“Silos” in the Workplace.................Kill or be killed (!)….What to do!

Every day we walk into our office with the belief that we really can make a difference, and with the personal resolve to work long and hard to achieve results. We have our routines that prepare us—we get our coffee, check our email, and comb the social networking sites. We may have even worked out at the gym, or done something else that boosts our confidence, and then the inevitable happens. We get blindsided by something that wasn’t on our calendar. We get an angry call from one of our customers, or, an indication from our board, boss, or peers that something isn’t going right that needs our immediate attention. In a matter of minutes things change. What started out as a good day is now suddenly a maelstrom of back-and-froths trying to figure out who caused the problem, and what needs to be done to resolve the issue? It’s called an adverse trend. Adverse trends have the power to bring out the best and worst in people. Usually the worst, humans have this need to be right, secure, and on top—we want to be in control—we want power and a paycheck at the end of the week, no matter what we have to do to get it. And if anyone is left standing at the end of the day, we want it to be us. Some people have simply given up and adopted this human condition as an ongoing reality, a way of life. “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Yet, for those hospitals that are exceptional at patient service and overall growth, they’ve usually found ways to bridge the gap, and create collaboration and teamwork at an exemplary level. To the degree that organizations maintain and encourage interpersonal dysfunction, they limit their ability to grow and compete with the business elites. Where does this unwanted human response to adverse trends originate? Usually in kindergarten, our first real shot at teamwork. But at least there we had someone who knows what’s best for us, and who kept the rules of appropriate interaction in place with some form of sanction, to cultivate the better response in our tiny, self-centered little minds. And, in a more grownup kind of way, that’s exactly what we need in corporate; a human incentive system led by people we respect and who know what they are doing, to cultivate the right results. An Operational Silo is a term used to describe any process, business unit, management style, or even employee who cannot or does not interact with any other process, system or employee. This sort of behavior can happen innocently or through political machinations, by design or by design flaw, but whatever the case it is bad for business.

Silo mentality is an attitude that is found in some organizations; it occurs when several departments or groups within an organization do not want to share information or knowledge with other individuals in the same organization. A silo mentality can negatively affect employee morale, especially when employees are aware of the issue and are unable to do anything to change it. The informational bottleneck results in inefficiency as different departments may be working with different understandings for project completion. The silo mentality is really an organizational way of thinking. As I told you repeatedly it occurs when departments or management groups do not share information, goals, tools, priorities and processes with other departments. The silo mentality is believed to impact operations, reduces employee morale and may contribute to the overall failure of an organization or its products/services and culture. There are a few ways for organizations to overcome such silo effects. The first is to recognize what business processes produce; the second is about the people or systems which run such efforts. Both are linked and must be addressed by management.

Why Silos Occur: Part of the problem with why silos occur has to do with process as much as people. Businesses have a series of broad goals which must then be broken down into tactical actions for parts of the organization to act upon. In doing so, this division of labor breaks up employees into teams. Teams tend to stay stable for the duration of the action taken. This is a good thing as employees need to work together to get things done. That said, inside the team people may restrict information too much to one section, thus insulating themselves and the process from other parts of the organization. This is a breeding ground for silos. Priorities are dispersed between various lines of complex healthcare system -- each with their own budget and responsibilities -- narrowing the focus of managers and leading to a lack of awareness of other priorities within the organization. This type of insulated decision making nearly always leads to problems.

