[skmurphy]

In this model communication has to go up to go across the silo. The "white space" in the organization is filled with poison gas (or strong cultural taboos against "breaking the chain of command"). Before you talk to someone you need to talk to their manager (or your manager must talk to their manager).

It's an interesting thought experiment for organizational design. If you had enough information you could partition the challenges an organization faces into a set of mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive set and assign one team to each challenge. Of course the world does not stand still and your perfect decomposition of teams to problems starts to go obsolete as soon as you announce it.

In "organize for Complexity" (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010CL1X66/) Niels Pfaegling suggests every organization has three kinds of networks:

1. Formal Reporting Hierarchy: manages formal budget and compliance with laws and regulations.

2. Informal Networks: hold social capital and operate in the “white space.”

3. Expertise Networks: hold intellectual capital and procedural knowledge that enables value creation.

This model remove the second and third category of networks as options. I suspect that an organization with only a formal hierarchy would be neither robust or resilient in the face of changes in the outside world (e.g new competitors, new opportunities, changes in customer needs, etc..). Christopher Alexander wrote about the value of multiple overlapping networks and a messy but lively organization in "A City is not a Tree" (See https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html ). I think his insights also apply to organizations.

I blogged about Pflaeging's insights in https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2018/10/24/7-sets-of-insights-...

[jadeforrest]

I didn't intend to argue against communication or collaboration between silos. When a leader implores the people around them to "break down silos", they're usually not being very explicit about org design or communication design or collaboration design. I argue it's important to be explicit about the collaboration model of teams -- and that can work across silos. For example, you might have a product marketing person (from the marketing silo) who is embedded in a team or a couple of teams and work closely with them. There are many collaboration models you can choose from that effectively allow teams to coordinate their work.

My next post is going to be about the structures you can use between teams and organizations.

You make a really good point about informal and expertise networks. Do you agree that good org design is often about making the value creation networks overlap to whatever degreee possible with the org structure? I enjoyed your blog post!

[skmurphy]

I think Christopher Alexander's insights into the organic structure of natural cities, what he calls a semi-lattice, is what a long lasting organization needs. It's never optimized at any moment in time but it continues to improvise, adjust, and adapt. Cities live much much longer than companies. I buy into Hayek's hypothesis that you never have enough information or intelligence to centrally plan anything above a very small scale.

I don't quite understand what your concerns are about "silo busting." I have normally seen it applied to teams that have become to locally focused, who don't care about the downstream consequences and second order effects of decisions they are making and outputs that they refuse to adjust.

Happy to chat or work on a joint write-up (contact info in profile). I don't have the sense that we are in agreement but that can establish a common ground to walk around the implications of our different perspectives.

[jadeforrest]

I love the point you're making, and perhaps what I'm trying to say isn't coming through in the piece.

Another way I've talked about this (to myself) in the past is that there is something akin to the cathedral vs the bazaar approach. One is designed, intentional, centralized, and structured. The other is informal, emergent, and distributed. I think this is what you're getting at with the organic structure of natural cities?

I believe the best organizations actually have some attributes of both -- tension between design and emergent structure.

Companies usually lack the right structure to really have emergent properties without bad results (see the excellent Coda Hale article referenced in another comment for some of the math behind this). I believe it takes some design to set things up so that emergent qualities can be successful.

You shouldn't squash things that arise between silos, like new communication pathways and even some collaboration. Those are very necessary and important. But I do think you need to keep an eye on collaboration, because it's often a sign that there are structural problems that will break down without further design.

The best designs, I think, allow for emergent qualities naturally.

I guess I also agree with Hayek's hypothesis, except that I'm not sure it applies here. For example, if your problem is that the go to market organization doesn't understand what is happening within the product development organization, that is a very solvable problem -- you can solve that many different ways -- the two that come to mind are role definition and communication channels.

A lot of what I'm advocating for is design that is compatible with how human beings work together, and sensitive to their limits.

I'm super curious if I'm missing your point or if you'd suggest adding anything to the piece to clarify this point. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!

[baxtr]

Isn't Apple organized in strict silos and at the same the time the highest valued tech company of all time?

[jadeforrest]

They're organized functionally, and are one of the only companies in the world that seem to have cracked this at scale. I've always been super curious how that works in practice.

This article argues against functional organization (as in most cases organizing functionally increases your coordination needs within a company).

[skmurphy]

My understanding is there is considerable activity and communication in the white space of the organization chart at Apple. Strict silo organizations tend to be extremely bureaucratic and slow moving.

[baud147258]

perhaps the silos are big enough (like an iphone silo, a macbook silo...) that they don't need to communicate so much between them? Or they got silos, but also effective communication channels?