Book Summary: Silo Effect by Gillian Tett

I am actually just gonna rewrite the author conclusion on the very last chapter of the book. This is for my further reference as I borrow this book from a friend and need to send this back to her, thankyou friend!.

An important notes before all else about Silos

We cannot entirely abolish silos, any more than we could abolish electricity and maintain our modern lifestyles. We need to have specialists in the twenty-first-century world to create order in the face of extreme complexity and an ever-swelling deluge of data. …

But, when our classification systems become excessively rigid, and silos dangerously entrenched, this can leave us blind to risks and exciting opportunities

p.247

How to treat or face Silos:

1. It pays to keep the boundaries of teams in big organizations flexible and fluid. Example in this book is Facebook, where they rotate their staff to different departments. In short give room for people to be mixed with other outside their classification or silos
2. Organizations need to think about pay and incentives. If groups get their incentives only for their own group success it will risen the competitive tension and they are unlikely to collaborate
3. Information flows matter too. Everybody need to share more data and enable everyone to interpret information and let different interpretations be heard.
4. It pays if people can periodically try to reimagine the taxonomies they use to reorganize the world or even experiment with alternatives. Inherited classification system are almost never ideal.
5. Use technology to challenge our silos. Read this story for more context: https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/big-data-excerpt-how-mike-flowers-revolutionized-new-yorks-building-inspections.html

To execute one of the five above, someone need to have anthropologists mindset:

1. Use bottom-up view: understand micro-level patterns to make sense of the macro picture
2. Listen and look with an open mind. Be the flies on the wall
3. Examine parts of life that people do not want to talk about (taboo, dull, boring)
4. Compare what people say about their life and what they actually do. Gap between rhetoric and reality
5. Compare different societies culture and systems.
6. There is more than one valid ways for humans to live

This will take a lot of times and far from instant results