Reframing silos
An existential fear of many scale ups is the thought that one day they may become “a corporate”, weighed down with bureaucracy, politicking and silos, the antithesis of their agile, collaborative, creative ideal. Of course the truth is far more messy, with these organisations needing to find an optimal balance between what one commenter calls flexibility and control. (Adizes 2002)
The aspect of these transitions that has recently interested me is the formation of silos. It struck me in recent work that these silos emerge or perhaps more accurately become more pronounced at the point where the entity is transitioning from start up to early scale up. This is problematic because at the very moment the organisation needs to look out, energy is directed to looking in. At such times it can seem that the priority has shifted from serving customers to maintaining internal tribes and the politicking between them. This can often result in a drive towards restructuring or other rational means of trying to dissolve silos. Only to find that the silos are reconsistuted under a different banner. This suggests that silos are less an outcome of structural deficiencies and more a outcome of culture.
Taking a psychodynamic perspective culture maybe viewed as ““A pattern of basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with it’s problems of external adaption and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore is to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems.” (1990, pg.111). To quote Menzies Lyth “a social defence” (1960), ritualised task performance and process which serve to protect group for it’s anxiety. Seen in this way, silos maybe considered as a response to perceived threats, where like penguins in the Antarctic, the team turn inwards and hurdle together for safety and the perception of comfort.
Systemic thinkers such as Trist, Miller and Rice suggest that these threats can most keenly be felt at boundaries of the system; the threshold between a given group and their context. Silos may then be seen as a retreat from this boundary to what may be thought of as a psychological boundary “a subjective or imagined construct that acts as a defence against the anxiety of standing at the task boundary” (Hirschhorn 1990 p.36)
In this moments it may be helpful for them or perhaps an external consultant to reconnect the group with their task, inviting them to consider how they might work together to achieve this task. They may also ask the group “what are we behaving as if we are here to do?”. This “as if” task perhaps revealing elements of the underlying anxiety that may have provoked the original retreat.
This returning is not easy but in my experience is more effective and sustainable then engaging in quick, disruptive and often futile attempts to deal with silos by purely rational means.
References:
Adizes, I. (2002) ‘The Lifestyle of Growing Organisations’, adopted from Adizes, I. Corporate Lifecycles: How and why corporations grow and die and what to do about it, NJ:Prentice Hall (1988) and Adizes, I. The Pursuit of Prime, Santa Monica:Knowledge Exchange (1996)
Hirschhorn, L. (1990) “Boundaries”, Hirschhorn, L. The workplace within. Psycho-dynamics of organizational life, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 31-39
Menzies, I.E.P (1960) “A case study in the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety. A report on a study of the nursing service in a general hospital, Human Relations, vol.13, pp. 95–121
Schein, E. (1990) Organisational Culture, American Psychologist, vol.45/2, 109–119
