27 January 2026
Transparency is one of the most frequently invoked ideas in modern leadership, and one of the least clearly understood.
It appears in values statements, pitch decks, annual reports, and speeches. It is promised early and referenced often. Yet when organisations come under pressure, transparency is usually the first principle to thin out. What remains is disclosure without ownership, visibility without judgment, and explanation without accountability.
Most people, when they speak about transparency, are really talking about information. Numbers. Reports. Access. The assumption is that if enough material is shared, trust will follow.
That assumption is convenient.
And it is wrong.
Information can be complete and still misleading. Visibility can exist without clarity. Disclosure can occur long after decisions have been made and consequences locked in.
Real transparency is not primarily informational.
It is behavioural.
That distinction matters, because behaviour is where trust is actually formed or broken. Trust is not built by how well outcomes are presented after the fact. It is built by how decisions are made, explained, and owned in real time, particularly when those decisions prove uncomfortable or unpopular.
I was reminded of this recently by a blunt line I heard years ago and never quite forgot: “Excuses are tools of the incompetent.” It is an abrasive quote, and deliberately so. Its value is not in its politeness, but in what it exposes.
Excuses thrive in environments where transparency is treated as surface compliance rather than leadership conduct.
When transparency is reduced to a reporting exercise, organisations become adept at explaining outcomes and remarkably poor at owning causes. Language grows defensive. Responsibility becomes abstract. Problems are endlessly contextualised but rarely confronted.
Decisions are reframed as inevitabilities rather than judgments made by people at a specific moment, with imperfect information and real consequences.
This is not about dishonesty. More often, it is about framing.
Excuses rarely involve falsehoods. They involve emphasis. Attention shifts away from agency and toward circumstance. Constraints are highlighted, choices are minimised, and accountability dissolves into process.
Used sparingly, this framing is human.
Used habitually, it is corrosive.
Behavioural transparency operates differently. It does not wait for a crisis or a report. It shows up early, quietly, and consistently.
Leaders make their reasoning visible, not just their conclusions. They explain what they knew at the time, what alternatives were considered, what trade-offs were accepted, and what risks were consciously taken. This is not an exercise in performing certainty.
It is an exercise in revealing judgment.
There is a common fear that this level of openness will undermine authority. In practice, the opposite is true. Leaders rarely lose credibility by acknowledging complexity or fallibility.
They lose credibility when complexity is concealed until it becomes unavoidable, and when fallibility is masked by explanation rather than owned through responsibility.
Trust does not break because things go wrong.
It breaks when things go wrong and no one is willing to say, plainly and early, “We got this wrong.”
That sentence is simple.
And it is rare.
Organisations tend to prefer safer constructions. Lessons were learned. Challenges were encountered. Outcomes did not align with expectations. Each phrase softens impact while avoiding the central question of who decided, and why.
Transparency also fails when it is applied selectively. If clarity appears only under pressure, people notice. Over time, they learn when the truth will be fully told and when it will be managed.
That predictability is damaging.
Genuine transparency is quieter and less theatrical. It is expressed through small, repeatable behaviours: sharing information early rather than late, allowing bad news to travel faster than good news, explaining decisions before they are challenged, and addressing mistakes before they are discovered.
None of this requires perfection.
It requires discipline.
It requires leaders to resist the instinct to protect their image at the expense of clarity, and to trust that most people can handle uncomfortable truths far better than delayed or diluted ones.
What people struggle with is not honesty, but inconsistency.
Not complexity, but confusion.
This is why transparency cannot be reduced to systems, documents, or frameworks. Those tools matter, but they do not substitute for conduct.
An organisation can have flawless visibility and still lack transparency if decisions are made behind closed doors, accountability is spread so thin it belongs to no one, and explanations appear only when pressure is applied.
In those environments, openness becomes performative.
And trust erodes quietly.
Behavioural transparency anchors trust to patterns rather than promises. Over time, people stop asking whether something is being hidden.
They already know the answer.
The irony is that this approach reduces risk rather than increases it. Opacity invites assumption. Assumption hardens into suspicion. Suspicion is far more damaging than disagreement grounded in shared facts.
The quote about excuses is confronting because it challenges a deeply ingrained habit: explaining instead of owning.
Competence, in this sense, is not measured by how elegantly failure is justified, but by how directly responsibility is accepted.
That standard is demanding.
But it is also stabilising.
When people know outcomes will be owned, behaviour changes. Decisions sharpen. Conversations improve. Accountability becomes real rather than symbolic.
This is the practical work of transparency. It is not flashy, and it does not announce itself. It accumulates quietly over time.
And when it is present, it is unmistakable.
Not because everything goes right.
But because when something goes wrong, excuses do not lead the conversation.
Ownership does.
JM
Founder + Managing Director
Bettr Strata