When used in a social context, transparency is about values vs. corruption and open access to information. However, the idea applies to governments differently from how it applies to people in their families and in private organizations. Transparency must be developed together with privacy where its needed and appropriate.

Transparency for organizations is vital to its members' ability to think and collaborate globally with shared mental models, and act more intelligently locally. Transparency is essential for environments where relationships and trust are essential, particularly for virtual environments. It is also key to coping with complexity, situations that require many people to make decisions related to a common context -- for example, in restoring trust to financial markets to unfreeze credit.

As a concrete matter, not just a physical metaphor, there are limiting conditions for an internal observer’s unaided field of vision across large organizational networks.

Organizations and people become transparent when they pull back the curtains,
or draw them shut, in four dimensions: Values (intention and access), Behaviors (cognitive and emotional),
Vision (perspective and resolution), and Identity (domain and boundaries).