Most organizations are hierarchical. This way of managing means that responsibility gets divided up into functions and the ‘head’ of each function is responsible for the results of that function and the budget allocated. Isn’t this rational? After all, the notion of hierarchy is as old as the bible. Literally. Moses was introduced to it […]
The Silo Peril and Breaking Down Barriers
“For those languishing at the bottom of a silo, there may be no way out.” This was the chilling conclusion of The Economist’s review of the book ‘The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers’ by Gillian Tett. There is little doubt in our minds that silos and silo mentality are among the […]
Freedom from the Trap of Silos through a Network of Projects
Many organizations still have traditional hierarchies and silo their people into functions. But the complexity of today’s reality needs something different. With the exponential growth of interconnections and interdependencies, a traditional organizational design can undermine productivity and sustainable growth. Here we summarize the organizational design we propose, based on two decades of international work, specifically applied to […]
How a CIO Can Learn to Drive Real Business Results
Ideally, the role of the CIO should be to manage the Quality of how humans and technology interact to produce real business results. In reality, CIOs today find themselves constrained in what they can achieve operationally. On the one hand, they need to be able to improve business performance. This leads them to want to […]
The End of Silos – Building Organizations Fit for Our Times
If organizations need to learn anything today it’s how to overcome silos. Silos are the number one enemy of productivity and competitiveness. They also seriously threaten the quality of life of employees. A recent article by former Navy Seal Chris Fussell ‘The battlefield experience that made me realize the danger of silos and isolated teams’ is a […]
Science against Silos – Why Organizations Need to Be Systems
The world of management is changing fast, and yet we still live in an environment where the prevailing organizational design is “functional/hierarchical” and organizations are thought of as a collection of silos. At the same time, we know that we are experiencing increasing levels of complexity. Why is it so hard to manage these increased […]
Complexity – We Can’t Work in Silos to Solve Systemic Problems
It may still not be obvious to all organizations and corporations, but they urgently need to come to terms with complexity and its implications. Most organizations are already feeling complexity biting but they don’t know how to identify it or how to manage it. That’s not surprising. The term complexity is often misunderstood. It doesn’t […]
Simplify Your Hierarchy For Speed and Reliability
Let’s make a radical statement about success and organizations: all that matters for the success of an organization and those who work within it is speed and reliability. Think about that for a second. How many organizations can actually say that they are designed for this? Isn’t it true that layers of bureaucracy and the […]
Is Your Organization Afflicted by Silo Sickness? Here Are the Symptoms
It’s time to cure the vast array of symptoms of silo sickness in organizations. These symptoms creep up and spread, before people realize where they are coming from. The reason the symptoms spread is because an organization is a living organism, a system. Dividing an organization up artificially into silos not only creates the disease of […]