The Silo Effect
Why Putting Everything in its Place Isn’t Such a Bright Idea
Gillian Tett
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Well, it gets five out of five for existing and it’s insights, but it seemed a bit like it was overly academic as it went on a bit to get to its points of which I no doubt missed a few as I skipped and skimmed its second part a fair bit as its narrative plodded and seemed a bit drawn out in places. However, the points made were observant, relevant and rather sensible and it should be read by everyone; certainly read by those further up hierarchies in many a top-down structured organisation, to learn its of insights and try out some of them as leading is engaging constructively not just dictating, breaking barriers and silos (and misapplied remuneration of roles) and collaborating when and where relevant with all, no matter their views and perspectives that may challenge convention and expectation.
A common theme of anthropological research is that the way we classify the world never really matches the reality of our environments. People might draw neat diagrams of their kinship structures and family trees, but there are often ambiguities, overlaps, and underlaps. Things fall between the cracks. Life does not always fit into the official descriptions of what people are supposed to do. Much of the time we ignore these messy realities. It feels easier to stick with the neat classification systems we have than constantly rewrite them, be that in the sphere of kinship, religion, domestic life, or anything else.
It was helpful to my own thinking and approaches taken at times, certainly during my livelihood, explaining and justifying an anthropological approach and that inferred a similarity to creative and design-led thinking through having and using an inside-outside perspective on subjects and ideas.
Still, it had a decent start and end with a few good parts in between, like this:
Staying in a silo, or just accepting the boundaries we inherit, often appears a lot easier. After all, we live in a world where people are expected to streamline their careers and become specialists. Our schools and universities put students into boxes at a young age, and academic departments are fragmented. As Fareed Zakaria, the American journalist, points out, the main thrust of educational policy in America today is to support specialized technical subjects, not generalist courses like liberal arts degrees, where students jump between different topics.4 We tend to assume that people will be penalised if they jump between professions or jobs. The people running institutions also face pressure to make these as efficient as they can by cutting out waste. Specialisation and focus is considered desirable in the modern world. That makes it hard to justify time-consuming activities that do not deliver instant results, such as talking to people from other departments, rotating people across departments, or sending people out on innovation safaris. [...]
[...] Living in specialized silos might make life seem more efficient in the short-term. But a world that is always divided into a fragmented and specialist pattern is a place of missed risks and opportunities. If we become blind creatures of habit – or habitus, as the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu liked to say – our lives are poorer as a result.
Or to put it another way, in today’s complex twenty-first-century world we are all faced with a subtle challenge: we can either be mastered by our mental and structural silos or we can try to master them instead. The choice lies with us. And the first step to mastering our silos is the most basic one of all: to think how we all unthinkingly classify the world around us each day.
And then try to imagine an alternative.
A good passage
As anthropologists started to study complex Western societies and sociologists conducted more on-the-ground research, it became harder to draw distinctions between the academic fields. In any case, [Pierre] Bourdieu believed that it was ridiculous to fret too much about academic boundaries or labels. He did not want to put any discipline into a specialist box, and he hated the way that universities tended to classify academics into different, competing tribes. To Bourdieu, ‘anthropology’ was not really an academic label or self-contained discipline, but an attitude toward life. It was an intellectual prism, or mode of inquiry, that anyone could use to get a richer understanding of the world, in combination with other fields such as economics, sociology, among others. To be an anthropologist you did not need to sit inside a university, or have a doctorate. Instead, you needed to be humbly curious, ready to question, criticize, explore, and challenge ideas; to look at the world with fresh eyes and think about the classification systems and cultural patterns that we take for granted. ‘Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess’, as Margaret Mead, the former doyenne of the American anthropology world, once observed.43
[...]
Anyone who has been immersed in anthropology is doomed to be an insider-outsider for the rest of their life; they can never take anything entirely at face value, but are compelled to constantly ask: why?
Anthropology, in other words, makes you permanently curious, cynical, and relativist. Adding that perspective to other fields of inquiry enhances your analysis, just as salt adds flavour to food.[...] We all know some individuals who have an innate ability to question cultural rules, pierce social silences, see the story behind the story, and analyse social patterns but have never studied anthropology. But we also know many people who do not question the world; in fact, most people never analyse or question the cultural patterns – or habits – that guide them. Most of us are unthinking creatures of our environment, in the sense that we rarely challenge the ideas we inherit. But the key point is this: with or without a formal training in anthropology, we all do need to think about the cultural patterns and classification systems that we use. If we do, we can master our silos. If we do not, they will master us.
Moreover, when people are mastered by rigid silos this can cause debilitating problems.
A second good passage
When people inside businesses or government departments were encouraged to reimagine the world – say, by looking at the world from the perspective of consumers, not producers – they could often become more innovative and effective. If journalists were to start organising their work according to how readers (not reporters) perceived the world, how would that change the media? Or if manufacturers started organising their departments based on what customers (not salespeople or designers) thought was important, would they sell the same things? The key point, in other words, was that looking at business processes or services upside-down, or back-to-front, could change an institution’s perspective. Or it could if everybody was willing to take a risk, even without knowing where that mental exercise might lead.
A third good passage
Most of us have an uneasy sense that our world is marred by silos. We might not use that specific word to describe the problem. However, we encounter it all the time: in bureaucracies where one department does not talk to another; at companies where teams are fighting each other or hoarding information; in societies where rich and poor or different ethnic and political groups live in separate social and intellectual ghettos, side by side. Technology should help break these barriers down. In theory, the Internet could connect us all. However, social media will not do this automatically, or even easily. Silos exist in cyberspace too. We live in a world that is hyper-connected, yet often we barely know what is happening around us.
That begs the question: what can we do? We cannot entirely abolish silos, any more than we could abolish electricity and maintain our modern lifestyles. We need to have specialists in the twenty-first-century world to create order in the face of extreme complexity and an ever-swelling deluge of data.