Tell.... the truth

Transparency and Accountability are great concepts and are tremendously popular words nowadays, but, working in the area of Corporate Responsibility reporting, but with reference to general communications from companies and other organizations, it is clear to me that it does not matter how much you say, or what you say.

What matters, is that what you say is true; but even then, what about what you do not say? It is perfectly fine to say the truth, but not say certain things, and thus, in effect you are not telling the truth -but how do you say everything (of course, being truthful about everything)?

This is the challenge, and one complicated by the fact that revealing such information may well be commercially sensitive or create difficult situations for those involved. The easiest answer is to work out what you need to say that people want to know about, as much as possible -and for each of these topics have a group of people who can represent those who might want to know the information and can decide what information should be released or not to ensure the overall picture is fair.

You might also want a second group of people to then be able to actually know all that information: the bad, the good, the sensitive etc, and be able to judge that what was said is a fair reflection or not.

Now doing both will be very hard and time consuming, but might be necessary in some situations, where it is important to rebuild trust after having lost it. In reality, no-one will go to such extremes to prevent losing trust, but will after they lose trust and get desperate!

Each organization needs to tell the truth, and that requires telling the good, the bad and the ugly. If not, no-one will trust what you say, and that seems to be the problem with business now. Business has not tried hard enough to say the truth, and now wonders why no-one trusts business! Business has to get its act together, and find a solution.