Silos: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Geoffrey Moore
Author, speaker, advisor, best known for Crossing the Chasm, Zone to Win and The Infinite Staircase. Board Member of nLight, WorkFusion, and Phaidra. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute.
As a consultant to management teams seeking to compete in an age of disruption, I hear a lot of complaints about silos and how organizations that have them must be doing something wrong.
Not true.
Silos are how you get things done. They keep other people out of your way and let you focus on the stuff you are directly accountable for. Nothing happens at scale except in silos. As long as you are competing in an age of stability, as long as staying the course is the right strategy, silos are actually your friend.
It’s when you are competing in an age of disruption that the trouble starts. Now instead of keeping you on the straight and narrow, silos are locking you in. They are preventing the kinds of innovation and collaboration that is mandatory if you are going to adapt to the new realities in an agile and timely way. Now you need to form cross-functional teams, refocus the mission, realign around external grounding points, be they emerging customer needs or next-generation technological capabilities, and build up new muscles more or less from scratch. Here silos can hurt you a lot.
So that’s the good and the bad of silos—good when you want to extend a winning play, bad when you need to realign and regroup. But there is also a third dimension to silos, one that is just simply ugly. That’s when leaders use silos to preserve and protect fiefdoms for their own personal advantage and relish the opportunity to sabotage a rival’s efforts by withholding a critical resource. These are the political silos, and they are only for losers. Unfortunately, the people who run them are usually very good at managing up, and throwing others under the bus, so they can often keep themselves in power long after everyone knows something is rotten. If you find your organization caught in such a grip, just leave. Life is too short, and yours is too valuable.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube
Chief Operating officer at Bombay Realty, Bombay Dyeing , Wadia group
4 年Silo thinking and style of working has been for long considered a bad thing for businesses. Matrix organisations often deliver incrementally as lot of corporate energy gets spent in managing conflicting priorities and objectives and such structures provide for nebulous accountability. Silo structures provide for focussed execution through functional excellence and sharp accountability. When disruptive headwinds are faced and the business is threatened with survival, the Darwinian evolutionary pressures force silo structures to morph to deliver very differently through cross functional collaboration. Have we not seen this in almost every company dealing with Covid led disruptions?
APAC Procurement | Business Operations | Supply Chain Management
4 年Very nicely articulated the differences in the impacts of silos based on the business context. The trick for the senior management is to figure out how & when they encourage silos to drive productivity & scale vs. enable cross-functional "coo-petition". Even the "business context" varies within a company across geographies & markets. This a constant balance on a daily/weekly basis and not an initiative; more apt to be reflected in a company's culture vs. its strategy.
Happily Retired from the Illinois EPA
5 年In my experience, a Quality Assurance Department can never be a silo. Yes, it has to focus on getting the work done that it is responsible for on a daily basis, but it must also work closely with other managers and departments. It must help establish a quality culture, drive continuous improvement, have open communication channels, engage in organizational-wide planning, integrate the quality management system throughout the organization, work to maintain compliance, manage risk and drive down the CoPQ (regardless if hardened silo have been erected in some departments). That's a lot to do, but all this is done with a primary focus on helping the organization achieve its business goals and objectives. This takes time, building consensus, managing change, finding that needed balance, a good understanding of the reality of the moment and at times compromise. It especially takes perseverance, focus, passion, humility and leadership on the part of those in QA. My thoughts, what do you think?
Regenerative researcher and writer at Orbis Sacri. Aiming to inspire through regenerative case stories, and encourage global regenerative movements to communicate collaboratively, to demonstrate what can be achieved.
6 年I completely agree. The worse kind are the political.? experienced these at first hand during the early 90s in IBM. Enterprises infected with these are at serious risk? and as an employee it's no fun.
Founder & CEO Suparna Health AI LLC [HEALTH AI Data Platform = Cloud Based ML/GenAI Data Platform + Applications for Health Systems, Public Health & Payers]
6 年A lot of times slios build up in onganisations and they require a deliberate effort on part of the organisation head or unit head to break it up. The efforts to break up silos should be on continuous basis. In a time particular in AI and Big Data or may be any other organisations which is brining product release quickly say lets 3 months - silos hurt a lot. At every point where the product transitions from one team to another or product evolves with every release - silos waste a lot of useful time. But yes I do agree if the product development time is long then to a degree it will help.