Breaking down 'Silo Mentality': Managers of successful organizations ensure that information flows freely between departments so all aspects of the hospital function effectively. Contemporary management views suggest that the silo mentality mindset must be broken for employees to remain motivated and be happy to come to work. Efficient companies promote the sharing of information to let the combination of groups function as a team. Traditionally, a silo mentality is seen as a top-down issue, beginning with management and trickling down to individual contributor employees. It may also be seen between individual contributors when the employment situation feels competitive, such as within a commission-based profession where individual performance numbers directly affect compensation. It can also be witnessed between competing departments, such as marketing and sales, where some assigned duties exist, at least in part, in both departments. It is often seen as intentional, as a silo mentality includes the desire to withhold information from other departments. The lack of cross-departmental communication can negatively impact workflow, as information is not passing freely across the organization. This can result in departments working with inaccurate or out-of-date information. Creating a sense of unity within an organization can help combat a silo mentality. Gearing the organization to work towards a single goal can create a sense of community between departments, encouraging more open communication. Taking the time to recognize successes can help encourage and support open interaction. Silo Mentality is present when a division, department or function does not willingly share information, resources and support to others. Barriers are erected between colleagues from different areas of the organization – resulting in painful growth and change across the whole of the organization. Do you see this? Perhaps you feel it. But can’t always evidence it. That’s because it isn’t easily evidenced. But here are five signs that Silo Mentality really does exist in your workplace.

1. Frequent use of the words “them” and “us”
2. People say “well that’s not my/our job”
3. You have to wait, and then chase, for information from other business units (or, other business units have to wait and chase for information from yours)
4. A consistent breach of organizational standards within a whole business unit
5. A lack of respect between business units

Notice that all of the above are in the ‘soft’ areas? I.e. they’re signs, not absolutes. They must be perceived, but can’t be measured (easily). Silo Mentality is a counter-culture, where there exists a culture of sabotage within the organization, but directed outwards from a business unit.

Active Measures-Management can use active measures to combat silo issues. The first is around organization policies. Policies should be defined by active management and stakeholders. The policies for running the organization and its processes needs to be clear and a sense of ownership must be felt by all within the organization. This allows for self-maintenance and stewardship of policies; and when policies are found to be ineffective, this information will be channeled easier than if members do not have stewardship rights.

Passive Measures-Passive measures often involve the human effect inside an organization. People are the most essential component of an organization, as technology can be replaced or upgraded readily. Passive measures, such as allowing employees of various departments the ability to connect over work and non-work related events is probably the most effective way to break down operational silos. Once employees make personal connections, it becomes easier to run processes because a trust is established. This can also lead to better and innovative ways of working within the organization.

Formal Measures-Stakeholders and managers need some upper-management structure in order to do their jobs. One of the most important structures to put into place is a formal communication platform. This can be in guise of a weekly or bi-weekly meeting or phone conference, with topics focused on various areas to generate ideas. Formal documentation and clear enforcement of that documentation, with lessons learned built in and captured can be an effective way to break down silos. Quarterly review of business processes versus revenue numbers and productivity can also help guide managers to where issues are arising. As an added benefit, from a technical perspective, consolidating technology platforms and simplifying avenues between them can also eliminate inefficiencies and consolidate costs.

Informal Measures-one of the most important things managers need to remember is their technology and process documentation will only go so far. Giving managers and employees' a degree of autonomy and prerogative in their day-to-day work and tasking can have huge benefits for the organization. Giving employees’ time to talk shop and share information about their jobs can be the best way of breaking things down. 

