'Leak before break' is an engineering principle which suggests that things (like the pipes in a nuclear power station) should be designed to leak (in a detectable, fixable way) before they explode (in a catastrophic, horrible way).
That also seems to speak to some of the virtues of openness in organisation design. An organisation's blogs, twitters etc aren't leaks in themselves, but they are vectors for fixable leaks, so potential disasters can be spotted and averted before they explode in non-fixable ways.
Or something. Anyway.