The Tyranny of Transparency

Last week I attended a thought provoking and radical course on accounting and control systems by Professor Paolo Quattrone.  He explores the "tyranny of transparency" exploring the Parmalat scandal and proposes that accounting standards and models like Net Present Value encourage people to only consider the answers they provide rather than looking at what they cannot show.  It is often these unknowns that cause the problems. He uses the Print Gallery by Escher as a metaphor for this.  The man in the gallery is viewing a print of a seaport, but among the buildings is the very gallery in which he is standing. The void in the middle is the key to the distortion and this is where the viewer should focus to discover the truth.

He proposes a new theoretical model for the use of accounting as a "Maieutic Machine" that encourages stakeholder engagement by visually appealing models and engaging processes that balance innovation and control and the creation of space for dialogue,  mediation and performance.  

This is just a snap shot of my take-away from the lectures.  This is a theory that Quattrone has been working on for many years, so it is well worth checking out his video lecture from the 2011 Rethinking Capitalism conference at University of California Santa Cruz for a more elegant explanation ........

Whilst I suspect some of what Quattrone proposes is already used by more enlightened accountants,  his challenge to the orthodoxy and his use of artistic and religious representations opens up imaginative ideas that could be used constructively by finance practitioners to put an end to the negative connotations associated with the "creative accountant". I look forward to weaving these into my work.