[dsl]

I think this level of transparency is great while you are a startup. However I have concerns over the "early discussions" and "sensitive partnerships." In my experience that is where things have always managed to go the worst for the employee base as a whole, not in the minor day to day operations of the business.

Can you speak to how you bring transparency to things like this?

[gdb]

Email transparency is one tool for spreading information within an organization. It excels at some use-cases (namely, freeing email that would normally be locked up in someone's inbox). However, it's poor at other cases: for example, it has no story for making that information more digestible (most teams address this by sending periodic state update emails to the company). Said another way, just lobbing an email to a list isn't sufficient for transparency.

One of the biggest problems we've found with using email transparency for "early discussions" is that it's often actively harmful (totally orthogonal to the content of the conversations). For example, we once were considering doing a particular acquisition. We approached it with full email transparency internally, sending on-list emails before we'd really figured out the parameters of the potential deal.

Immediately, people started to express strong opinions in favor or against it. We had a full-company sitdown to talk about it, but it was really weird because it was all just hypotheticals. Ultimately, we burned a lot of time on it, and the deal was kind of dead in the water due to this approach.

The list of exceptions are the cases (either found empirically or through inspection) where "absolute transparency" can be harmful. It's kind of like the "shouting fire in a closed theater" free speech idea — you should make sure your transparency mechanisms don't cause unnecessary emotional turmoil.

On the other hand, there tend to be good alternative mechanisms to make these cases transparent, such as talking about them at your all-hands meeting, where you can provide additional context and discuss in realtime.

[derefr]

> Immediately, people started to express strong opinions in favor or against it. We had a full-company sitdown to talk about it, but it was really weird because it was all just hypotheticals. Ultimately, we burned a lot of time on it, and the deal was kind of dead in the water due to this approach.

This sounds like the sort of problem you solve with a policy, not by breaking the enabling technology. What about just telling your employees that nascent partnerships—like nascent microservices—start out "owned" by the people exploring them, and everyone can observe their development, but nobody has an implicit right to have input on them until they get to the "release-candidate" phase?

[gdb]

It's kinda (and in some cases maybe even irresponsible) unfair to drop major things on people without providing more context. The point of email transparency isn't to make everything transparent; it's to increase efficiency. We don't need to cover everything.

Generally with similar initiatives these days we'll talk about them at all-hands, or if they're particularly interesting have a dedicated gathering to discuss them. We also find ways of increasing transparency once the need for secrecy has been removed, such as opening up the list archives post-hoc.