Open House: Archives

A short history of transparency

The restaurants George Orwell described in his 1933 novel Down and Out in Paris and London were not places you’d want diners to see. A wall separated the dining room’s calm ambience from the chaotic grime of the “cold, filthy kitchen.” Architecturally, the wall between these two interconnected worlds was a good thing, and important for both sides. For the restaurant, it concealed the ugly frenzy behind the scenes. For the diners, it preserved a shinier belief in what they were buying.

The model that Orwell experienced persisted for six more decades before restaurateurs and their architects in the early 1990s—mostly in the Bay Area—did something unexpected: they brought the “back of house” front and center, putting chefs and line cooks on display to diners. This was done primarily as a means of demonstrating spotless kitchens and the use of fresh ingredients. Arguably, this design decision also set the table for the celebrity chef craze that began shortly thereafter. With open kitchens, chefs and their staffs were transformed from obsessed, cantankerous artisans to obsessed, cantankerous, celebrity artisans. But more importantly, making kitchens and patrons visible to one another created a transparency that enriched the experience on both sides of the now-non-existent wall. Chefs got better visibility into the dining room, providing an instant feedback loop. Diners got better visibility into the kitchen, seeing firsthand the collaboration, technical skill and artistic inspiration responsible for their gastronomic experience. The “culinary arts” were finally on display to its patrons. Seeing the kitchen enriched the eating experience in the same way seeing a symphony orchestra enriches the listening experience.

It’s important to distinguish the kind of transparency at play in restaurants with the transparency between corporations and shareholders legislated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act after the Enron, WorldCom and other accounting scandals. Transparency that is inspired by the idea of mutually enriching an experience is different than transparency focused on proving integrity. Sarbanes-Oxley dictates how and what public companies communicate to shareholders. Similarly, many car dealers love to tout customer access to “dealer invoices” as a measure of their transparency. This is totally different than the kind of transparency open kitchens deliver. As an example, one equivalent of Sarbanes-Oxley for restaurants would be to disclose department of health inspection reports in the back of the menu. Whether or not that’s a good idea, open kitchens are inspired by a desire to enrich the experience, not prove their adherence to the most basic disclosure requirements.

At the same time, while transparency for the sake of disclosure and compliance is different than transparency that enriches the experience, they do have something in common. For each, a lack of transparency has a cost. Enron shareholders were kept in the dark and ended up losing their money. Restaurant diners were missing out on the joys of seeing chefs at work creatively. They are different kinds of costs, but costs all the same.

A more transparent creative process

Within the client-agency relationship, a creative process that isn’t transparent also has costs. Put in the simplest terms, these costs are:

• Time and Productivity: Without a transparent creative process, agencies can head down the wrong path. This happens frequently. Ultimately, this lost time makes for longer project durations—time that could’ve been spent doing something else.
• Expense: More time equals more money. Plus, late deliverables can make clients late to market, a direct hit to revenue.
• What Could’ve Been: Is a great idea a great idea if no one knows about it? For clients and agencies alike, a lack of transparency means they will never know what could’ve been. If the client had shared that key perspective before an agency brainstorm, what inspiration would’ve followed? And what would’ve happened if the client had seen the idea that the agency eventually abandoned? Neither of them will ever know, and that’s a painful cost.

So how can clients avoid paying these costs? There are three easy steps clients can take with their agencies to inspire a more transparent creative process.

1) Invite yourself to brainstorms. The traditional model for the client-agency relationship calls for the client to brief the agency, the agency to retreat to their headquarters for several weeks, and then the agency to return to the client with brilliant new ideas. But why wouldn’t the client be involved in the brainstorms where those ideas are born? They know their business best. Plus, they’re thinkers, too, and have plenty of good ideas and bad ideas—just like the agency team. All the reasons for having the client in the brainstorms are about enriching the creative process. And all the reasons for not having the client in the brainstorms are about an agency’s insecurities. So invite yourself.

2) Eliminate all the big reveals. Agencies are addicted to the big reveal—the rush that comes from unveiling new ideas the client has never seen before. A big part of this rush comes from how dangerous it feels. Clients will be thrilled, or clients will be unhappy. But the risk of unhappy clients isn’t the biggest danger in a big-reveal approach. It’s time and expense. Why would either the client or the agency invest so much of a project’s schedule and scope in a leap of faith that the agency has it right? Instead, clients should insert more frequent “small reveals” by the agency throughout the process. It may steal thunder from the big ta-da, but it will ensure a more successful outcome for everyone.

3) Join the critique early. After initial brainstorms, most agencies set out to sketching lots and lots of ideas in rough form. This is true across all sorts of deliverables, from brand positioning statements and taglines to logos and advertising concepts. Most clients end up seeing a fraction of the initial output and, instead, are presented with the magical “3-5 directions” outlined in the scope of work. Why? What if the agency leaves behind a really good idea in favor of investing too much time refining an idea a client would have killed from the start? Clients should join the earliest critiques, offering their guidance when it arguably matters the most. Agencies will feel vulnerable about showing ideas without their normal client-facing polish and drama, but joining the critique early on will save clients and agencies time and further the best ideas.