Work Disrupted by Jeff Schwartz & Suzanne Riss & Tom Fishburne

Author:Jeff Schwartz & Suzanne Riss & Tom Fishburne [Schwartz, Jeff & Riss, Suzanne & Fishburne, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119763512
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

The silo effect occurs when different departments or teams within an organization fail to communicate, and undermine productivity as a result. Two departments could be working on the same initiative, or at cross purposes, without knowing it.

Silo Busting

The opposite of working collaboratively is working in silos. The silo effect occurs when different departments or teams within an organization fail to communicate, and undermine productivity as a result. Two departments could be working on the same initiative, or at cross purposes, without knowing it. Financial journalist and author Gillian Tett has studied silos within companies, finding that their internal structures, the complexity of their businesses, and regulation often reinforced siloed approaches and the associated turf battles. Her research explored the aftermath of the financial crisis, when many financial institutions realized that one of the factors that caused the crisis was their siloed nature.

“The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing,” Tett said in our interview. She noted that both the Bank of England and many major financial institutions had silos that blinded them to the impending collapse of major parts of global financial markets—or at the very least made it harder to see and act on. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there has been a drive across the financial sector to operate in more holistic and integrated ways. Tett has dubbed the effort for departments in a company to shift away from behaving as isolated islands “silo busting.”7

Some siloes arise as a result of the way organizations are structured and regulated. They can also arise when we put on blinders or lose perspective, Tett said. In her book The Silo Effect, she explores the consequences of companies operating with excessively rigid internal structures and rigid mindsets “where tribes end up killing each other and competing.” Tett explains, “siloes can exist on several levels. You can get structural siloes where companies are identified into nutty divisions or departments that try and kill each other. You can get cognitive siloes where different people are essentially trapped into tunnel vision by having very rigid ways that they divide up the world. And then you get social siloes, people basically only ever talking to people like themselves (tribalism). In some ways the social siloes are an increasing problem.”8

She notes that as the result of these different types of silos, companies miss not only dangers and risks, but also big opportunities. “The world moves on outside their company and they end up essentially not seeing how different categories are collapsing [outside the company], like, say, hardware, software, and content at the time of the death of the Sony Walkman and the move into digital music,” Tett said. “That's why Sony lost out in positioning their Walkman. [To win] you need to … think about how the world's moving outside but look at your own structures and mental taxonomies as well.”9

Tett trained as a social anthropologist She is a proponent of finding new ways for us to look at ourselves and to consider how our organizations operate—as though we were outsiders instead of insiders.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.