It is the cheapest credibility available and it is almost never used, because it feels like it costs something.
Because every reader has a running discount applied to anything a company says about itself. The discount exists because the incentive is obvious.
A statement against your own interest does not fit the pattern, so it is not discounted.
That you know what you are, that you have thought about the boundary, and that you were willing to say it before someone else did.
All three are hard to fake and easy to verify.
Everything a company says about itself is discounted, except the part that costs it something to say.
Weaknesses that are actually strengths. "We care too much." "We are perfectionists."
Everyone recognises this immediately and it is worse than saying nothing, because it demonstrates the willingness to perform honesty rather than have it.
Naming the client you are a poor fit for. Naming what a competitor does better. Naming a constraint in your own approach.
The test is whether it would cost you a specific deal. If not, it is not a real disclosure.
That it loses business. It does, sometimes — to clients who would have been a poor fit and would have left in the first difficult period.
That is a filter operating before the cost is incurred rather than after.
Stating your own conflict of interest before anyone finds it. Published up front it reads as architecture; discovered later the identical fact reads as concealment.
Same information. Entirely different conclusion. That asymmetry is the whole argument.
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