Teams are an important place to begin to change an organization’s culture. However, team culture is just the start; what is needed is for the culture of the whole organization to move from being transactional to being more relational to enable all organizational members to care for the whole. While it is not possible for everyone in a large organization to have the kind of warmth and caring that is possible to develop between team members, it is possible for individual team members to intentionally build close relationships with individuals in other parts of the organization.
In hierarchical organizations, there is a tendency to leave the care of the whole to those at the top. But as organizations become flatter and have a greater need to quickly and continuously change, caring for the whole necessarily becomes the responsibility of everyone in the organization. To be responsible for something, you have to have knowledge of it. Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos provides the knowledge that enables that responsibility.
There is little doubt that our organizations have become fragmented and that fragmentation is the source of many organizational problems. As the world and thus organizational issues have become more complex through technology, specialization, multiple geographies, languages, and differences in values and cultures, there is a need to both grasp and make use of the divergent perspectives that exist across an organization. As we saw with SEEQC, conversation is the mechanism that combines divergent knowledge into understandable forms for organizational members. Although any understanding necessarily resides in each individual member’s mind, it is through the webs of conversation that intersect functions and departments that members create a similar representation in their minds. The denser the web of conversation, the more connected the organization and, thus, the less siloed an organization becomes.
Webs of conversation allow individual contributors to take action while holding in their minds a representation of joint actions across the system. Asch (1952) describes this phenomenon, “There are group actions that are possible only when each participant has a representation that includes the actions of others and their relations. The respective actions converge relevantly, assist and supplement each other only when the joint situation is represented in each and when the representations are structurally similar. Only when these conditions are given can individuals subordinate themselves to the requirements of joint action. These representations and the actions that they initiate/bring group facts into existence and produce the phenomenal solidity of group process” (p. 251-252).
Weick (1993) describes the shared understanding among high-performing crews on carrier decks. On those decks, jet aircraft take off and land on a rolling platform no larger than a football field and without the benefit of radar, which could reveal their position to an enemy. Weick explains, “When they interrelated their separate activities, they did so heedfully, taking special care to enact their actions as contributions to a system rather than as simply a task in their autonomous individual jobs. Their heedful interrelating also was reflected in the care they directed toward accurate representation of other players and their contributions. And heedful interrelating was evident in the care they directed toward subordinating their idiosyncratic intentions to the effective functioning of the system” (P 193).
One of the early thinkers about the problems caused by silos was Russel Ackoff (1995), a Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, from 1964-1986. His speech, “How Not to Build the Best Automobile in the World,” has become a classic example of why conversations need to occur across different parts of an organization.
Suppose you’re building the best automobile in the world. You would go about it by first bringing each of all the car models in the world to one place. You would then hire the best automobile engineers and mechanics in the world and ask them to determine which of the cars has the best engine. If the engineers say that the Rolls-Royce has the best engine, you would pick the Rolls-Royce engine for your car. Similarly, you would ask your engineers to find out which of the cars has the best exhaust system and pick that for your future car. Using this method, you and your team would go through the necessary parts for building an automobile and in the end have a list of the best parts available in the world. You would then give the list to your engineers and mechanics and ask them to assemble the car. What do you think you will get? The answer is obvious: you don’t even get an automobile! The parts won’t simply fit together. An engine from a Rolls-Royce won’t work well with an exhaust system from a Mercedes. The performance of the automobile is dependent on the interaction of its parts, not on the performance of the parts taken separately.
His story, if an amusing exaggeration, graphically portrays the problem organizations face when they are siloed. They suffer from internal competition for resources and limited multidisciplinary teamwork within and between operations and departments. For example, when organizations are siloed, those in marketing often believe that production has no idea about the problems they face with clients. Likewise, those in production think marketing is unaware of the extensive activities needed to design and test products. And they are right! In siloed organizations, departments have little awareness or sympathy for the problems and difficulties those in other parts of their organization face. But if an organization has found a way to hold conversations cross silos, then when a problem arises, someone in marketing might say, “I have a friend over there in production; let me give her a call.” Or “I’ve learned a thing or two about how finance works from a friend in that department. Here’s what I think we might do to resolve our issue.”