Healthcare Scenarios: Most leaders in our healthcare system agree that it is very fragmented and uncoordinated due to a high degree of complexity. Due to this fragmentation, some stakeholders unfortunately develop a ‘silo mentality’ on how to solve a problem within their part of the system. One of the overall goals of healthcare reform is to move from a fragmented healthcare system to an integrated model that provides services more efficiently and at less cost. Within hospitals, this fragmentation is seen in the different silos in which people work. Operating in silos threatens to prevent hospitals from delivering the coordinated care that is necessary to meet quality and cost demands of healthcare reform. In contrast, breaking down silos can help hospitals achieve coordinated care, which improves patient flow and the overall efficiency of the organization.  "The fragmentation and variability associated with silo operations is the root cause of inefficiency and the biggest obstacle [to flow]," says Ben Sawyer, executive vice president of healthcare performance improvement consultant. He says one of the first steps in eliminating silos is changing the mindset of everyone in the hospital, from the CEO to the front-line workers. People need to move from department- to system-wide thinking about hospital operations to deliver care in a coordinated manner. While changing one's way of thinking after years of working under a different philosophy can be challenging, there are steps hospitals can take to work towards a silo-less organization. "There needs to be a demand that you're trying to fulfill," says Imran Andrabi, MD, senior vice president and chief physician executive officer of Toledo, Ohio-based Mercy Health Partners. "You must feel like the way we do business is not working or not sustainable — that something needs to be different." Recognizing a need for change, such as to reduce costs and improve quality, helps make hospitals more open to changing their mindset. "It's not necessarily fundamentally changing who you are, but maybe taking a few steps in a different direction to look at the same problem in a different way," Dr. Andrabi says. One of the key mindset changes necessary to break down silos is moving from a focus on immediate needs to a focus on key operational defects. Dr. Andrabi says that traditionally, the healthcare industry has focused on symptoms — such as overcrowding in an emergency department — instead of the root cause — such as inefficient processes in the ED. Overcrowding represents an urgent need: the hospital needs to better manage volume to ensure patient safety and maintain its market share. However, concentrating efforts on simply trying to see more patients faster ignores a possible upstream cause that may require an entire redesign of the ED process. Attacking the root cause of a problem is a more effective long-term solution than trying to eliminate the symptom and fosters coordination among silos. "If you get at one root cause, you may be able to get rid of a thousand symptoms," Dr. Andrabi says.  One of the reasons healthcare providers have historically been cautious to address root causes is the conflict between urgent needs and important long-term deficiencies, according to Ben Sawyer. He says that healthcare professionals resist going upstream to determine the root cause because they think leaving the immediate downstream work could result in fatal consequences. In the example above, the ED team may be concerned that taking the time to reassess their processes may put emergent patients in danger of not being seen, leading to potentially severe health outcomes. "It's a dilemma in the hospital system," Ben Sawyer says. One way hospitals can overcome this dilemma is to develop an infrastructure that allows providers to address root causes without sacrificing immediate patient needs. "Leaders can enhance the creation of an environment in which people can start taking their time away from urgent [tasks] and spend time thinking about the causal effects and important things in the organization," Dr. Andrabi says. In addition to focusing on root causes, hospitals need to create a system aim to change mindsets towards breaking down silos. A system aim outlines the organization's primary goals and strategies on achieving those goals. Dr. Andrabi suggests hospital leaders "articulate that vision in such a way that people are willing to be part of it and can see what's in it for them — that they're not just doing it to make a change, but doing it to get a better outcome, better processes and a better environment in which people have the ability to do meaningful work."

Changing Mindset: Once hospitals begin to change their mindset, they need to work on fostering collaboration among departments to break down silos and improve patient flow. Efforts on improving patient flow need to involve the entire organization, because patients, staff and information travel between departments; they do not stay in separate silos. Optimizing flow in one department may not necessarily improve overall patient flow if the departments do not coordinate with each other. For example, Dr. Andrabi says a hospital lab reported having 96 percent of its labs on the charts by 8 a.m. In itself, this figure seems positive. However, looking beyond the department, Dr. Andrabi found that surgeons began rounding on their patients at 6:30 a.m. — making the lab's achievement less valuable. "Hospital-wide coordination enables you to be in a situation where you are looking at the outcome and what needs to be done within the organization as a whole to be able to achieve that outcome," Dr. Andrabi says. Similar to shifting to root cause-thinking, moving from silos to coordinated departments marks a change from immediate needs to organization-wide needs. Considering the functions within the entire organization is the key to making true improvements in patient flow. Everyone knows we need greater integration across silos in healthcare. To do that, we need to change the way we think and form effective partnerships to jointly share resources, knowledge and solve problems.

With silo mentality, organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over managed and under led: We have transitioned from an industrial to knowledge, innovation, and hyper-connectivity economy - with this shift has come to a change in organizational forms away from the traditional rigid hierarchies managed through command and control to more fluid and responsive network forms. Yet many business managers still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy of the old economy limits many 'networked' organizations. Are silos a mere product of organizational design? Or is their nature tied to a deeper level: the humankind's nature? Despite the mountain of evidence pointing the detrimental effects of these silos, they still seem to be quite common in organizations. The question is: why? In today's volatile economy, nothing impedes progress more than protective silos which are simply a form of bureaucratic amorphous mass designed to preserve the status quo. How does one eliminate bureaucracy? What would be some ideas to assist in breaking down silos in an organization where they are present?

