Anticlue

The effect of silos

We all know about single points of failures. That's the one critical point where if something goes wrong, everyone is in trouble.

What's bad is when that is a single silo and one person is responsible for the entire system.

First thing that happens is poor communication, somewhere along the lines something becomes disconnected and one part doesn't inform the other part.

Next, there isn't alot a sharing going on. Good ideas and lessons learned are lost when people stop communicating. Individuals end up individually reinventing a wheel, that the group has collectively made if they would only talk to each other.

The poor communication causes a reduced awareness of other initiatives and sometimes the silo begins to resent that not everyone else is understanding the importance of the silo. Or even the workload of the silo.

Silos also breed a lack of standardization and consistency, you can't have standardized practices if you don't communicate them.

In the long run a silos will be of a higher cost, because the same lessons learned are repeatedly in multiple ways by individuals instead of collectively by the group at once, and the brainstorming for a great idea is lost in the midst of single mindedness and purpose.