Wikileaks is offering real time transparency in policy making and statesmanship. Business may think this has nothing to do with them. You are next, I assure you.  Transparency is no longer a choice.

Here is what you can do to defend yourself. And what the responsible business is doing.

Be Authentic. That may not sound like a defense, but I assure you it is what will work. In fact, the only thing that eventually will work. Authenticity is more important than transparency, but includes the “no secrets’ nature of transparency. Authenticity would have saved the State Department and Heads of Nations of lot of embarrassment from this recent set of leaks. It may not have stopped the leaks but it would have made them uninteresting.

What I mean by this suggestion is that more attention is being paid to whether the leaks are appropriate than whether the conduct they expose is appropriate. Secrecy is a pursuit only when we are not authentic. Let me explain.

Leaders have become so depend on the ability to present their case with different spins that it never occurs to them that there is another way. It is very old fashion and something my mentors insisted on. It was a powerful lesson for me and yet I have had very little success in getting business leaders to embrace it. Maybe this is a good time to offer it again. There are three characteristics of authentic behavior which businesses, not- for profits, families and yes governments can adopt and make their interactions uninteresting as documents to be leaked.

First, a person thinks about and includes in their communication what will be seen as central to or have meaning attributed to it, by everyone those who will be effected.  This is true whether they are in the room or not. So, if another leader would interpret what I just said as meaning something different than I mean it, I acknowledge that without prejudice against them. E.g. if they see what I am saying as meaning I am threatening their sovereignty even though I do not see it that way, I own up to that interpretation. You are not just communicating what you think it means, but actively getting in others shoes and see how it might be interpreted by others based on their values and concern. What would they hear and think, irrespective of your like or dislike for them? How would they interpret the event? To do otherwise is to consider only one interpretation of possible outcomes from an event, and to ignore others. It may open up other options in the leaders mind. This practice comes in handy when thinking about stakeholders who are not in the room as well.  An authentic leader genuinely hears with other’s ears and minds.

I have a friend, Bob Mang, who does this with every situation and it sometimes drives me crazy. He insists on speaking for every person who is not in the room and to the best of his ability, how they would say it themselves if they were there. It makes the conversation more empathetic because the situation cannot exclude effected persons.

Second, an authentic  leader seeks to represent the same situation in the same way, no matter the audience or situation, because they seek to include the whole in their thinking and interactions. This means they do not offer partial versions of a situation or choices in order to influence people with only part of the story and offer a different version to others.  An authentic leader does not say different things to different people in order to win them over. They seek to be complete and whole no matter to whom they speak.. To do otherwise is much like teenagers do when they are seeking to increase their popularity. They seek to set one group up against another by supplying only part of the story and different parts to win over converts.  An authentic leader speaks with one story to everyone.

When I demand of myself to do this, I notice I become less political in my stance. I know I cannot leave out parts even with the risk of making myself less convincing knowing what it compelling to the person in front of me at the moment. I have to be whole and not just persuasive, knowing that being whole will be better for all in the long run.

Third, authentic leaders know that others have aspirations that are beyond their own. They may not agree with the other’s aspirations, but they are receptive to including them in a final reconciliation.  They use all situations to deepen their understanding of others. They keep ourselves open to finding ideas that include the aspirations of all the players and even those impacted beyond the immediate moment.  The authentic leader seeks to be as systemic as possible and multi-generational in effects through time.  They consider how to include the aspirations of others in solutions rather than how to get only what we want

To do this, I have to get beyond my own solipsistic agenda and concede that the world works better when we all are able to be included.

Imagine how boring the reading of documents would be if I had the experience and interpretation of others in my head, even enemies and hostile stakeholders, I had to tell the same story to everyone with no spins or couching to different audience, and I took into account the future of all parties even those not alive today.  I think the transparency of our coming media world will not offer so much worth stealing and leaking. Business and State leaders will be seen as more whole beings genuinely seeking to make it work for all. Not that would be awesome, using Umari Haque’s term.