The challenge for CEOs is to get rid of the silo mentality: CEOs and C-suite leaders should be concerned about workplace silos. These are groups or departments within an organization that work in a vacuum with little functional access to other groups, or little communication with them. When you have silos, people have little interest in understanding their part in the success of the organization as a whole. With silos, managers focus on guarding territory rather than on engaging colleagues outside their group. People in command and control positions don’t reach across the organization. What they do instead is primarily move information and decisions vertically, never across to other departments. When that happens, there is no growth, the organization is going nowhere. The challenge for CEOs is to get rid of the silo mentality. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Vijay Govindaraja from the Tuck School of Business says the best way to break down silos is by adopting an innovation agenda. “An innovation agenda creates necessity, inspires people to work together, and in the best cases it demands that they do.” Business development and human resources consultant Ingrid Cliff says one of the best ways to it is to raise the visibility of projects. “Processes to facilitate this can range from complex work allocation computer systems, digital project management systems, through to a simple whiteboard list,’’ Cliff writes. “The things to remember here are that whatever system you use needs to be regularly updated, it needs to only have one version in one place (otherwise people get confused and end up not following any project), and it needs to be visible to all people who have an interest. Social media RSS feeds are a great example of creating visibility and individual choice - people can choose to opt in to the feed and can choose to opt out as they wish.” Other methods Cliff suggests include making sure executives and managers are walking the talk, building a shared vision so that the entire business knows and buys into the type of customer experience they want clients to have, setting KPIs that reflect the importance of teamwork, cross-team collaboration, tracking all the ways that customers interact with the business, mapping out how the information flows with them and taking action to adjust each tiny block or trouble spot. Neil Smith at Fast Company says managers seeking to break down silos need to ask five key questions: (1) What priorities do you or your departments have that are not aligned with another’s? (2) Put yourself in the place of the other silo--what would make that silo realize that your need was a priority? (3) What information do you or your department have that could be useful to others? (4) What information or assistance do you need from another silo that you are not getting? (5) In what areas would increase collaboration and giving up some autonomy be more beneficial for the company than maintaining your individuality? “Cooperation, communication, and collaboration are the three keys to working across silos,’’ Neil Smith says. “Those are components that ideally any successful working relationship would have, but they are must-haves if you are going to break the organizational silos barrier.” A lot of organization’s reaction to the silo mentality goes back to leadership and trust. Silo mentality is a common challenge for lots of organizations. It is not structured, but the behaviors and attitudes of the leadership teams and lack of strategic and team objectives and rewards that drive this mentality. If there is a high level of trust within the upper rankings of management, this will be conveyed through their actions and directions to those within their own work unit. If all of the upper-level management is engaged and focused on the same institutional goal and plan, they will be able to move forward in the same direction. By sharing the same vision, trusting that adjacent and supportive departments are all capable of completing their portion of the goal, and being able to coordinate and communicate effectively across departments, you can attempt to increase the performance of those members within each silo for the overall goal. Once a breakdown of trust or communication occurs, you begin to see each silo become more decentralized and self-focused. When leaders of an organization place an emphasis on building a culture of cross-functional collaboration, the opportunity for silos to work against the alignment of all departments towards the goals and objectives of the organization is diminished. Having leaders of respective functions to interact in a structured setting on a consist basis goes a long way towards eliminating the silo mentality.

