In a breeze of nostalgia, one might remember an early childhood situation when parents wanted to make you "choose" between the healthy wholegrain cookie and the sweet, sugary real deal. They took a bite and said, "Mhhh, tastes as good as the original!". Even if you could not articulate it as a child, you felt that you were to be nudged based on incomplete information into a decision against your natural choice. Of course, there are good reasons to choose healthy over sugary food, yet those were not explained to you, and instead, you were provided with premade and partly fake assumptions that you should not be able to form yourself.
In child education, dealing with a situation like this is valid to a certain degree. Understanding the benefits of prioritizing long-term health over short-term rewards would be too complex, depending on the child's age. However, in today's organizations, you usually deal with adults. What has this to do with transparency? The anecdote above shows that humans generally at least have a "feeling" if they are being tried to manipulate into a premade decision based on incomplete or faulty information.
Transparency might hurt when making decisions
In an organization, however, decisions have to be made daily. Plenty of them affect the decision-makers and the rest of the organization. It does not matter if a company consists of strict or flat hierarchies. As a decision maker, there is always the impulse to leave the information that served as a base for the choice in the vague. There can be multiple reasons, some of which are more valid than others. However, one central point is not to put the decision up for discussion again out of fear that someone else might come to another conclusion based on the same information. But even if people do not want to give their whole perspective on their decision, there often is the urge to fill the blank space by providing a somewhat superficial, semi-true, and, ultimately, not honest explanation.
People might have to accept a decision because of hierarchy. Therefore, a lack of transparency and sugarcoating might initially seem pragmatic. "You have some sort of explanation; therefore, please leave me alone now." Yet, circling back to the childhood anecdote, people tend to have a natural sensor if parts of the actual reasoning are being kept from them. They might even feel like they are not taken seriously, making it even harder to accept a decision they disagree with. However, the honesty of the initial explanation sets the tone for the upcoming discussion. If there is no proper information about the reasoning behind a decision, the counterarguments can only be of the same quality. Therefore, a lack of transparency behind a decision might not defend it but bears the risk of provoking a conflict doomed to lead nowhere because nobody can argue about the object of the debate itself anymore. There are no winners here.
The former headline was lying: Transparency actually does not hurt
People tend to accept a decision, even if they do not fully agree with it, easier if they feel like they are taken seriously. Transparency, in this case, is not only the more appropriate way of interacting between adults but also more pragmatic. Withholding the motives or only communicating them in part might seem easy at first, but it can consume way more energy in the long run.
There are many more good reasons for transparency. Especially in flat hierarchies, it is crucial to provide everyone with enough information to make informed decisions. Otherwise, a flat hierarchy would become a caricature and simply a way to defuse responsibility. Looking from the other direction, transparency and information enable people to take on responsibilities and develop potentially creative solutions with the big picture in mind.
So even if transparency seems to take some effort initially, especially in an organization, the potential of people using information constructively should never be underestimated. When embracing transparancy, there is less at risk than it first seems, yet a whole lot of potential to be unlocked.