How to Share Just Enough Information
On February 12, 2002, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood in front of journalists and the media at another U.S. Department of Defense news briefing.
Facing another probing question about the lack of evidence to link the Iraqi government with the provision of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, Rumsfeld began his reply, with little idea that he was about to coin the phrase that he would be remembered by.
”…because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
I remember watching the briefing on BBC News. My initial reaction was that Rumsfeld had said something tautological and utterly ridiculous, but, in retrospect, it has been labeled a smart distillation of complex matters. I think I now agree.
Although the public would declare this phrase as a Rumsfeld creation, his memoir [Rum11] mentioned that it was commonly used inside NASA, of which Rumsfeld likely heard a variant of when he worked on the assessment of ballistic missile threats to the United States in partnership with William Graham, an administrator at the space agency.
At the time of the “known knowns” phrase, Rumsfeld found himself in a difficult professional situation that can become more acute with increased levels of seniority. Generally, the more senior that an individual is in an organization, the more access they have to sensitive information, and the more careful they have to be about how it’s handled and shared.
An individual’s experience is what allows them to understand, reason, and vet sensitive information to ensure that confidentiality isn’t broken. It is their experience that means that when it’s time to deliver information to others, that it’s done in a way that respects the owners of the information, the information itself, and those that want to know more. This is why it’s a skill you need to learn and practice.
Delivering Bad News
Medical professionals know far too well the dilemma of sharing sensitive information. When communicating with their patients, trust is established through openness and honesty. If a patient has been diagnosed with a fatal illness, then the delivery of that information must be done transparently, sensitively, and kindly.
This requires a great deal of knowledge and understanding on the part of the physician, both in terms of how to summarize and present the information, but equally importantly, how to deliver it in a humane way with empathy and candor. Ethics are also important to consider, as the physician must also understand how to handle delicate situational intricacies.
For example, consider how fatality policy in hospitals requires the next of kin to perform the initial identification of the deceased. This may mean that a close relation may be refused to see the deceased until the next of kin has done so—an ethically difficult quandary.
Furthermore, is it wrong to withhold the specifics of a diagnosis, even when it isn’t life threatening, from someone who is suffering from serious mental health problems and therefore could be exposed to more risk as a result of knowing the truth? What if there’s no concrete reason to withhold information of a diagnosis, but instead their family is requesting it be kept secret from them?
Maybe we should be glad we’re in software.
Trends Toward Transparency
As a manager, you’ll be required to make regular decisions about how much you should share with other staff and when. The easiest option with any sensitive subject is to not say anything at all.
But is keeping everything a secret by default the right thing to do? Definitely not. Unless there’s a critical reason for hiding information, it should be shared, although care should be taken in how the message is delivered.
Earlier in the book (Chapter 3, Interfacing with Humans), we explored the foundations of the relationships that you want to build with your staff. Modern management is about facilitation, empathy, openness, and candidness.
Some startups in our industry have been taking radical steps toward openness in their culture. Buffer publish their staff and salary information in public for the entire world to see.[4] They also publish their salary calculator, which estimates how much you would earn if you worked for them in a particular role in a given location.[5] The idea is that when everything is on display, there’s nothing to hide, therefore transparency brings consistency and fairness.
Revisiting our medical information–sharing dilemmas, that industry has long since changed its default stance to openness. In a survey in 1961, 10% of physicians believed it was correct to tell a patient the exact details of a fatal cancer diagnosis, a percentage which had changed to 97% by 1979 [SFKI16]. More recently, the NHS is implementing trials of genomic tests to predict your likelihood of fatal illness in the future.[6]
In work, in life, and in health, we want transparency. But how can we do that while still respecting that not every detail can be shared?
As we touched on previously, as your time spent as a manager increases, so does the exposure to sensitive information. But what sort of sensitive information are we talking about? You’ll be party to some or all of this information during your time as a manager. Some of it is information about the team, and some of it is information that may signify something about to happen to the team:
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Compensation. You’ll know the salary data of your direct reports, including any inconsistencies between them. You may know that Jim is overpaid because he negotiated well when joining, so Alice is underpaid in comparison. You need to normalize that over time.
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Performance issues. You’ll know whether any of your staff is underperforming. For example, you could have one member of staff on a PIP, and that should remain a secret to the rest of the team.