Unfortunately, remote work, which has significantly increased the well-being of employees, may also be increasing silos. A study (Yang, L. et al.) examined the increase in silos that occurred when Microsoft workers became remote. Examining 61,182 emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls, and workweek hours of Microsoft employees in the first six months of 2020, the authors found that “firm-wide remote work caused the collaboration network to become more heavily siloed. It resulted in fewer ties that cut across formal business units or bridged structural holes in Microsoft’s informal collaboration network” (p. 49). They also found a decrease in synchronous communication and a related increase in asynchronous communication. The latter is problematic because it is more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information using asynchronous communication. So the problem of lack of conversation across silos may have now become an even more significant problem! Linda Gratton confirms this finding in her new book, Redesigning Work (2022).
Although many valuable conversations across silos happen by chance, for example, in the lunch room, at the coffee machine, or after work at the bar, they are insufficient and, with increased remote work, less likely. However, an organization can intentionally develop webs of conversations across silos. When each team member has close relationships with colleagues in other parts of the organization, the silos that are currently so troublesome are greatly reduced, and a sense of belonging and community grows among the whole. Organizations need to implement processes that are specifically designed to create conversation across silos.
General McChrystal (2015), while the US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan, recognized this need and redesigned his forces to become a “team of teams,” which he described as “an organization within which the relationships between constituent teams resembled those between individuals on a single team” (p. 132).
McChrystal says, “We didn’t need every member of the task force to know everyone else; we just need everyone to know someone on every team, so that when they thought about, or had to work with, the unit that bunk next door, or their intelligence counterparts in D.C., they envisioned a friendly face rather than a competitive rival” p. 128). McChrystal recognized and then designed a web of conversation across his task force.
Many researchers have studied coordination across silos and used various terms. Edmondson (2012) used the term “teaming” to talk about the need for organizations to coordinate across boundaries, calling it “teamwork on the fly.” She (2012) notes, “It cannot be overstated that people tend to focus on their own tasks, they need to give adequate attention to how their task fits into the larger picture of the collective enterprise”(p.84). Granovetter (1983) created the term “weak ties.” He explained that strong ties grow between team members. In contrast, weak ties occur between acquaintances in other parts of an organization, and weak ties are pivotal to the flow of information across an organization. Another researcher, Burt (2004), coined the term “structural holes” to explain differences in social capital. Structural holes are the empty spaces between teams. His research revealed that individuals who cross the structural holes in a network, have earlier access to a broader diversity of information, have significantly more “good ideas,” are promoted earlier, have higher salaries, and receive more positive performance reviews. Bolton, Logan, and Gittel’s (2021) theory of relational coordination proposes that “relationships of shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect help to support frequent, timely, accurate, problem-solving communication, and vice versa, enabling stakeholders to effectively coordinate their work across boundaries”(p. 2). Kegan and Lahey (2016), in An Everyone Culture, describe three organizations that have effectively reduced silos while helping individuals develop by holding daily cross-organization interactions between pairs and groups. Pentland (2015) uses the term “idea flow” to describe “the ease with which new thoughts can permeate a group. Pentland has found that the two major determinants of idea flow are “engagement” within a small group, like a team, department, or neighborhood, and “exploration”—frequent contact with other units. In other words, a team of teams”(p. 2).
Below, I describe three processes that facilitate Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos. Out of the many possibilities, I have chosen processes that I have had some involvement with so can relate in some detail. I start with Action Learning, a process designed by Revans, who was my long-time mentor and a teacher that greatly influenced my thinking.
Reginald (Reg) Revans – Action Learning
Revans had trained as a physicist in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the 1930s. There he rubbed shoulders with the greatest scientific minds of the age. He studied under Rutherford, who discovered the structure of the atom, and JJ Thomas, both considered fathers of nuclear physics. Five Nobel prize winners (or would win the prize in the future) worked at the Cavendish Laboratory while Revans was a doctoral student there. Each physicist and their doctoral students worked on a different aspect of physics. John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton worked on the first nuclear particle accelerator, which allowed them to split the atom. Edward Appleton demonstrated the existence of a layer of the ionosphere that could reliably transmit radio waves, and Sir Mark Oliphant pioneered the development of microwave radar.
