When you asked if you could confidentially send me a draft of your post about Will’s book to check, I said yes.
The next week you sent me a couple more emails with different versions of the draft. When I saw that the draft was 18 pages of technical material, I realized I wasn’t going to be a good person to review it. That’s when I forwarded to someone on Will’s team asking if they could look at it instead of me.
I should never have done that, because your original email asked me not to share it with anyone. For what it’s worth, the way that this happened is that when I was deciding what to do with the last email in the chain, I didn’t remember and didn’t check that the first email in the chain requested confidentiality. This was careless of me, and I’m very sorry about it.
I think the underlying mistake I made was not having this kind of situation flagged as sensitive in my mind, which contributed to my forgetting the original confidentiality request. If the initial email had been about some more personal situation, I am much more sure it would have been flagged in my mind as confidential. But because this was a critique of a book, I had it flagged as something like “document review” in my mind. This doesn’t excuse my mistake—and any breach of trust is a serious problem given my role—but I hope it helps show that it wasn’t intentional.
I now try to be much more careful about situations where I might make a similar mistake.
Personally, I don’t really blame you or think less of you for this screwup. I never got the impression that you are the sort of person who should be sent confidential book review drafts. Maybe you’d disagree, but that seems like a misunderstanding of your role to me.
It seemed clear to me that you made yourself available to confidential reports regarding conflict, abuse, and community health. Not disagreements with a published book. It makes sense that you didn’t have a habit of mentally flagging those emails as confidential.
Regardless, I trust that you’ve been more careful since then, and I appreciate how clearly you own up to this mistake.
I want to offer my +1 that I strongly believe Julia’s trustworthy for reports regarding Leverage.
It makes sense that you didn’t have a habit of mentally flagging those emails as confidential.
I would generally expect that if I give someone access to a draft of any kind and they want to forward it to someone else to put the author of the draft in the CC. Even of the absence of the promise of confidentiality, I consider sharing someone’s draft without their permission and witholding the information that you share it bad behavior.
This doesn’t excuse my mistake—and any breach of trust is a serious problem given my role—but I hope it helps show that it wasn’t intentional.
Of course it doesn’t show that it wasn’t intentional to say “my mistake wasn’t intentional but accidental”. The only thing that shows that it wasn’t intentional would be to take actual consequences that are meaningful enough so that it doesn’t look like you benefited CEA with your mistake.
To add detail about my mistake:
When you asked if you could confidentially send me a draft of your post about Will’s book to check, I said yes.
The next week you sent me a couple more emails with different versions of the draft. When I saw that the draft was 18 pages of technical material, I realized I wasn’t going to be a good person to review it. That’s when I forwarded to someone on Will’s team asking if they could look at it instead of me.
I should never have done that, because your original email asked me not to share it with anyone. For what it’s worth, the way that this happened is that when I was deciding what to do with the last email in the chain, I didn’t remember and didn’t check that the first email in the chain requested confidentiality. This was careless of me, and I’m very sorry about it.
I think the underlying mistake I made was not having this kind of situation flagged as sensitive in my mind, which contributed to my forgetting the original confidentiality request. If the initial email had been about some more personal situation, I am much more sure it would have been flagged in my mind as confidential. But because this was a critique of a book, I had it flagged as something like “document review” in my mind. This doesn’t excuse my mistake—and any breach of trust is a serious problem given my role—but I hope it helps show that it wasn’t intentional.
I now try to be much more careful about situations where I might make a similar mistake.
I’ve now added info on this to the post about being a contact person and to CEA’s mistakes page.
Personally, I don’t really blame you or think less of you for this screwup. I never got the impression that you are the sort of person who should be sent confidential book review drafts. Maybe you’d disagree, but that seems like a misunderstanding of your role to me.
It seemed clear to me that you made yourself available to confidential reports regarding conflict, abuse, and community health. Not disagreements with a published book. It makes sense that you didn’t have a habit of mentally flagging those emails as confidential.
Regardless, I trust that you’ve been more careful since then, and I appreciate how clearly you own up to this mistake.
I want to offer my +1 that I strongly believe Julia’s trustworthy for reports regarding Leverage.
I would generally expect that if I give someone access to a draft of any kind and they want to forward it to someone else to put the author of the draft in the CC. Even of the absence of the promise of confidentiality, I consider sharing someone’s draft without their permission and witholding the information that you share it bad behavior.
Of course it doesn’t show that it wasn’t intentional to say “my mistake wasn’t intentional but accidental”. The only thing that shows that it wasn’t intentional would be to take actual consequences that are meaningful enough so that it doesn’t look like you benefited CEA with your mistake.