[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!