A practice Rutherford initiated at the Cavendish Lab was a Wednesday afternoon tea attended by the five Nobel Prize winners and a few lucky doctoral students, Revans among them. Rutherford had one rule for the afternoon tea: no one was allowed to speak about their successes. They could only raise issues about the problems they were facing in their research which they had been unable to solve. Others would listen as the speaker described the problem and all the ways he had already tried to solve it. Then the group would puzzle together on what might explain the failure, often suggesting perspectives the problem owner would not have thought of on his own. And as often, the problem owner would leave the afternoon tea, perhaps not with an answer, but with a different way of thinking about the problem. (Revans, personal communication, 1980-1985).
Several concepts are notable in this practice at the Cavendish Lab. 1) The cleverness of Rutherford to know he needed to design a way for the scientist to learn from others who were working within another field of physics (with the small inducement of iced cakes and tea). 2) His recognition that each had a different knowledge base, with a different set of problem-solving approaches that could be useful to others. 3) The humility and willingness of these great men to lay out their failures and seek the help of others. Rutherford created a process for collaboration that facilitated the birth of the new science of nuclear physics.
Later, when Revans became the Director of Education at the National Coal Board (from 1945-1950), he implemented a process much like what he had participated in at Cambridge as a doctoral student. He called it Action Learning, which brought together small groups of managers from different coal pits. The managers met every few weeks to help each other with the problems each was facing. Revans saw that what was needed was not for experts to tell the managers what to do, but for them to have the opportunity to learn from their own experiences through collective reflection on their actions and outcomes. He believed that people, through in-depth discussion, could not only resolve any problem but could also help each other develop themselves as human beings. And indeed, the coal pits that adopted action learning reported a 30 percent increase in productivity.
The current practice of Action Learning (Dixon 1998, Pedler and Burgoyne 2008), based on Revan’s work, brings together small groups of 4-6 people from different parts of an organization, who meet twice a month for three to four months to support each other in addressing a real-time challenge each is facing in their own work. During the meetings, each person has their own ‘airspace’ to discuss a challenge they face with the team they lead; other team members adopt a helpful questioning approach (no advice and no solutions). As a result of the joint reflection, each individual decides on an action to take before the next meeting. When they reconvene two weeks later, each member reports on the outcome of their action and again thinks with the team about the next action to try. One of the main premises of action learning is that learning and action require each other. Revans (1980) often noted that there is no learning without action and no (sober and deliberate) action without learning.
As an example of the kind of learning that can happen in an action learning team, I recall an incident in a large oil company where I introduced action learning across multiple departments. This particular team had already met together four times over a period of a couple of months. One of the members, Jim, a newly promoted manager, was explaining his difficulties with a manager in another department with whom he needed to collaborate. When it was Jim’s turn to tell his action learning partners about his recent problem, he said, “The guy just won’t listen. When I try to explain, he cuts me off. He never lets me finish. I’m trying to figure out how to get him to listen to me so we can solve our mutual problems.” In the preceding four sessions, the action learning team had gained a great deal of knowledge about each other from their interactions. In response to the problem Jim had just explained, one of the team members said, “Jim, I’ve noticed in our group, sometimes when you tell us about something, you go on for quite a while, often repeating yourself, as you try to get your thoughts together. Do you think that also happens when you talk with this manager that is cutting you off?” Jim thought about that and agreed that he probably did go on and on with the manager. With this insight, Jim worked out what to do about his problem. The action learning team members knew Jim well enough to reflect with him on his interaction patterns. They had developed relationships that allowed them to speak honestly with each other. And Jim felt trusting enough to tell the group about the problem and think seriously about their observations.
Typically, multiple action learning teams meet concurrently across an organization. Some organizations find it helpful to have a coach meet with each team for the first couple of meetings to help them get started. In other situations, an organization may hold a large group meeting for all potential participants to explain how action learning functions before members are assigned to teams that then work independently.
Silos are reduced through action learning teams because, as each team member explains their situation, others learn about that part of their organization, its tasks, the problems it faces, and its members' knowledge and skills. Meeting over several months builds relationships that endure long after the team has ended its series of meetings.
There are several other forms action learning can take. For example, Revans built an exchange of teams between London hospitals, with a team from one hospital going to another hospital to address its problems. In his work in Belgium, he created teams from an organization in one sector, for example, banking, that spent time with another sector, for example, city government, to address their problems. There are many ways to make use of Revans ideas, but the practice described in detail above is the most useful for reducing organizational silos.