Collaboration practices: Creative collaboration via integrative diversity can overcome silos. Silos are inevitable in every structured organization. Silos are a method of containment and storage: bounded groups or insular tribes are evidence of silos, and silos are reservoirs for homogeneous thinking, limiting the organization's creativity and innovation. It is the responsibility of the leaders to initiate his or her team to break the silos to realize the common goals or strategy which are far more important than the personal and departmental goals. Fostering collaboration is the key to creating a seamless organization when in pursuit of a strategy. There are negative conflicts when the organization has little collaborative competency; and when they integrate, there is more potential to innovate and create value, more so when the collaborative competency of the organization is strong. Diversity is the key to innovation and growth in organizations, and only converted into value when it becomes integrative diversity - Silos are the opposite spectrum to integrative diversity and limit the organization's potential. Identities and differences are the sources of creativity although insulating them within silos contains this potential. Silos don't seem to fit within emerging 'networked' collaborative organizational forms, and if they are being reinforced, their existence is perhaps a legacy of old management thinking applied to new ways of doing - the result, higher risk of conflict and inertia, not something organization's want in a global marketplace that demands innovation, speed, responsiveness and flexibility to succeed.

Outcome-based measurement practices: When you measure the end and not the means, the silo walls will become retractable. The problem stems from the way outcomes are being measured. When the collective outcome is the focus, the silo walls collapse. When individual and departmental outcomes are measured, the walls go up. In other words, what are the organization's rewards and recognition structure perpetuating? Differentiated performance metrics and rewards systems tend to bring this shift in perspective about, but they too are a necessary aspect of how an organization operates -- until they become counter-productive and have to be changed. So the effective scenario to break down silo includes following steps: (a) Help staffs understand the priorities, perspectives, and strengths of people from other parts of the organization; (b) Raise everybody's level of accountability; (c) Ensure customer and strategic focus, if managed properly; (d) Drive innovation that is relevant to the bigger picture.

In essence, with silo mentality, organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over managed and under led, remain disconnected, hoard knowledge and power within silos, and do not have the competence to collaborate in the long term. There is no such thing as a perfect organization. Rather, the best organization is one that transitions from one form to another in order to adapt to the changes and improve organizational maturity from efficiency, effectiveness to agility.

When the managing partners of Boston-based Creative Realities, Inc. ask executives, “What is the number one innovation killer at your company?” one of the first words they always hear- always-is “silos!” The term “silo” was created to indicate a similarity between grains silos that separate one type of grain from another and the segregated parts of a company. In a company suffering from silo syndrome, each business unit or function interacts primarily within its own “silo” rather than with other groups across the company. The problems of “silos” show up in duplication of cost and effort, working at cross purposes, lack of synergy, little knowledge transfer or economies of scale. The largest problem, however, is a lack of alignment with the overall company strategy.

Acting in the interest of the silo, not the company: And the bigger the company, the more harmful a role silos play. Silos create an environment where sharing and collaborating is virtually impossible. Those in charge of specialized knowledge often embrace the belief that “knowledge is power” and erect silos to protect their turf. They act primarily in the interest of their own silo — not the company. As an article in Fast Company says, ‘human nature forces people to want to do the best they can within their own ‘sandbox’ at the expense of everybody else. ‘Owning’ a function or a part of a business naturally brings forth a manager’s entrepreneurial spirit, and you don’t get to be head of a silo without being competitive. Managers rationalize their lack of cooperation as ‘I’ve been given this area to run as I see fit…’ The result of this thinking is bad enough when it is kept within a company, but when it spills over into customer relationships it can be disastrous. One company that I know of had five global business units (BUs for short), each with different products. Several of their biggest customers were in Japan. The customers were hounded by corporate VPs of the BUs calling and wanting to schedule visits — usually all within the same week. The customers, no doubt, were left thinking how disorganized the company was. The only way it was resolved was by giving the scheduling task to someone in the company’s Japan office. All BUs had to go through this person to schedule appointments with customers.

