Indeed. I've always been deeply influenced by the old saying:

Your Character Is What You Do When Nobody Is Watching

Your chances of having a problem from stuff being leaked is greatly reduced if you aren't doing shitty things to begin with.

Not that I think that's what motivated this "whistleblower".

Guilt should not be inferred by a person or company protecting its own privacy.

It is naive to think that a bad actor cannot craft a falsehood from a subset of truths they select that you've chosen to make public.

When there are motivated leakers from both sides of the political spectrum it’s impossible to “not do shitty things”; someone will always be disappointed: https://www.foxnews.com/media/facebook-whistleblower-reveals...

Diplomats have long argued that certain concessions can only be made if the specifics of their negotiations are kept private.

Since transparency is the opposite of lack of transparency, I don't understand how transparency can have bad effects without the opposite (lack of transparency) having the opposite (good) effect.

It can't both be the case that transparency ever has bad effects and lack of transparency never has good effects: pick one of the bad effects of transparency and introduce "lack of transparency" in its place. Isn't that bad effect now gone? Isn't that a good effect of the lack of transparency?

I think it's a question of whether we're playing a single round of a game or an iterated game; or, to phrase it differently, whether we're discussing single acts or culture.

Granted, any time that transparency leads to bad effects, lack of transparency would presumably have led to the lack of those bad effects, and so be good, at least indirectly. A one-time lack of transparency can perhaps be appropriate.

However, a culture of lack of transparency is not the opposite of a culture of transparency, and those are the two poles I really see us discussing. A culture of transparency can lead to problems, but can also lead to good things (or at least to the exposure of bad things so that they can be addressed); whereas a culture of lack of transparency always will lead to problems, and any temporary good results from its imposition will be overwhelmed by its long-term ill effects.

It is also a question of whether the transparency allows dissenting views. Often, it doesn't.

Which isn't to claim that all dissenting views are good. But when you are an industry that is having a hard time with minority views, forcing the minority to take center/public stage at all times is actually somewhat counter productive.

Put differently, if you are going to encourage transparency for communication and decisions, you have to take extra care to not punish good faith mistakes.

The whole point of 1:1 is that some privacy allows people to say things they would not otherwise.

So yes, lack of transparency can have good effect.

I want to believe this. I also believe that 1:1s is a bit of an aggressive tactic to force someone to talk when they may not want to. :(

It's a hard problem. Some people don't want to talk for good, well-founded reasons; others (and I'm often guilty of this myself) don't want to talk because they just instinctively flinch away from hard but necessary discussions.

1:1 is a tool that requires a certain level of skill to be used successfully. it can be used for many purposes and in many ways.

if you're describing your past experiences, you should definitely level that skill, especially if it makes you uncomfortable.

Well said.