Moving beyond "us" and "them"
Moving beyond "us" and "them"
Creating unity without undermining the diversity that's essential to innovation, agility, and adaptiveness
If you have overcome your inclination and not been overcome by it, you have reason to rejoice. - Titus Maccius Plautus (254 - 184 BCE)
I started out helping organisations create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness over 35 years ago whilst working for one of the world’s leading open innovation labs. 1
Our culture of collaborative value co-creation prompted a senior executive client to ask me: “Could you come and help our people behave more like your people?”.
Neither of us knew back then that he was launching the career path I’ve been on ever since. 2
In those early years, my background as a digital systems design and development engineer meant that many of the clients I worked with were high-tech organisations throughout Europe, Asia, & the US.
Nearly all of them had significant problems with internal fragmentation, leading to limited coordination, lack of cooperation, and low levels of collaboration between key functions, projects and areas of the organisation.
Each local part of the organisation operated as a silo, fiefdom, or faction with its own subculture that sees “us” as different, often very different, to “them”.
A tell-tale sign of this problem is when people label colleagues in different parts of the organisation ‘unprofessional’, ‘incompetent’, ‘untrustworthy’, or worse.
Marketing, R&D and Manufacturing, three key functions in most high-tech firms, often harbour less than glowing impressions of each other:
Marketing tend to see themselves as business builders, but R&D see them as offering customers whatever they ask for, even if it’s impossible, simply to make the sale — while Manufacturing see Marketing as living the high life on expenses.
R&D tend to see themselves as securing the organisation’s future, but Marketing see them as barely grown-up kids tinkering with their tech toys — while Manufacturing view R&D as impractical boffins.
Manufacturing tend to see themselves as champions of quality, but Marketing see them as order fillers — while R&D view Manufacturing as risk-averse Luddites.
This fragmentation into different subcultures is amplified by how organisations have traditionally tasked individual managers with maximising performance of their part of the organisation, even when such local optimisation is to the detriment of the organisation as a whole — which it often is.
This overly inward focus is intensified by incentives, both explicit and implicit, encouraging the managers of different parts of the business to compete with each other for resources, raises, bonuses, promotions, etc.
With this setup, it’s not surprising that “us” & “them” attitudes and behaviours often lead over time to deep silos, only connected at the top…
35 years ago, antagonistic attitudes and misaligned behaviours due to silo mentalities caused organisations plenty of problems. But in today’s increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, they’re highly toxic to the cross-functional sense making, decision making & action taking at the very heart of a future-fit culture.
Doing more of what doesn’t work
Organisations have a long established and deeply ingrained default habit of approaching significant challenges by restructuring and fiddling around with extrinsic rewards.
Unfortunately, rejigging structures and revamping scorecards typically substitutes one set of silos with another, without changing the ways people act and interact.3
A related response to the recognition that more innovation, agility, and adaptiveness are required is to appoint someone to head up the area.
But when a ‘Chief Innovation Officer’, ‘Head of Agility’, or ‘Adaptiveness Tsar’ is appointed, they often find themselves struggling to make a systemic impact on the organisational culture. 4
These roles can have a significant impact when they have genuine influence at senior executive level. Without this they can ironically become another silo, further inhibiting the adoption of necessary new mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours.
Organisations similarly shoot themselves in the foot with other ‘quick fixes’ like bolt-on innovation labs, digital platforms, and partnerships with ‘creative ideas’ agencies.
These all impede the collective sense making, decision making, and action taking of people inside the organisation, who therefore fail to build the future-fit muscles they need to explore, experiment with, and exploit new ways of creating new value.
That’s not to say changes to structures and metrics are never required — far from it. But these must emerge as outputs from improved ways of working together, not as inputs to try and make improvements happen.
Focusing for maximum leverage
Silo mentalities, like all aspects of an organisation’s culture, are ultimately rooted in people’s mindsets. That’s where the awareness of ‘the way we do things round here’ resides, and it’s where to focus for maximum leverage in systemic culture change. 5
Traditional organisational cultures were based on mindsets of conformance, stability, and ‘fit’, predicated on relatively high levels of certainty and predictability.
These created deeply embedded legacy top-down, command and control attitudes and behaviours that continue to haunt the organisational landscape to this day.
After repeatedly seeing mindset shifts transform these legacy attitudes and behaviours, sometimes literally overnight, the penny dropped: an organisation’s culture is the prevailing system of mindsets that forms and informs people’s awareness of ‘the way we do things round here’. 6
Seeing ‘culture’ as ‘system of mindsets’ enables you to focus on the few key individuals whose mindsets offer maximum systemic leverage for culture change.
These key influencers are not always in the most senior positions and are always unique to each organisation. 7
Finding and focusing on them, and specifically their mindsets, is the low risk, high leverage way to overcome “us” and “them” attitudes, and start creating a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
A way to get started
See if you can identify one or two people from each subculture who share both a recognition of the need for greater cross-silo working, and a willingness to engage earnestly in co-creating conditions for success.
Next, introduce them to the 2D3D mindset that’s key to overcoming silo mentality and central to innovation, agility, and adaptiveness. 8
Then, work with them to identify the key influencers whose mindsets, and therefore attitudes and behaviours, systemically affect everyone and everything else. 9
Finally, engage with them to encourage and enable the key influencers to adopt the 2D3D mindsets that systemically unlock innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
I joined Cambridge Consultants Ltd in 1983 as a digital systems engineer, ran various technology projects, and led the Digital Systems Group before moving into consulting.
For more details see my LinkedIn profile.
Structural rearrangement and Extrinsic rewards are two of the seven methods of influencing organisational culture. For more on this topic see this previous article.
For more on this topic see this previous article.
For more on this topic see this previous article.
For more on this topic see this previous article.
For more details on key influencers and how to find them, see this previous article.
This previous article provides an overview of the 2D3D mindset.
For more on this topic see this previous article.