We've all been in the situation where we hold information which could potentially disrupt the morale of a team or organization. It could be pivots in scheduling, changes in stakeholder requirements, pivots in product design, team restructuring, or a potential project loss. The old adage of 'Knowledge is Power' remains true, and as leaders and managers we often hold the keys of knowledge to the teams we lead.

How much information do we give? Transparency is often a buzzword in management articles on websites, but can there be too much transparency?

I argue, that transparency is critical to maintaining a mental model shared by members of a team. Like most things in life, there are little universal policies. I'd argue that the degree of transparency and communication conveyed to your team should be aimed at maximizing the alignment of their mental model against the goal of the team and project vision.

Full transparency may cause undo stress when it doesn't contribute to this alignment. If, for example, a hypothetical organization were to be in a position where a project may be dropped- but that chance were only 1%; I'd make the argument that the harm caused by contributing this information to your team's mental model of the situation, and resultant stress and distraction, may not not weigh well against the benefits of being direct and transparent.

No transparency, however, can cause a terrible dilemma where individuals begin to construct their own mental model of why actions are taking place, which is most likely error prone with incomplete information. This can cause folks to lose faith in the organization as a whole, or cause their actions to slowly drift away from actions which might benefit the current project targets.

With these polar examples in mind, I think a compromise is clearly required. In software engineering there's a 'principle of least privilege' which states objects should allow just enough access to their properties, so that a user can accomplish intended use cases. Similarly, an argument could be made that the minimal basis of transparency should be 'enough context and transparency for a team to understand why they are being action-ed.'

In the military, it's quite common to 'hurry up and wait.' As a junior enlisted service-member, you seldom have any idea why- and the direct result is generally frustration. "Why am I standing out here at 4am, when we don't leave until 6am?" As that frustration mounts, I'd hypothesize that people will natural begin to construct their own mental model of the situation and attribute observations to why they are here.

"My Sergeant always tells me to be 15 minutes early, if he's 15 minutes early, and his boss is 15 minutes early- I bet this is cascading up the chain of command"

These models may not be correct, however, and this fabrication causes the individual to begin applying it in other circumstances. Every gathering and time becomes questioned.

Similarly, this happens in the professional world. If a project faces an evaluation and a particular feature set is in jeopardy- more scrutiny may accompany that feature. If leadership worries that this scrutiny may cause folks to doubt the success of the project, If individuals aren't told this is the case at lower levels, they'll begin to construct their own rationales for why. Maybe it's arbitrary leadership, maybe it's just a jerk boss, maybe something is in jeopardy with the project.

When we don't take a moment to provide enough context as to why- 'This feature is under scrutiny, but the project is safe' we effectively remove an opportunity to help align mental models- and this leaves teams in a precarious situation- one where their notion of health and target might converge on something that's completely off base, where it will continue to shape their individual activities until corrected, if corrected. In my experience, this becomes more difficult the longer it festers.

Worry about your teams stress levels, don't share every little thing that might disrupt them, but take care to share enough information to help channel how they create their mental models.

R