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Disclosure
Well, the then president of Ontara, JR Clark, had recently recovered from colon cancer. Part of his recovery had been a long visit to the Options Institute, where he had learned to reprioritize his life and find happiness even though his body seemed to be ravaging any hope for happiness. Those who have not worked in Silicon Valley might not realize that it is one of the most hopeless places in the world. The pressures are enormous, and seem to conspire to steal all possibility for happiness. I had never met anyone who made $250,000 a year and felt cheated by their employer until I started working in Silicon Valley. JR thought it would be wonderful if the Ontara partners learned the basics of finding happiness so they could help their often hopeless-feeling clients reframe their experiences into something more meaningful and satisfying. This is why JR had invited the facilitator from the Options Institute. Everything went well for the first day and a half of the offsite. The group talked, deepening their understanding of dialogue techniques. They discussed their client relationships from the perspective of a quiet beach cabin rather than from the mid stream whirl of the valley. And all was unfolding well until the facilitator introduced an exercise on disclosure. The objective of the disclosure exercise was to deepen the relationships between the partners by having each disclose what was really going on with them. The retreat had worked its magic, and everyone was feeling close and comfortable and so no one commented as the facilitator outlined the exercise. Partners were to pair up and go for a walk on the beach and during that walk, find the words to disclose how they really felt about each other. Questions, curiosities, and feelings should be shared rather than squelched. Receiving partners were instructed to accept the information, not as information about themselves, but as information about the one disclosing, information that the receiving partner could use to better understand their counterpart’s perspectives. This, anyway, was the theory. You probably already see where this is going. The receiving partners did not accept this information as information about their counterparts, but as information about themselves. Even when the ratio of good to bad information was ten or twenty to one, the receivers felt brutalized. Suspicions were planted that afternoon that ultimately destroyed the firm! Even JR, who had the original idea for the meeting, learned some disconcerting information about his partner and wife, which seemed to grow like a cancer in the space between them. People who had before felt like siblings began to behave like suspicious business partners. This exercise tore away a layer of innocence that never returned. The firm, and the relationships between the people in the firm, never recovered. Disclosure did them in. At some level, none of the information was new information to anyone. At another and perhaps more vulnerable level, none of this information should have ever been exposed. Relationships are tender things. They thrive on patience, care, and understanding. Generosity is like fertilizer to their plant. Shocks and surprises tend to have net positive effects on them, too, encouraging their roots to deepen and strengthen. But there is something about relationships that doesn’t love or need full disclosure, and this seeming paradox is an important one to understand. My perceptions at any point in time include my present sensory experiences combined with past meanings, previous conclusions, and tentative hypotheses about how these experiences might fit into my world view. I am scarcely aware of most of this meaning making process, most of it occurs without my even thinking about it. When someone asks me what I think about something, this is the swirl I access for an answer. For some questions, I have an immediate and confident response. I love grilled salmon unconditionally; there’s no ambiguity in my response. For other questions, questions about relationships prominent among them, full disclosure requires sharing this odd, mostly preconscious swirl of ambiguity, because there are few relationships that are cut and dried for me. Ask me what I think of you and, if I’m completely honest, it will feel like I’m savaging you. It’s not that I’m looking for the rain cloud within every silver lining, it’s more that I see lots of variety within every experience. I can love my mother and acknowledge her shortcomings, too. I see how we fit and how we do not fit. My scathing bits do not diminish my admiration and caring for her, in fact for me they enrich our relationship. Still, I‘m confident that sharing these perspectives with her would simply devastate her. And I’m not taking anything away from her by keeping these little secrets between us. We would recover from the disclosure, but the devastation of full disclosure is unnecessary for the maintenance of our relationship. What about honesty? Isn’t it the best policy? Shouldn’t we strive to be honest, to never tell a lie? Most of the lies I tell are lies of omission. “Yes, you look lovely in that dress.” (The shoes, which I know to be your favorites, look silly to me. You smell funny and your hair style makes you look like you slept in a dumpster.) “I think you did well on that project.” (I would have done it completely differently and probably faster, but for you, taking into account all that I know about your skills and limitations, you did well.) Notice all I don’t say. These observations in the parens really are about me, they are my opinions, my judgments, my perspectives. They are not immutable truth but tentative, local perspective. If I choose to share these perspectives, I have to be careful to frame them properly because these are about me and not at all about the other person. I mostly don’t want to know what others think about the things I do. I am an easy target for anyone with a wounding perspective. This piece might not be as good as something you’d write, but then you aren’t writing it. If I’m interested in this sort of information, I can always ask for it. When I ask what you think, I am trusting you to filter the irrelevancies from your response because full disclosure has the effect of stalling forward momentum. As I said before, this is often just a temporary stall, one that can be recovered from, but in many cases the stall is completely unnecessary. Disclosing your full perspective might be merely encumbering. I initiate significant change by breaking the rules for commenting that keep us safe from these internal perspectives. Teams develop habits that limit their ability to talk about what really needs to be discussed. These habits are often rooted in unconscious rules for what’s appropriate in another, unrelated context. What’s appropriate in a family is different from what’s appropriate in a team, but these commenting rules, being largely unconscious, prevail. Once disclosed, these rules can be more deliberately and usefully deployed in different contexts. Lack of disclosure is most often not by design but by our unconscious out-of-context deployment of otherwise perfectly appropriate commenting rules. In my youth, I thought relationships were good or bad, healthy or sick. I carelessly disclosed my perspectives, believing full disclosure meant health, and, in so doing, I’m sure I chased off some who were more careful than I was. Today I am more aware and accepting of the swirl inside of me, and more conscious of the rules I have for commenting. I am improving my ability to situationally deploy these rules, comparing what’s done with what seems appropriate and making more deliberate decisions about what to keep to myself. I am honest with myself, first, about what’s safe to disclose, what’s useful to disclose, and what seems to be better left unsaid. I pray that others are doing the same. david
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