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 over 35 years ago whilst working for one of the world’s leading open innovation service providers. 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 in digital systems 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 silo mentality.
The silo mentality problem
Silo mentality manifests as poor coordination, cooperation, and collaboration between key functions, projects, areas, etc.
Each silo, fiefdom, or faction has its own subculture that sees “us” as different, often very different, to “them”.
A tell-tale sign of this is when colleagues in other parts of the organisation are labelled ‘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: 3
Marketing tend to see themselves as business builders, but R&D see them as offering customers the impossible, while Manufacturing see them living it up on expenses.
R&D tend to see themselves as securing the organisation’s future, but Marketing see them as tinkering with tech toys, while Manufacturing view them as impractical boffins.
Manufacturing tend to see themselves as champions of quality, but Marketing see them as order fillers, while R&D view them as risk-averse Luddites.
Silo mentalities are exacerbated by how organisations are typically structured, with individual managers tasked with, and measured on, maximising ‘performance’ of their part of the organisation, often to the detriment of the whole.
This overly inward focus is intensified by incentives, both explicit and implicit, encouraging the managers of different silos 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 deeply entrenched mistrust and ‘turf’ wars between silos.
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 just substitutes one set of silos with another.
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.
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 & 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. 4
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 & 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’. 5
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. 6
Finding and focusing on them, and specifically their mindsets, is the low risk, high leverage way to overcome silo mentality and start creating a future-fit culture of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
How to get started
To overcome silo mindsets, first bring together a few people from each subculture, chosen because they share both a) a recognition of the need for greater cross-silo working, and b) 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. 7
Then, work with them to identify the key influencers whose mindsets, and therefore attitudes and behaviours, systemically affect everyone and everything else.
Finally, find ways together to encourage and enable the key influencers to adopt the 2D3D mindsets that systemically unlock innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
Find out more in these eight short videos, total viewing time 44 minutes, here.
Also check out pages 17 - 21 of my 22-page report on overcoming the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently thwarted efforts to create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility and adaptiveness over the past 35 years: instant download here.
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.
This four-minute video describes such perspectives further.
Donella Meadows identified mindsets as the highest leverage focus for systemic change in her seminal 1997 paper: “Leverage points - places to intervene in a system”.
This seven-minute video describes the journey to this realisation.
For more details on key influencers and how to find them, see this seven-minute video.
This six-minute video provides an overview of the 2D3D mindset.