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Wider company changes. Perhaps there’s a re-org being planned that hasn’t been finalized yet. It affects your team but isn’t yet ready to communicate.
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Redundancies. A bad year for the company may mean that some people will need to be let go soon. That list of staff is confidential.
This is a privileged set of information, and it’s your duty to ensure that it is treated with the utmost respect. For issues that you can resolve on your own, this is usually fine. You can keep a secret, right? But it becomes more difficult when you need to call upon others to assist you with reasoning about, or making decisions with, the sensitive information. You need to begin to share it with others. But how do you know what to share, with whom, and how should you act as a gatekeeper to ensure that you follow the Hippocratic Oath and the Golden Rule?
Consistently Just Enough
We can think about how to share sensitive information by trying to categorize it further. Perhaps we could sort it into three categories:
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Completely confidential: Aside from those that have been given authority to know, nobody else should. For example, a round of redundancies would fall into this category. This information is not shared.
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Closed box: Think of it like a present under the Christmas tree. You all know it’s there, but you don’t know what’s in it. The process or concept isn’t sensitive, but the contents are. For example, people will know that pay reviews are being done, but they won’t know each other’s pay, nor will individuals know until the process is finished. This information requires you to filter and gatekeep it.
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Open box: This information isn’t sensitive at all, such as which staff are in each team. This information can be shared widely.
Across these categories, the following rules apply:
- You are consistent with how you treat information with different people.
- You always share just enough.
Even though these two principles are straightforward, it’s surprising how easily they go wrong, and very rarely through malice.
Being Consistent
We fight our biases. When it comes to sharing information, you need to ensure that you’re aware of what it means to be human. From an early age, humans have an innate desire to share with others. Babies point, and toddlers pick up items so that you look at them and see what they are seeing. When you’re given sensitive information, sometimes you have this unexplainable desire to share it with others. You may be compelled for many reasons to share something with someone at work. You may know somebody extremely well and feel a duty to keep them informed, even if it’s not relevant to them. You may even subconsciously be trying to build rapport with someone by letting them into a secret.
Regardless of your intention or relationship with someone, you need to be consistent. You should only share information with a person if:
- It is relevant to them and their job.
- They have a reason to know.
- It benefits you both, such as it unlocks further conversations.
- You only share what they need to know.
- They can be trusted to keep any sensitive information a secret.
Otherwise, you should question your motives for telling them in the first place. Only you will know the exact answer to who should be told what and who shouldn’t. But you should be aware of the variables that can affect your decisions and the way in which to share that information.
The Meaning of Just Enough
So what does sharing just enough actually mean? It’s straightforward for two of the three information categories. Completely confidential information should be just that. Open box information should be broadcast as much as is useful for everyone’s knowledge.
The trick is getting the closed box category right. My own take is that the existence of closed box information should be broadcast as much as is useful for everyone’s knowledge, except that the full details are not disclosed.
Many people default to closed box information being treated as confidential, but this can be perceived negatively. For example, if the pay review process is underway, why not regularly update everyone that it is progressing, even though you’re not going to disclose the details until a later date?
Keeping silent in situations where just enough information can be shared can make staff feel as if there’s a reason that you’re not talking about it. Often, after rumor and gossip, that reason can become negative (for example, “they’re not doing pay reviews this year!”) when the real reason can be quite positive (for example, more time and money is being spent on competitive benchmarking).
In the absence of information, people tend to assume the worst. So try not to let that information be absent in the first place. Classify the information that you hold, and make sure that you share just enough of it so that staff feel included and well-informed.
If you don’t, your known unknowns might be linked to weapons of mass destruction, and we all know how that turned out.
Leave Nobody Behind
Assuming you’re handling your information well, then the task doesn’t quite finish there. As a manager, you also have a duty to keep people informed. Leave nobody behind.
You should be continually trending toward consistency with the information that you share: ensure that everyone has seen the same version of the same information. Has an important decision been made? Summarize it in an email. Have various people expressed concerns directly to you? Answer them publicly in a place where the whole team can see them. Ensure that you mix private interactions and public broadcasts so that no person is left behind.
Keeping People in the Loop | |
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Here are some strategies for keeping your team in the loop with pertinent information.
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