"Not keeping secrets" effectively ends up meaning that you need "permission" or at least consent for everything you work on. Depending on how tight things are this can be a recipe for misery because it's common in managerial ranks for people to be change-averse to the point of absurdity.
Many many ideas I write down and develop. Many I throw away. But I learned never to throw information on the table without analysing the consequences of doing so.
This applies to teams as well.
I think your urge to hide things until ready is clearly a symptom of other (root) problems within the organization. I have never seen what you describe in a healthy organization, and many seemingly “healthy” places are not. It sounds like the organization fears failure and refuses to learn from mistakes or believes it’s impossible. This is a cultural issue that needs to be fixed by senior leadership but, if I had to guess, is probably caused by senior leadership being unwilling to trust.
I’d encourage you to look to solving roots and not symptoms or go somewhere else where you’re allowed to. Good luck.
“Your company isn’t healthy. Either get senior leadership to change or leave.”
Internet advice is weird.
You've never screwed something up and had to try it a different way?
1.) I’ve never screwed up.
2.) (and never) Had to do something different.
I’m saying the lack of transparency you’ve been forced into to accomplish things is the result of people who are incapable accepting mistakes or doing things differently. You must work in secret because people don’t believe the technical team can or will learn from their mistakes. In a healthy organization you would not have this burden.
I have some very anxious team members who will get on edge when the development team starts to use key words like "refactor" and "iterate". Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire and the PTSD of that has stuck around with many of us.
In order to make everyone's lives easier, I will sometimes work in secret on prototypes of more "controversial" ideas to bring before the team. I find starting the conversation with "Here's a new thing you can actually see and play with" eliminates 99% of the annoying bullshit you get out of non-technical folks.
It takes some discipline to do this correctly (i.e. don't ferret away on a secret prototype for more than ~1 week). That said, I can't imagine how you would scale an organization if everyone had to know everything always.
Also, none of this stuff is actually secret. It's more of a need-to-know basis. If someone explicitly asked me about one of these efforts, I would tell them everything they wanted to know and then some.