WHY SILOS ARE DANGEROUS

WHY SILOS ARE DANGEROUS

The story most managers believe is that we are separate individuals. This is why we structure organisations into jobs and have individual objectives and performance reviews.

Imagine if our managers knew the story that physicists have known for 50 years. That physical materials like solids, liquids and gases are interesting but not nearly as useful as the study of how things are organised and relate to each other.

An organisation, whether a company, a Department, or a Ministry, is a system and for it to work in an emergent type way it needs to be a system. It can’t be split up into segments or reorganised into silos and still be expected to behave like the original system because it won’t; it’s no longer that system. The individual parts (Marketing, Production, Policy, Corporate Services) might in some ways work like a system, but they will tend to work towards emergent behaviour that is favourable to itself rather than to the whole organisation, each going off in their own direction. 

This is the key reason why silos are so dangerous. They don’t allow systems to be systems and because they’re not systems they can’t possibly emerge like systems.

Most managers are way behind physicists because they spend lots of time and money selecting good people into the organisation without thinking much about the system these people are going to work in. 

There is no doubt that people behave according to the system they are placed in; therefore, it would be more advantageous if the organisation spent more time and money designing the system into which the people are placed.