Bustin' them silos

Wherever you get organisations, you get silos. You get banks of information, skills, knowledge, relationships, which sit in their own discrete 'not-talking-to-anyone-else' categories. Under the same roof.

You may have run across this from time-to-time in your own workplace / organisation. I see it all the time in my industry, and almost daily when I'm with clients.

Why do silos exist? A couple of reasons come quickly to mind (I'm tired and it's late, so this is gonna be brief and will miss things, I'm sure):

*Perhaps the evolution of an organisation to its present state has been from a background of discrete units (sometimes completely separate entities) that were designed to stand alone without each other.

*People perceive that communication with other departments will complicate their procedures, and lead to delays in productivity. Perhaps allied to this is the old adage, 'Do it yourself, do it properly.' Don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. Be streamlined.

*Not wanting to appear that we need other people's skills and ideas (we 'save face' by not admitting that they have something we might all benefit from).

*Just plain snobbery and people not wanting to work together - why work cooperatively with other departments when it's much more fun to snipe and bitch?

*Any other reasons you care to suggest ...

It's so easy to complain about these things and never do anything about them. So easy to play 'victim' to siloing. "I can't do anything because so-and-so never listens." "They think they're better than us." "That department gets preferential treatment with funding, and no one looks out for us."

So who's going to change this? Who's going to 'bust the silos'? Did you really think the organisation was going to do that for you?

With my limited experience in this field, I can only make the following observation: organisations will never break silos for you. It comes down to people with good ideas finding other people with good ideas, and getting together around those good ideas.

It will likely never happen through the organisation. It will happen around the water cooler, the coffee shop, the lunch table, the hallway.

There is so much brilliance yearning to be released if we can learn to hold our nerve, keep our vision straight, and work with people who are willing to learn, stuff-up, and grow with us.

If we believe the end vision is noble enough, we need to be ready to bust some silos. And it won't likely be a quick exercise.

What is the diagram above? My brief attempt to demarcate silos, the (debarred) potential for communication between them, people with like ideas inside them, and ways of connecting people and ideas.

(Thanks to Nick and Garry for such an encouraging discussion this morning which has prompted this post. Keep up the good work, fellas!)