Lessons we can learn from Malaysia: Another example occurred in Malaysia. There were 60 employees representing four BUs co-located in the same office. The management of one BU decided it would be a nice gesture to give each of their employees a day off on his/her birthday. When announced, the employees in the other BUs were upset. Here we had one BU making a unilateral decision without thinking of the impact on the rest of the office. The example of Company in Japan started me thinking-How could this BU not have thought of the impact of adding this new benefit? Then I realized: At the headquarters’ location, each BU was in a separate building. They did not interact, never saw one another and obviously never socialized. The only interaction was when the VPs of all the BUs met at the CEOs staff meeting every two weeks. For all practical purposes, they worked for different companies. But in Malaysia, however, as with all the other offices throughout the world, the number of employees was small and they all were located in the same office. They all knew each other, went to lunch together, and socialized after hours. Unlike the isolated BUs at headquarters, each office was a closely knit group. When everybody in a company — or in this case, a location — knows everybody else, informal relationships naturally develop and stepping across the lines drawn on an organizational chart is easy. Knowledge is shared and problems across silos are more easily recognized, discussed and resolved. In order to correct silo problems, there is no need to re-organize the entire company. Here are 4 steps that can help break down walls and allow “cross-pollination” (1) Encourage cross-BU and cross-functional teams to work on company-wide problems. Employees get to know each other, gain exposure to other areas of the company and perhaps even accept assignments in other BUs or functional areas. (2) Eliminate formality in the company and the need to go through an endless chain of command before engaging leaders. (3) Establish common platforms and systems across the company and give people access to the same data and information. This discourages information hoarding. (4) Design comfortable space in each building or on each floor where cross-functional teams can come together in a relaxed setting to brainstorm products/services, processes, and work cross-functionally to create solutions.

Breaking down ‘Silos in Healthcare’: Healthcare reform has been a major issue in recent years, with the overall goal being that we transition away from a fragmented healthcare system into an integrated model which can provide more effective and cost-efficient services. The problem is that a silo mentality exists in the majority of health and life-science organizations. Walk into any such facility and you'll soon detect that ideas, data, information, and viewpoints are segregated as each department is working within its own distinct silo. Yes, various branches of the operation have unique needs, but this separation is compromising the "big picture" objective of delivering coordinated care as a means of maintaining quality standards and meeting the cost demands of healthcare reform. By working to change mindsets and break down these healthcare silos, it becomes much easier to improve patient data flow and boost organizational efficiency across the board. Most healthcare professionals can quickly spot the symptoms of their organization's issues - overcrowding in emergency rooms, inefficient payment, etc. - but why are the symptoms present? Healthcare silos prevent everyone from accessing and interpreting important data sets, instead, encouraging users to make decisions based upon a part of the information rather than the whole. This results in short-term "Band-Aid" fixes that don't actually do anything to improve the sustainability of operations, or to resolve the root problem. Unfortunately, the trend in the past has been for healthcare industries to be wary of taking a look at the underlying issue. The fear is that by swimming upstream to understand long-term deficiencies and business gaps, they'll be forsaking the immediate downstream work which could result in fatal consequences. As an example, a hospital may worry that by assigning staff to evaluate the root causes of an inefficient and overcrowded E.R. that it will actually slow the process down further, placing emergent patients in danger of not being seen. But does it have to be this way? It really doesn't. The only reason that the idea of finding the root cause seems so risky is that data isn't readily available to all. With compartmentalization and healthcare silos standing in the way, it's not simple (or, in many cases, even possible) for users to tap into valuable data sets in order to detect what's going wrong or how to fix it. The goal of breaking down silos, then is to enable healthcare operations to develop a practical data infrastructure that allows users to tap into the full potential of the petabytes and exabytes of available data in such a way that smarter, long-term solutions can be found. In this way root causes can be addressed without sacrificing more immediate patient needs. 

Work to Adjust Mindsets: One of the biggest barriers that healthcare organizations face when attempting to break down healthcare silos is the mindset of their staff, and even themselves. Change is often viewed with hesitance and anxiety. In order to create a more open mindset with regard to data sharing, it's important that departments are able to see that this isn't "change for the sake of change", but that in coming together as a single unit, everyone will benefit. Fostering interdepartmental collaboration is one of the most crucial steps in breaking down healthcare silos and improving patient flow. As information is created or as data travels between departments, it should not stay in separate silos. This ensures that valuable data sets may be accessed and analyzed in a way that reveals the big picture to all users, pinpointing various outcomes, and what steps need to be taken within the organization as a whole in order to achieve consistent - or better- outcomes. In other words, moving from silos to coordinated departments will allow the organization to shift away from focusing on immediate, individuals needs to long-term, organization-wide needs. This is the key to making concrete improvements in patient flow, streamlining processes, cutting costs, and reforming healthcare. 

