Visibility and Transparency

 

Because I am not a pilot, I don't often get an opportunity to sit in the cockpit of a small plane. However, one time on a trip from Denver to Salt Lake City the pilot came into the cabin and asked if anyone was interested in sitting in the right seat with him for the flight. I jumped at the chance.

Sitting in the cockpit with the headphones on listening to all the chatter, and getting a bird's eye view of the Rocky Mountains and just how much air traffic there was between Denver and Salt Lake City was very interesting.

As is sometimes the case, flying into Salt Lake in December included landing in the middle of a very dense inversion. Basically, without the aid of instruments, visibility was zero. In fact, I found myself trying to put on the brakes with my right foot (brakes which weren't there, by the way). The pilot noticed what I was doing, chuckled and calmly said, "That's why they pay me the big bucks."

Although his instruments gave him visibility to help him land the plane, there was no visibility for the rest of us (which made me a little nervous). Had this been a project, he may have had visibility but there was no transparency for everyone else on the team.

Is there a difference between visibility and transparency?

I think so. In project management terms we talk a lot about giving executives and stakeholders visibility into project status and other information to inform decisions, but we rarely talk about a process that is transparent to everyone involved in a project (and yes, that includes individual contributors to a project team).

I believe this is relevant when we start talking about adoption, team member engagement and buy-in. If team members don't have visibility into what they're buying into (which requires transparency from bottom to top as well as from top to bottom), it's difficult to expect anyone to be totally engaged. When's the last time you were totally committed to something that you didn't really know much about?

Thanks to the recommendation of @NimblePM, I've been reading The Truth About Leadership. Authors, James Kouzes and Barry Posner suggest that we need to move from a "need to know" style of communicating to a "commitment to share" mentality. Just as an executive needs visibility into what's happening in the trenches to validate that corporate goals and objectives are being executed by project teams to inform decisions, everyone needs visibility into what's motivating decisions and driving objectives if the goal is worker buy-in and team member engagement.

Nobody likes working in the dark.

I've mentioned this before, but I once worked for an organization that one year, through an oversight, didn't make their corporate goals public to anyone until November—which made it hard for anyone to do anything that could reasonably impact whether or not they achieved their objectives. What's more, since the rank and file of the organization didn't know what the goals were, it made it difficult to expect that anyone could actually buy-in to those invisible objectives.

An atmosphere of transparency is appropriate for almost any organization. When everyone can see into what's pushing some initiatives forward and the value of everything they may be individually contributing to, an engaged and empowered workforce can accomplish great things. Transparency makes it possible for team members to see the bigger picture, which allows them to do more than check boxes when tasks are completed.

Visibility can sometimes be created with the right project management tools. Transparency is created with a "commitment to share" work management philosophy.