Boundless

1Silos Kill!: The Limitations of “Acquire and Retain”

“Some influences stand out like a landmark and leave a traceable legacy with evident heirs. But the most profound influences soak into the cultural landscape like rain and nourish everyday consciousness. Such an influence is likely to go undetected, for it comes to seem the way things have always been, the natural or even the only way to look at the world.”

—Rebecca Solnit (1999, p. 85)

Our businesses are organized to achieve economies of scale. The remarkable thing is that they nearly all go about it in the same way. They acquire and centralize as many resources as they can; then manage, process, and improve them as uniformly as possible, getting the most amount of work done for the least possible direct cost to themselves. We call this the silo mindset and it has been extraordinarily successful. But this model has other costs that are only recently being recognized, such as unresponsiveness to customer needs, overproduction and other forms of waste, and externalities or costs that are borne not by the silo itself but by the broader system of which it is a part. In other words, the silos model is fast becoming a victim of its own success.

Consider the following headlines: “How to Smash a Silo” (Fenn, 2023), “Why Data Silos Are Bad for Business” (Scott, 2018), “The Negative Impact of Business Process Silos on Productivity” (ISS Group, 2021), and “Smash Silos to Improve Cross Functional Communication” (Kessinger, 2017 ...