Innatesilo

The silo teams fragment the strategy, stagnate execution, motivate unhealthy internal competition, cause more problems than benefits.

Most business managers and teams operate with an incomplete and relatively small view of the business ecosystem as traditional companies are operated in functional silos to achieve a certain level of business efficiency. 

However, most people don't realize which gaps silo is causing, how much pain it is bringing or the cost to the organization. Silo is a universal problem facing businesses, especially for large mature organizations or our society as a whole today.

Until you change that mind-set, silos will not disappear: In today's volatile economy, nothing impedes progress more than protective silos which are designed to preserve the status quo. Are silos a mere product of organizational design? Or is their nature tied to a deeper level- humankind's nature, rooted in the mindset level. In fact, silos can start and flourish, under poor leadership thinking. At their heart, silos are not a structural issue, they are the result of poor thinking, etc.

Despite the mountain of evidence pointing to the detrimental effects of these silos, they still seem to be quite common in organizations. Silo thinking creates a blind spot. At the individual level, Silos cause slowness and small-thinking. Silo mentality is fundamentally about keeping the mind static and keeping the people separate rather than keeping work separate

Find a business problem that is recognized and prioritized, find one caused by silos: Silos are the opposite spectrum of integrative diversity and limit the organization's potential. If a manager sees his/her success measured against the manager in another silo, rather than sharing expertise to the overall benefit of the organization, then they will be inclined to erect barriers to stop collaboration. So silo makes the organization as a sum of pieces, not a holistic whole; silo enlarges gaps between different divisions and decreases business speed, etc.

The world is increasingly complex and fast-changing; the need for specialization is likely to increase. So the point is that the greater specialization does not need to lead to silo thinking or working. To break down silos, someone above the silo is supposed to piece all the individual puzzle pieces together to improve organizational agility. The specialized generalists with interdisciplinary knowledge and expertise are in demand to bridge silos and contribute to cross-functional communication and collaboration. The mitigation is to undermine the silo mentality by fostering social /business networks of "self-interest" or common interest across silos, in order to enhance communication and enforce collaboration.

See the trees, but also the forest: Silos result in overlapping functions, increased costs, duplicated efforts and inconsistent decisions among entities. The organizational management needs to analyze root causes of the silo effect. There should be a general vision or mission statement that covers the general idea and purpose of the organization’s strategy, seeing the trees without ignoring forests.

A successful business, or any system for that matter, finds its greatest stability when the parasitic and collaborative elements within it, find a balance The digital leaders and professionals have to bridge geographical, industrial functional silos or any digital divide today; with emerging digital technologies, organizations can now have better opportunities to share best practice and next practice to unlock performance.

Silo thinking becomes the root cause of business ineffectiveness; the silo teams fragment the strategy, stagnate execution, motivate unhealthy internal competition, cause more problems than benefits. Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, and collaborations amplify the collective business competency to achieve better than expected business performance.

Posted in: Digital Pitfalls,GAPs