THE IDEA
The walls that grow from within
Silos aren’t built deliberately. Nobody designs an organisation with the intention that departments won’t talk to each other, teams won’t share information, and the left hand won’t know what the right hand is doing. Silos grow. They emerge from reasonable structures - separate budgets, separate metrics, separate reporting lines - that gradually harden into isolation.
The word suggests tall, sealed containers with no connection between them. That’s the right image. Inside each silo, things work fine. The team has its own goals, its own processes, its own information. But the flows between silos - the handoffs, the shared understanding, the coordinated action - atrophy. Information that one team needs is trapped in another team’s systems. Decisions that affect the whole organisation are made with visibility into only one part.
Silos are a structural problem, not a people problem. Telling people to “collaborate more” doesn’t fix silos, because the structure rewards local optimisation and provides no mechanism for cross-silo coordination. The incentives, the metrics, the communication channels, and the decision-making authority are all organised vertically, within silos. The work that matters most often flows horizontally, across them.
IN PRACTICE
The gaps where quality goes to die
A patient moves through a hospital: admitted through A&E, treated in a specialist ward, discharged with a care plan. Three departments, three sets of records, three sets of priorities. The A&E team focuses on rapid assessment. The ward focuses on treatment. The discharge team focuses on bed availability. Each does its job well. But the transitions between them - where handoff errors occur, where information gets lost, where context disappears - are nobody’s primary responsibility. The patient’s experience is defined by the gaps between the silos, not by what happens inside them.
A software company builds a product across three teams: frontend, backend, and data. Each team has its own sprint cycle, its own backlog, its own definition of done. The frontend team builds a feature that needs data the backend team hasn’t prioritised. The backend team builds an API the data team can’t support at the required scale. Each team is on track against its own plan. The product is months behind because the plans don’t talk to each other.
A family operates in silos without recognising it. The working parent manages finances. The other parent manages the household. The children manage their own social lives. Each domain functions independently. But when the financial decision to cut costs clashes with the household decision to invest in better meals, and both clash with the teenager’s need for money for a school trip, nobody has a shared view of the whole picture. The family’s goals are misaligned because nobody owns the integration.
WORKING WITH THIS
Building bridges, not tearing down walls
The goal isn’t to eliminate silos. Some separation is necessary and healthy - teams need focus, autonomy, and clear ownership. The goal is to maintain the connections between them so that the whole system works, not just the parts.
The most effective interventions target the flows between silos rather than the silos themselves. Shared metrics that require cross-team coordination. Regular cross-functional meetings with a mandate to address handoff problems. Rotation programmes that give people experience in other parts of the system. Shared platforms that make information visible across boundaries.
Ask: where does work cross from one team to another? Those handoff points are where silos do their damage. Map them. Measure them. Make someone responsible for the quality of the handoff, not just the quality of the work on either side. The silo isn’t the problem. The absence of connection between silos is.
THE INSIGHT
The line to remember
Silos don’t fail inside. They fail between. The gaps between the parts are where the system’s performance lives - and dies.
RECOGNITION
When this is in play
You’re seeing silos when different teams describe the same situation in completely different terms. When information that one group needs is held by another group that doesn’t know it’s needed. When the customer experience is worse than any individual department’s performance metrics suggest. When cross-functional projects take disproportionately long. When the answer to “why didn’t we know about this?” is “that’s a different team.”