them into action in a large corporate environment where resistance to change is high. Let’s look at your comment in terms of an example. Let’s say that I run a large customer contact center, and my gut tells me that I’ve got some people issues in the level 2 support team. If I could run all the email traffic through a semantic analysis engine to give me indicators on the tone of outbound emails, and compare that to level 1 and level 3 support teams, that could either confirm or contradict what my gut is telling me.
Either way it won’t make a decision for me, but the metafilter gives me another piece of datum for decision making.