Silos are not necessarily a bad thing; they can be beneficial when used properly and provide organizations with a structure that works. They often foster expertise in different areas and promote a sense of individuality, accountability and responsibility. Silos also act as a method for ensuring focus around specific business deliverable. These are all good things, so why are they the biggest hindrance to corporate growth? In an ideal world, silos would be: (a) Transparent - allowing people to see inside the silo, enabling people to understand what that silo is working on and reassure them the work is in the best interests of the organization; (b) Permeable - allowing information to flow in and out of the silo, enabling other groups to leverage the expertise and information best across the entire enterprise and also allowing the silos to better understand their impacts on the organization. But these types of silos rarely exist. Unfortunately on most occasions, silos encourage behaviours that are beneficial to the occupants of the silo, but are often not in the best interest of the overall business or its customers. It also plays into the hands of corporate politics, since silos help to keep things private. And we all know that in office politics, information is power. A recent survey from the American Management Association showed that 83% of executives said that silos existed in their companies and that 97% think they have a negative effect. Silos restrict clarity of vision across the organization, and they breed mini-fiefdoms where people are less likely to collaborate, share information and work together as a cohesive team. Not surprisingly this leads to poor decision-making as well as impacting on morale within a company, its efficiency and profitability. The structure of businesses’ silos often seems to work against the interests of customers and simply engineer the wrong behaviours. Since every manager is part of a silo, how often have you experienced frustration, when your priorities don’t align with someone else’s in another department? Can you remember telling a colleague that whatever you needed was really important? Or telling another colleague that you were doing something that has a higher priority? We have all been on both sides of the equation. Often you find that silos are not aligned because of the company-centric or channel-centric nature of many organizations and the lack of alignment to the impacts on the customer experience. And in some cases, the way they are measured and the KPIs of different silos actually conflict with each other. And remember that operational units will tend to deliver against what gets measured and their KPI targets, since their bonuses, especially management bonuses, are contingent on the achievement of KPIs. In order to deliver a great customer experience you need to change what is measured and align it to the customer and not the organisation.

In 2012, Beyond Philosophy did some research amongst customer experience professionals and executives, which showed that “silo mentality” is the biggest organisational hurdle to improving the customer experience. This is understandable as the end-to-end Customer Experience touches many parts of the organization and, as Tom Peters once said, “any organization over five people is too big”. You must have also heard of Jeff Bezos’ two pizza team rule i.e. that each team should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas. Some companies, rather than being a seamless entity and speaking to the customer in one voice, frequently present mixed messages. Each silo has its own view of the customer and the landscape they exist in, each from its own perspective. This causes the customer to see the organization as disjointed and dysfunctional, leading to a lack of trust, irritation and creating a feeling that the company is simply incompetent.

'Silo' one of healthcare's biggest flaws. To healthcare mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong, MD, the dirtiest four-letter word in the realm of digital health is " silo."

Soon-Shiong envisions a future healthcare system that connects all the dots, serving a patient throughout his or her life, not just in sickness. He sees that health journey much like a long plane trip, with the consumer and caretaker pulling in data from all sources to plot a course, and adjusting that course as things happen. "What we are trying to create is a true operating system," he said. Such a system would encompass clinical decision support, machine learning and "adaptive amplified intelligence" that "integrates pieces of the puzzle" and "gives you inputs … so that you can manage outputs." "It's a difficult concept to envision," he said, "because nobody's taken the trouble of taking each of these siloed pieces and integrating them into a single healthcare system." Soon-Shiong concluded that much of healthcare is resistant to wholesale change, and he said "Change management is the next challenge,"

Still I couldn't find the answer of 'what to do with Silo?' Should we kill or be killed.......is our workplace like a 'Death Squad' movie to make the 'Change!' Or every time we be killed and change our job. Anyway, change is there: either you change the Silo in your workplace or change your current job!

But!!

Are you sure, you're not facing 'Silo' in your new workplace?.????..Be careful in your next move....