“We live in a world where people are expected to streamline
their careers and become specialists.” (p. 253)

Gillian Tett offers an anthropological perspective, subtitled The PERIL of EXPERTISE and the PROMISE of BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS, of why people tend to form and trust institutional silos.

Start by reading the conclusion, Connecting the Dots (p. 245) first, as Tett captures the key application lessons (pp. 247-250) from her eight shared stories:

1. It pays to keep the boundaries of teams in big organizations flexible and fluid.
2. When employees are rewarded purely on the basis of how their group performs, and when groups are competing with each other internally, they are unlikely to collaborate.
3. For everybody to share more data, and modern computing technology now makes that much easier.
4. It pays if people can periodically try to reimagine the taxonomies they use to reorganize the world, or even experiment with alternatives.
5. It can also pay to use technology to challenge our silos.

This review suggests that findings from Part I, Silos, are related to lessons learned in The Knowing-Doing Gap, Team of Teams, and Peak; and that findings from Part II, Silo Busters, align well with leadership lessons found in a typical Academy Leadership Excellence Course.

Silos | Managers

Central to Pfeffer and Sutton's The Knowing-Doing Gap is the treatment of knowledge as an active process which should be instantly and comprehensively shared, rather than a specialized, proprietary asset to hoard and hide. Tett shares the story of Sony's rapid growth after the success of the Walkman. Instead of working as a single team, however, each department started experimenting with its own ideas (p. 63). Even worse, was UBS during the financial crisis a generation ago. [UBS] had secretly accumulated $50 billion worth of U.S. subprime mortgage securities on its balance sheet, apparently without any of the top managers at UBS noticing (p. 83).

Stanley McChrystal's Team of Teams story is based on a simple, yet remarkably effective collaboration idea: Ensure that every individual team member know at least one member of every other team. Picture a spiderweb of connections informally sharing knowledge -- thereby crossing the Knowing-Doing-Gap. Territorial UBS managers were quite the opposite: These teams [of risk officers] did not talk to each other very much (p. 99). 3,000 people in charge of managing risk not communicating knowledge. What could possibly go wrong? [They] .... had failed to spot the risks building up in separate desks and departments, because different silos of gigantic institutions did not communicate with each other and nobody at the top could see the entire picture (p. 103).

Tett's historical anthropological research uncovered that psychologists have noted that our brains often operate with so-called mnemonics, or mental markers, which enable us to group our ideas and memories on certain topics to make them easy to remember (p. 29). Her observations mirror those of Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole in Peak: Rather than a supernatural use of short-term memory, the masters are recalling mental representations. These are preexisting patterns of information - facts, images, rules, relationships, and so on - that are held in long-term memory and that can be used to respond quickly and effectively in certain types of situations (p. 61). When we create organizations or groups based on narrow sets of knowledge, trouble may arise. The story of the credit crisis shows that even experts (or perhaps, especially experts) can collectively become very blind when they organize their surroundings into excessively rigid silos (p. 109).

Silo Busters | Leaders

Brett Goldstein's transition from OpenTable to the Chicago Police Department is a terrific example of crossing the Knowing-Doing Gap. Just as the different departments of a company such as Sony or UBS tended to hug data to themselves, so too the different sections of the police, FBI, or CIA tended to hoard information (p. 145). Goldstein quickly put his silicon valley experience to use. His revolutionary application of knowledge sharing collected all the reports about gang movements and put them on a centralized database, launching a technique now known as geospatial and temporal reporting (p. 154).

Facebook's secret to success, since its inception, has been to marry quantitative computing skills with soft analysis about humans' social ties and then turn this into a hard-nosed business plan (p. 169). This brings to mind Matt Lieberman's seminal 2013 Harvard Business Review article Should Leaders Focus on Results, or People? discovering that we are perceived as great leaders 72% of the time when we focus on both results and people, rather than only 14% or 12%, respectively, when focusing on just one. Facebook's culture likewise embraces contemporary findings on motivation, such as Dan Pink's, highlighting autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the top three motivators in a knowledge-based environment. In addition to validating Lieberman, Toby Cosgrove's empathy epiphany at the Cleveland Clinic embraced revolutionary collaboration. Recall collaboration as the most preferred conflict leadership strategy discovered during our Leveraging the Power of Conflict workshop. It's a combination of high assertiveness (think surgeons) and high cooperation (think nurses).

Tett's BlueMountain Capital story (Chapter 8), is perhaps the most interesting. It's founder, Andrew Feldstein, was particularly interested in how people used classification systems to organize their world (p. 224). It's reminiscent of Boone Picken's betting on the price of oil companies showcased in Daniel Yergin's The Prize. BlueMountain was organized to financially take advantage of pricing distortions between sophisticated financial products. A most interesting application of the Knowing-Doing Gap. Learn the market distortions then act to financial advantage based on the findings.

Summary

By coupling innovation and leadership, anything is possible. Breaking down silos is a good start.

We can either be mastered by our mental and structural silos
or we can try to master them instead. (p. 254)

JE | November 2024