Henry Mintzberg – CoachingOurselves
Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian academic teaching business and management. He is the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has taught since 1968. Like Revans, Mintzberg believes that practicing managers learn by reflecting on their own experience. In 2004, Mintzberg published, Managers Not MBAs which details what he believes is wrong with management education. He views prestigious graduate management schools like Harvard Business School and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania as obsessed with numbers in their overzealous attempts to make management a science. He sees this as damaging the discipline of management. What he believes is needed is post-graduate programs that educate practicing managers using insights from their own problems and experiences.
Mintzberg has used this philosophy to design a Management Program at McGill University. He believes that practicing managers can benefit enormously by reflecting on their own experience and sharing the insights with each other. The managers in his program stay on the job and come into the classroom periodically for 10-day modules—five in all, over 16 months. He notes these modules focus not on the functions of business (marketing, finance, etc.) but on the mindsets of managing: reflection (managing self), analysis (managing organizations), worldliness (managing context), collaboration (managing relationships), and action (managing change).
Phil LeNir, a practicing manager and, as it happens, Mintzberg’s son-in-law, bought into Mintzberg’s philosophy and wanted to make it work within his engineering organization. Partnering with Mintzberg, they jointly developed CoachingOurselves, based on the idea that managers learn the most from sharing their experiences with each other. CoachingOurselves is a peer learning process that brings together small groups of 4-6 managers from different parts of an organization once every two weeks, for six or more weeks, to participate in 90-minute guided discussions, online or in person. There are some hundred potential topics for groups to choose from, depending on their needs, for example, Rewards and Recognition, Decision Making, Enhancing Communication, etc. Each group chooses the topics of most interest to them. The topics are based on the work of recognized thinkers in the field of management. But the written guidance is minimal, perhaps a page of a thought leader’s ideas, then questions for the group to discuss that connects their own experience to the topic. This format creates the space for participants to have conversation, share concerns, draw on others’ experiences, and in the process, develop connections across silos.
One participant, contrasting CoachingOurselves with a highly facilitated course he had recently participated in, said, “I didn't like it (the highly facilitated course) at all because the technology took away my freedom to be me. It started telling me what to do, what to say, what not to say. So, of course, I reverted to, ‘Okay, well, I'll just do as I'm told.’ And then I'm not really doing what I need to do to have some productive outcome from the time I'm spending going through all this.”
Fujitsu’s Social Science Laboratory in Japan, with about 1100 employees, provides system integration and IT solutions to large organizations. The Laboratory has been implementing CoachingOurselves for 14 years. Over time they became interested in finding out, “What’s the impact on this organization when we put this kind of social learning process in place?” Calculating the benefit of any social/learning program is difficult, but the Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory had the research capability to do so. They gathered some impressive data that supports Conversation Across Silos. Here is what they found.
CoachingOurselves at Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory started in 2007. Figure 1 shows that the percentage of employees that participated in CoachingOurselves from 2007 through 2015 impacted the increase in sales and profit. The red line in Figure 1 shows the participation rate. The green bar represents profit, and the blue bar sales. Figure 1 reveals that until the percentage of employees participating in CoachingOurselves grew to about 30% around 2012, there was little change in profit. Above the 30% participation rate, profit steadily increased as participation in CoachingOurselves increased. By 2015, when 60% of employees had participated, profits had increased 90% over what it had been in 2007. The data in Figure 1 are correlational; that is, Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory was becoming more profitable, at the same time participation in CoachingOurselves was increasing. Interesting, but not compelling evidence that CoachingOurselves was the cause of the increase, e.g., correlation, not causation. However, Figure 2 leaves little doubt that causation, not correlation, resulted in the profit increase.
Figure 2 shows the business results of each of the six different departments within Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory against their participation rate in CoachingOurselves, first for 2014 and then for 2015. The participation rate between the six departments ranges from just under 30% to over 80%. What becomes clear in Figure 2 is that when over 30% of department members met together in 30 90-minute sessions over nine months, they were able to work together in a way that benefited Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory’s performance. Causation, not correlation!
