Silo
busting toolkit
This
toolkit has two key component parts.
Part
1 Silo-busting tools
One of the most common complaints from people working in any organisation
is the difficulty they experience in working across organisational silos.
Silos prevent you from working with others as effectively as you would
like, and are created by organisational, process or behavioural obstacles.
Often
this means that, in order to work with others outside our team, department
or function, we need to send messages up the silo, and fire them across
to the appropriate point in a corresponding silo.
Alternatively, communication with people in other silos is achieved through
a complex network of informal routes, established to work around the obstacles
put in place by the official organisation structure, processes, and culture.
There
are several broad causes of organisational silos:
| Structures grow and change over time, not always necessarily in a way that best suits the work required of those sitting in them. |
| Processes evolve to meet the changing demands of the business environment. When a process breaks down, how often is a "work-around" solution created that, whilst not ideal, is a good enough quick-fix. The problem with this approach is that, eventually, a mound of sticking plasters grows over a broken or inadequate process, each one making it more difficult to see the original problem. |
| Often, these structural and process evolutions are caused by the way we work together, and the behaviours we exhibit. How often, when a process or structure is sub-optimal, do we approach colleagues in other parts of the organisation and work on how to put it right? It’s not a common occurrence – our day jobs get in the way, there are simply too many urgent pulls on our time to really get stuck into putting something right for the longer term. |
Sound familiar?
This
situation is, as we all know, a common one, but it is one which, if challenged,
can lead to the opportunity to make our working lives immeasurably better
and more effective, and that is what our silo-busting toolkit sets out
to help you to achieve. It provides the tools and techniques to help you
to break down your silos, or at least make them shallower.
To
get an idea of how deep your organisational silos are, as well as some
ideas as to why, try downloading
and completing our silo depth gauge questionnaire by clicking here.
