---
title: The Power of Knowing Together (4) — The People Who Put It All Out There
url: https://oosioo.com/en/p/%ED%95%A8%EA%BB%98-%EC%95%84%EB%8A%94-%ED%9E%98-4-%EB%8B%A4-%EA%BA%BC%EB%82%B4-%EB%86%93%EB%8A%94-%EC%82%AC%EB%9E%8C%EB%93%A4
date: 2026-10-18T12:17:44+00:00
author: SYSOP
summary: Leaving information wide open feels unsettling. But the moment you open it, the team changes. From not creating secret chat rooms to opening up the finances, these are the rules of transparency.
---
# The Power of Knowing Together (4) — The People Who Put It All Out There

There's nothing grand about the way you tear down a wall. You put everything out on the table.

## Don't make secret chat rooms

I set myself one principle: share, as much as possible, all the information related to a decision. I don't create secret chat rooms on messaging apps. If A and B talk while leaving C out, C may not know it at first, but sooner or later they feel it — in a meeting, when the other two speak as if something's already been agreed, and the thought hits: "I was the only one left out." That feeling is usually right, and once trust breaks that way, it's hard to rebuild. The best approach is never to exclude anyone in the first place.

When I took over a new team, the first thing I did was call a meeting and share everything I'd come to understand — the company's situation, what the client needed, the direction of the project, and where each person's role fit into the whole. After the meeting, one team member told me, "This is the first time I've heard any of this. Now I finally understand why we're doing this work." And this was someone who had already been on that project for over a year.

## Opening up is what makes you a player

Companies far from here are walking the same path. In one country, after employees bought out a failing factory, they taught every single worker how to read a financial statement. Once the shop floor understood exactly how much a single roll of toilet paper cut into profit, everyone became a player instead of a spectator. There are companies that publish every employee's salary, formula included — the reasoning being that secrecy breeds distrust, while openness lets people spot and fix unfairness on their own. Korea has examples too. At one company here, the weekly all-hands presentation shares not just wins but each team's failures, laying bare even the reasoning and context behind other teams' decisions. Opening up a failure raises the starting line for whoever comes next.

The most extreme case is opening up the meetings themselves, entirely. One of the world's leading investment firms records nearly every meeting and lets every employee watch it back. The lawyers warned it was risky, but the founder believed transparency actually reduces wrongdoing and protects the company. The company says disputes there have in fact been unusually rare. Still, this level of total disclosure isn't the right answer for everyone. There has also been criticism that such extreme exposure felt like pressure and fear. Even opening up needs a pace and a manner that people can actually bear.

You don't have to look far. Korea's government opened up vast amounts of public data for anyone to use, and has topped the OECD's public data openness rankings more than once. Information that would have sat as a pile of paperwork if kept closed became, once opened, the raw material for startups and services. Openness itself became an asset.

![Contrast between hiding things in secret chat rooms and opening everything up — finances, salaries, even failures](/uploads/b9e60f8181aca419.webp =720)

## You only bring it out if it's safe to speak

But opening up information requires one thing: the belief that it's safe to speak. When Google analyzed 180 teams, it found that what set the highest-performing teams apart wasn't who was on them, but whether it felt safe to speak up. One study found the opposite of what researchers expected — that better nursing teams didn't report fewer mistakes, they reported more. Not because they made more mistakes, but because they felt safe reporting them. Pixar has a gathering where people rip apart the film they're making with blunt criticism, and that gathering carries no authority to enforce anything. The director is under no obligation to change a single scene. They know that the moment feedback comes with authority attached, honesty disappears.

![Contrast in psychological safety: organizations where speaking up is risky stay silent, while organizations where it's safe report mistakes first](/uploads/9e22861df2eb9b53.webp =720)

In the next piece, I'll talk about what actually happens once everything is put out on the table like this — the idea that knowing together is what lets people move together.