Protect Us from Anxiety.

I’ve worked in organisations where access to information is appropriately aggressively policed and protected. The military gave me a security clearance and operated on ‘need to know’. My information security company employer did likewise. Both did so with the intent of guarding against third party harm.

Yet the majority of people in organisations who purport to ‘protect’ information do so for selfish purposes.

The most common is that information is power.

By restricting access they both anoint themselves as gatekeeper, as well as increase the value of the information by making it scarce. People appoint themselves as guardians, thus increasing their status - regardless of who needs the information the person protects. The gatekeeper attends meetings where things are disclosed and discussed that must be important if so few go. (They aren’t.)

Another common motive for restricting access to information is people don’t want to encourage others to find fault in their decision making. If we saw their working out, we may point out an error of fact or reasoning. Too risky. Keep it secret. Tell a story that confidentiality encourages candid conversations.

A third and related reason for denying access to information is people don’t want others to see how random and shallow, and often nepotistic their decisions are. If we saw the coin flip, the personality bias, the deals, the conflicts of interest, the back scratching, or the child-like fear that lie behind many behind closed door decisions - we would be appalled. Best we not see how the bloody meat is cut in the abattoir.

Thus, in an era where we can access centuries of information with a click, we accept without question that our boss can access information and use it to make decisions affecting us, and we can’t know why or how. We aren’t allowed to check their working out. We accept that the boss or executive or board can meet an never publish its minutes - not video the meeting and make it available online. We act like words need to be transcribed onto parchment by monks with quills, instead of recorded and turned into text and published almost instantly by a range of cheap software.

We choose to allow our boss to protect us from the effort and anxiety of nuance.

Those bosses aren’t protecting information from third party harm. They’re protecting it from us.