One of the major challenges of communication is that it is there to describe what has happened and what will happen.

That is, communication is judged by the ability of those communicating to walk the talk.

When organizations seek to implement transparency, they often assume that it will happen by describing things, may it be events, plans, or results, using more or better words.

What transparency is about, is the ability to describe things in the way people experienced it or can see it happening.

Whenever people cannot link the actions with the descriptions, they’ll question transparency.

Those at the sending end sometimes can’t see themselves handling the descriptions perfectly. It’s a situation in which they may seek to control the upcoming actions to make them happen according to their descriptions. Yet, those at the receiving end know that any effort to control future actions is elusive. They see how the effort to control future actions is an invitation to know what is being controlled. They see how it becomes an invitation for people to find a different path to their objective.

That’s when communication doesn’t happen through words but through actions.

The art of communication is to combine both.