The question is, what was happening in those 90-minute sessions that gave rise to the increase in profits? Possible factors that made those interactions impactful were:
1) using the content as a spur to talk about the problems they were facing in their work,
3) through discussion, helping each other address those problems,
4) forming connections and friendships through repeated meetings,
5) gaining in-depth knowledge about other parts of Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory through their conversations which then served them when they faced problems with those other parts.
Pentland has conducted studies at a number of companies that support the findings at Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory. He outfits “employees with badges that produce detailed, quantitative measures of how people interact. At a Chicago-area IT consultancy, he collected a billion measurements in one month—1,900 hours of data—and found that engagement was the central predictor of productivity, exceeding individual intelligence, personality, and skill. The teams with the highest levels of internal engagement and external exploration had much higher levels of creative output.” Fast Company p.2
A final example of Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos
is University Hospital in San Antonio, Texas. University Hospital is a teaching hospital connected to the Division of Hospital Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio. The hospital is a Level 1 trauma center with 35 surgical suites over two floors and 420 private patient rooms. It has been ranked Best Hospital in the region by US News & World Report for five years in a row.
But like all hospitals, it has faced similar and pervasive problems: nurses with too much to do, doctors who can spend only a minimal amount of time with patients, and too little communication among the healthcare team caring for patients. As anyone who has been hospitalized knows, traditional teaching hospital care involves 1) physician-led rounds where the conversation among your nurse, physician, and students is about you, not with you; 2) hospital staff that come and go during the day, including the Physical Therapist, Nutritionist, Pharmacist, Social Worker, Respiratory therapist, Phlebotomists, etc.; 3) you answer the same questions over and over, and often receiving conflicting information from the different healthcare professionals that come in and out; 4) the plan for your day is not transparent to you, you don’t know when or if you will be sent for tests, or when you will again see your doctor; 5) the loss of the sense of control is frustrating and sometimes scary.
Recognizing these problems, as early as 2004, University Hospital began working to provide better coordination across silos. But it was not until hospital personnel began implementing multidisciplinary rounds, called Collaborative Care, that change began to happen. Collaborative care has improved care at University Hospital for both the hospital care team and the patients.
Multidisciplinary rounds are not where the changes began at University Hospital, but they are the change that is most visible to patients. So put yourself in the position of a patient, lying in a hospital bed after a serious operation, and in comes a whole team of medical professionals, a doctor, pharmacist, nurse, physical therapist, hospitalist, respiratory therapist, nutritionist all standing or sitting around your bed at the same time. These healthcare professionals take time to introduce themselves one by one, and they ask you about yourself, not just your illness, but also about your work and hobbies. They want to get to know you. They also introduce themselves to your family, that are present in the room, and ask about them as well. That first meeting is the beginning of building a healthcare team that includes you and your family.
During that first meeting, a few team members sit down to be at eye level as they talk with the patient. Patients soon realize that the care team members are talking with them, not at them or about them. And perhaps most important, they are listening. (Ultimately, caring may be more about listening than talking – as humans, we are aware of the caring of others when we sense that we are being heard). The interaction among those around the bedside begins to feel like a conversation among friends. Everyone understands the language in the room; none of the medical team uses specialized jargon that only healthcare professionals can interpret. As the conversation continues, the patient, family, and healthcare professionals jointly develop the next steps of care, written on a large wall chart – the “goal board” so that everyone can see the plan.
The attendance of a full team of healthcare professionals is not a one-time occurrence. They will return again tomorrow to review the plan. Each time they return, a stronger relationship builds among all team members. This closeness is evident from their gestures and expressions and is noticeable to the patient as they watch healthcare professionals lingering for a moment to say goodbye or to touch their hand.
I had the opportunity to work with the hospital along with the originators of Collaborative Care, Paul Uhlig (2018), a cardiothoracic surgeon, and Ellen Raboin, (a healthcare researcher/consultant. As people in the hospital attempt to explain what Collaborative Care is, I frequently hear them tell this story that illustrates why it works so well.
This was a patient who was not doing well after heart surgery. He was a farmer who lived alone in the woods. His nearest neighbor lived several miles away. His operation had gone very well, and everything measurable about his recovery was coming along fine. His laboratory values, chest x-ray, and vital signs were normal. But he was not eating well and was not walking. He was growing weaker and beginning to have difficulty coughing and clearing his lungs. Everyone on the care team could see his deterioration and worried about him. No one knew what should be done differently.
