Organisational Silos and an alternate way to manage…
Can alternate organisational structure create more business value by busting through unproductive silo’s?
Many organisational structures are as they have been for years, sticking with an hierarchical pyramid org structure that splits into departments and disciplines, each with their own KPI’s and deliverables that in theory come together to drive the organisation forward. It can be interesting how quickly silos can form in these structures and without high level discipline, organisation goals can be quickly made subservient to local team goals.
In her book “The Silo Effect” Gillian Tett highlights:
“while the world is increasingly interlinked as a system, our lives remain fragmented. Many large organizations are divided, and then subdivided into numerous different departments, which often fail to talk to each other — let alone collaborate. People often live in separate mental and social “ghettos,” talking and coexisting only with people like us. In many countries, politics is polarized. Professions seem increasingly specialized, partly because technology keeps becoming more complex and sophisticated, and is only understood by a tiny pool of experts.”
With the rise of tech startups and agile team leadership a number of alternate structures are being trialed to attempt to break down these silos and make organisations that are both more responsive and resilient to change. A big part of this change is to make organisational structure such that teams can be fully self reliant in delivering the solution from conception to execution to delivery. A move away from centrally organised bureaucracy to distributed independent teams.
McKinsey explore one such model in their article “The Agile Manager”
Today’s agile organizations are building on these ideas. The squad leader is now a part of an agile matrix, where the value-creation, or tribe, leaders provide constant direction and prioritization around where the value is, and the capability, or chapter, leaders focus on ensuring deep functional expertise, common tools and competencies, and economies of scale and skill. If these leaders can become effective, nonintrusive managers, the agile company will enjoy the best of both worlds: the benefits of size and scale typically realized in large organizations, as well as the benefits of speed and nimbleness often associated with small entrepreneurial start-ups.
Michelle Parsons highlights in a terrific post “Forget Agile vs waterfall its about silo busting” how in her observation the single biggest contributor to silo’s is the lack of a prioritise list of key projects for the whole organisation (Enterprise Backlog)
If you don’t establish a priority, people will make one up. The person or department that yells the loudest will get their work prioritized first, even if it’s not the next most important thing for the enterprise. Conflicts arise due to confusion about priorities. Business stakeholders get upset because their work isn’t getting delivered. Customer satisfaction suffers. Distrust builds. Teams are stretched thin trying to juggle 10 number ones at once. Chaos ensues.
It doesn’t matter how your teams, departments, funding, products, and leadership hierarchy are organized. This will change (it always does). Your company needs one enterprise backlog. And the backlog needs to be published and communicated across the organization. Period. Build and maintain the backlog in a single place, whether it’s a tool like Jira or a wall of index cards. This is your company’s single source of truth, it’s galvanizing force. Say no to backlog silos!
Tett has several other suggestions for breaking silo’s
- Keep the boundaries of teams in big organizations flexible and fluid… Rotating staff between different departments, … Creating places and programs where people from different teams can collide and bond …, be that through hackathons, off-sites, or other types of social collisions. It can also be beneficial to design physical spaces that funnel people into the same area, forcing constant, unplanned interactions.
- What big institutions really need are “cultural translators,” people who are able to move between specialist silos and explain to those sitting inside one department what is happening elsewhere
- Periodically try to reimagine the taxonomies they use to reorganize the world, or even experiment with alternatives. Most of the time, most of us simply accept the classification systems we have inherited. But these are almost never ideal: they can become outdated, or end up serving just narrow interest groups.
You might also like:
- Your Operating System-is it delivering ? — How can you begin to understand the Operating system of your organisation?
- Building a culture of full disclosure — How does a work place culture allow people to speak up, highlight important issues and opportunities to improve?
- Culture and Change — What is culture and how do you build and nurture it?
- Achieving Diversity — why being unbiased is not enough — Diversity is something we aspire to, but are we paying more than lip service to it? Are individual good intentions enough to achieve a diverse group setting, at work, socially or through the community?
- Boundaries of failure — Rasmussen’s model of how accidents happen.
- Pre-Mortem — How to avoid disaster — A simple exercise in looking at what went wrong- before it does.
