Brave New Work 6. Defaulting to Transparency with Joel Gascoigne

**Joel Gascoigne** (0:00)
One of the things we did for many years is we kind of hacked it to make emails fully transparent. We set up a number of different email lists and said, CC, this email list basically just categorized the emails of what you're discussing.
And then the thing was like everyone in the company was on every list. It's more-

**Aaron Dignan** (0:19)
You invented Slack channels basically with email.

**Joel Gascoigne** (0:21)
Basically, yeah.

**Aaron Dignan** (0:26)
Hey everybody, welcome to the show. This is Brave New Work. A podcast about reinventing our organizations and the search for a more adaptive and human way of working.
I'm Aaron Dignan and I'm joined by my co-host, Rodney Evans.

**Joel Gascoigne** (0:39)
Hey, y'all.

**Aaron Dignan** (0:41)
On today's episode, we're going to talk about transparency, what we share and what we don't share and why. But before we unpack that, let's do a little opening up ourselves with a check-in round.

**Rodney Evans** (0:53)
Yeah, let's kick off this episode like we do all the others with a check-in.
The question for today is what song are you listening to on repeat right now? And what do you love about that song?

**Aaron Dignan** (1:08)
So this is kind of an easy one because I go deep with songs and I just get stuck in loops. And right now I have a fairly older song called Loud Pipes from a band called Ratatat. That is like an all electric instrumental kind of groovy song that I just love to work to. And it kind of sends me out.
So that's for sure the answer.

**Rodney Evans** (1:30)
What about you? Nice.
For me, it is a cover I discovered recently of Jealous Guy by The Beatles, covered by Donny Hathaway. And the vocals on it are so lush. Donny sounds so much like Stevie Wonder. And it is the particular genre I love of songs that I already adored, reimagined by people in unconventional and neat ways. And I cannot stop listening to it.

**Aaron Dignan** (1:56)
My favorite thing is a cover of a song that I don't really like, where I like the cover.

**Rodney Evans** (2:01)
Totally.

**Aaron Dignan** (2:01)
That's like absolutely the best thing that can happen. I'm into that.

**Rodney Evans** (2:05)
Okay. So today's topic is transparency or how we share information. And I guess I'd like to start just by asking you, what does this mean?

**Aaron Dignan** (2:14)
So I like to think about transparency as an information space generally, how, you know, what we know and don't know, what we share and don't share.
And this notion has become more popular recently, I think, as we deal with more complex, more dynamic markets, et cetera, where people are like, yeah, who should have the information and who shouldn't? And maybe historically the answer was, you know, we want to keep it under lock and key and only certain people can know. And it seems like now we're moving towards a pattern of maybe people should know more.

**Rodney Evans** (2:46)
Yeah. I want to go right to the counter argument, which is always if we open everything up, then people will be overwhelmed by information, drinking from a fire hose. They won't know what's important for them to actually see.
How do we head off that first before we even get into what we could be doing?

**Aaron Dignan** (3:10)
Well, I think that it's a reasonable fear, right? Because we are swimming in so much information. I mean, I have trouble keeping up with my own email and Slack and Twitter and all that.
And then not to mention the amount of data that we're producing as a culture now every year. So I think it's a reasonable pushback.
I think the twist is that most organizations are used to pushing information out to everyone and having everything be coming at them.
And they're not used to creating an information hygiene where it's there if you need it. So if you can imagine the same argument being made about libraries, what if someone was like, we can't have all the books in the library. Won't people be overwhelmed and just have their whole day interrupted by books? It's like, no, the books are there when you need them. And I think that's at the basis of this idea of push versus pull, where push information is in your inbox, in your face, at the all hands. It's hard to avoid. It's going to interrupt you. And pull information is like when you need it, it's there. And I think the advocates of transparency are pushing for that kind of access. It's the kind of access like, do you want to know what I'm working on? There's a place you can look. Do you want to read the document? There's a place you can look. It's different than saying everybody should share everything vocally, loudly, and in your face all the time.