Hi there, Matts Rehnstrom here. Shaper of Business Excellence. In this video, I’m going to give you the number one prescription for the Silo Syndrome.
As you know, all the advice I give you is based on my 25 years of experience helping different organizations to improve. The main thing that I see as an obstacle for improvement work is this Silo Syndrome. That is where everyone is doing their own thing. If you’re going in to do an improvement work, you see that everyone is doing their own improvement work.
When all Departments Do Their Own Improvement Work
So one departments they are improving. The other department they are also improving, but they don’t talk to each other. And in an earlier video I mentioned this as, as we say in Sweden; that we asphalt, or paving, our cow paths. Because everyone will pave their own ways, maybe improving a little bit, but they will not reach the huge success that we could if we work together.
It is like one organization is having a view scope. You know when we were kids, or maybe even as adults, we sit in a boat, we have a view scope and we look underwater, we look down and we see the bottom, so one friend will say “Oh the fish, you see it?“ and you will say “Yeah, I saw it. I saw it. It was here.” But your friend that is over there, or you in there, you’re also sitting there and watching it. “Oh, here comes another fish. I saw it. Yeah, there’s a lot of fish down here,”
Missing Out on the Big Picture
But I don’t see the same thing as you do and you don’t see the same thing as I do. And in the organizations that we have, the fish is going around here. Those fish are our customers in the business, so we don’t see the whole flow.
We just see what we see through this little view scope that we have, which is our silo, so the prescription for improvement work then, that I was promising to give you. That is first of all make a workshop where you collect as many people that you can in management positions and as high up as you can in your organization.
My Prescription for Preventing Silo Improvement Work
- Run a workshop on a high level
- Look at the end-to-end process
- Look at the improvements from the customers’ point of view
- Bonus: Your process might stretch outside your own organization
During that workshop you go through the whole business. You go through and you look at the end-to-end processes that you have, you make sure that everyone shares that view of your organization and when you have found the end-to-end processes in your organization, you look at it from the customer’s view.
So first of all, make a workshop as high up as you can into organization. Second of all make that, or during that workshop, you’re looking into the end-to-end processes that you have in your organization. A third of all you’re looking at it from the customer’s perspective.
And a bonus one that I can give you a prescription. Is that the process, the end-to-end process. It might not just be within your organization. It could be outside your business. It could involve other businesses as well because if you’re looking in that view scope in your department, or someone in their apartment, and someone else looking at in their department.
The same is when you’re looking at the whole process flow, and needs that the customers have, only from your business, your organization’s view. It might be higher up. It might be a larger view scope, but it’s still just one silo where the fish is swimming from one side to another and you need to see the whole flow.
So that is my tip for today and my prescription to you for having, if you’re having it, which I think most all of us have, this silo syndrome. So good luck and let’s go shape our business to excellence.
