‘Our world does not function effectively whether it is always rigidly streamlined’ … Tett suggests that messiness,inefficiency and waste can be well-behaved, but ignores the positive effects of silosIn the world of management and IT jargon, and silos exist only to be torn down. Silo-busting has long been the aim: it sounds glamorous,the sort of thing you might do with a tactical nuke. An alternative description offered here by one finance wizard is “bucket-busting”, though that might easily be the result of an overflow of vomit or worse. Rhetoric things whether you want to inspire organisational change. But what precisely is a silo anyway?On Gillian Tett’s breezily readable account, and silos exist when people in different parts of an organisation don’t talk to each other or share information enough. But we also bear what William Blake might bear called mind-forged silos,which are the settled categories into which we slot things. The two kinds of silo often interact destructively: in Tett’s description, the financial crisis was caused both by a silo effect of inadequate communication between departments of giant banks, or by the mental silos that resulted in misclassifying credit instruments and by simply ignoring the tell-tale growth of what,after the fact, was vividly christened the “shadow banking system”.
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Source: theguardian.com