Twenty-five years of working through organizational change taught me one distinction most organizations never bother to make: honesty and transparency are not the same thing.
Honesty is reactive. You ask me a question, I answer it truthfully, or I tell you I don’t know. Transparency is anticipatory. It means that if I already know something is changing—and I know it’s going to affect you—I don’t wait for you to ask. You shouldn’t have to discover something I already knew was relevant to your life.
A lot of organizations think they’re being transparent when they’re actually just being honest on a delay. That gap is where people start filling in the blanks for themselves, and eventually, trust gets harder to maintain.
The announcement is not the communication plan
One organization I worked for went through seven reorganizations in three and a half years. The pattern was always the same: a Friday afternoon announcement telling you who you’d report to Monday morning. By the time you walked in, the organization had already moved around you.
Technically, that’s communication. There was an announcement. The new structure existed on paper. But being told the outcome on Friday isn’t the same as being walked through the change. There was no context for why it was happening, how responsibilities were shifting, or what the transition was supposed to look like. We got the outcome and were expected to figure out the rest. After a while, the uncertainty about what the announcement even meant became harder to sit with than the reorg itself.
Compare that to a large technology migration I worked through elsewhere. We knew months out. There was a T-minus plan running alongside a communication plan. Departments got what they needed, when they needed it, and the updates didn’t stop once the change went live. It wasn’t flawless, but there was very little friction because nobody found out about the change by living through it.
The difference wasn’t the size of the change. It was whether communication was treated as a single event or something that had to continue throughout the change.
“I don’t know” is a complete sentence
I’ve said some version of “I don’t know why that happened. I’ll go find out” more times than I can count—over late payments, broken systems, decisions still in flight. It’s uncomfortable to say and uncomfortable to hear. The temptation is always to fill the silence with something reassuring instead.
I’ve given in to that temptation. I’ve handed someone an answer because it was what they wanted to hear, and then had the situation change and that answer come back on me. The damage isn’t just a second communication problem. It’s that the person now has to decide whether they can believe you the next time. I’d rather say “I don’t know yet” and mean it than manufacture certainty I don’t have.
Showing information isn’t the same as giving it
At one organization, town halls featured graphs of company performance with no underlying numbers attached. Eventually someone asked the obvious question: “Then why the fuck are you showing us the graph?” The answer was that the company was required to show the graph but not required to disclose the numbers behind it.
The information had technically been shared. Nobody in the room understood what they were looking at. This is where a lot of corporate transparency breaks down. We treat the distribution of information as if it automatically produces understanding. An email goes out, a slide gets presented, a town hall happens, and because something was communicated, the box gets checked. Whether anyone understood it is a separate, usually unasked, question.
When transparency becomes a bottleneck
I’ve also seen the opposite failure: too much upward communication, to the point that people stopped making decisions without checking whether the CEO already knew. A small call could become a problem if the wrong person was surprised by it, so people learned to escalate before they acted. Eventually, communication itself became the bottleneck.
That taught me the limit on all of this. Employees don’t need to know everything leadership knows. Some things aren’t mine to share. Some decisions are still being worked through. Transparency doesn’t mean total access. It means the people who need to act on something aren’t left to guess at it.
What I believe now
What I hold myself to now is pretty simple. If I know something is going to affect someone, I try to tell them before they have to ask. If I don’t know the answer, I say that. And if someone has to make a decision, I want to make sure they actually understand what they’re deciding.
I’ve been on every side of this—the employee left in the dark, the manager forced to relay something I didn’t fully understand, the leader who should have said something sooner, the oversharer who said things that weren’t mine to say. None of that adds up to a formula. It adds up to this: not everyone needs to know everything, but the people who have to act need a shared and accurate picture of what just happened and what comes next.
That’s a lower bar than most companies claim to clear.
Most of them still don’t clear it.