Working in silos- the bigger the company, the more likely you are to encounter this cultural pattern.

Silos, the vertical walls between divisions, are created to allow functional specialization in the name of efficiency. However, when market dynamics are high, it is not efficiency that wins but adaptability.

Here’s why silos can be problematic in complex environments:

  1. Internal competition: Silos often waste energy competing against each other, instead of working together to strengthen the company’s market position.
  2. Not seeing the big picture: When the information flow between units is hindered, every department sees the world through its own lens, which focuses on its own interests first. These “blinders” prevent departments from understanding the big picture and full complexity of situations, and ultimately from supporting solutions for the good of the entire company.
  3. Hindered innovation: Instead of using all available expertise and combining different viewpoints, silos make it harder to come up with innovative solutions or chance discoveries, because they restrict access and feedback to work in progress.
  4. Inefficiency and Redundancy: Without open information and collaboration, each silo works in isolation to create its own solution to shared problems, instead of building on each other’s work or using what a sister department built already. This is a waste of time and resources.

Transforming silos into an agile network

If you want to build for adaptability and increase time to markets, you need to make the walls between the silos more permeable. Strengthen the creation of horizontal connections between divisions and teams, for example by implementing job rotations.

As Stanley McChrystal describes it in Team of Teams, you want to build a network instead of silos. Operating in a network allows work to become more agile, and to move away from waiting for top-down instructions.

You don’t need everyone in the network to be connected to everyone else, what you do need is that everyone knows someone on every other team.

Foster the creation of network connections by creating project teams for new challenges consisting of people from different departments. This way, the other silos get associated with a friendly face instead of a competitive rival.