I talked with an organization that was running into growing community grumbles on one of their initiatives recently and the principal kept defending their actions by repeating her argument about their supposed “transparency.” She believed because they weren’t intentionally hiding anything, and their plans and operation were out in the open, that they should be getting lots of community love and credit for it.

They weren’t, and they were upset and stymied. Transparency is an overused and not very well understood concept, but this explains it further.