One morning during collaborative rounds, someone noted on the goal board that the patient had a dog. When the dog was mentioned, the patient’s eyes lit up for a brief moment, then tears came to his eyes. The social worker comforted him, and the team listened attentively as she asked about his dog. He said he loved his dog. His dog was his family. When he came into the hospital, he had left his dog with his neighbor, but he had not been able to talk with his neighbor since his surgery. He was worried sick about his dog. What was most important to him was to make sure his dog was OK, but he didn’t know how to do that. His worry occupied his thoughts. The goal of finding out how his dog was doing was placed on the goal board in his room, beside the other goals for his treatment. Knowing the dog's importance to him, the team sent a sheriff to check with his neighbor. His dog was fine. The next day the patient was much better, and several days later, he was able to go home.
I heard many similar stories illustrating how meaningful conversations between the whole care team and patients revealed a way to speed healing and express caring. One patient wanted to be well enough to watch her son play in a special football game. A father knew his hospitalized daughter needed a special blanket she always slept with. Another family knew their sister was having a stroke because her unusual symptoms were like their brother’s. A son knew his father was having a life-threatening reaction that wasn’t listed as an allergy. The Collaborative Care team believes having time to talk with patients and their families brings a needed perspective to their treatment.
Although a physician and head nurse participate in collaborative care rounds, they do not run the meetings at the bedside. A nurse, social worker, or other staff might facilitate the discussion. But as the meeting moves, leadership continually shifts to the person with the most knowledge about the particular issue under discussion. For example, the pharmacist will take the lead if the patient asks a medication question. Over time, and through distributed leadership, team members appreciate each of their colleagues’ wealth of knowledge. That understanding and the respect it generates significantly increases the insights available to the team for problem-solving.
The change began at University Hospital not with multidisciplinary rounds but with several months of planning conversations among healthcare providers from different disciplines. The conversations were about how they wanted multidisciplinary rounds to function and how to make them happen. They ran simulations to study how they might talk together in an actual patient room. Often during these reflective discussions, they were joined by Paul or Ellen, not to tell them how to resolve the issues they faced but to add perspective from other hospitals that had worked through the same problems.
When Collaborative Care began holding multidisciplinary rounds for real, two other kinds of collaboration meetings were held that were central to moving from what had been a very hierarchical system to distributed leadership. These two meetings were 1) a daily 30-minute reflection meeting that the multidisciplinary team held as soon as rounds were finished and 2) a system meeting that included hospital administrators and care providers.
The content of the daily reflection meeting was not about patients; that discussion had already taken place in its fullness at the bedside. The reflection meeting was about working more productively as a care team and engaging patients and their families more effectively. The reflection meeting was critical because any team functioning in a traditional setting will have a great deal to unlearn and learn to work effectively as a Collaborative Care team.
The system meetings, held once a week, were a place for longer-term planning and organizational change related to issues of structure, staffing, learning, and leadership to be addressed. For example, visiting hours might need to be altered to allow family members to be in the hospital during rounds; how nurses were assigned to beds might need to change so that a consistent and co-located team could work and learn together.
Paul and Ellen hold that the best way to begin creating a Collaborative Care environment is to have weekly system meetings. They are where the relationships between those interested in collaborative care are formed. And the nature of the relationship between multidisciplinary care team members is what makes it work.
University Hospital has calculated a 0.7-day reduction in stay in those units engaged in Collaborative Care. That means $1.5M in avoidable costs and the treatment of 780 more patients over six months. But that outcome is not the most important; rather most important is that the patients feel more in charge of their own care and feel respected as human beings, not just a disease. And perhaps, surprisingly, caregivers feel greater satisfaction in their work. (personal correspondence)
In Collaborative Care, Conversations across Silos occur in many formats that increase participants’ understanding of the whole system and how the parts of the system interact. That understanding grows through daily rounds at patients’ bedsides but also in the daily reflection meetings that follow the rounds, the weekly meetings of the whole system, and the practice meetings in the months of planning. You can’t change just one thing because everything is connected in a system.
Rules of Thumb for Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos
I draw on these three examples to identify the characteristics of Conversations to Reduce Fragmentation Across Organization Silos and to suggest how they do so. Conversations across silos spreads the culture of caring and belonging that was developed in conversation for teams and, in addition, strengthens coordination across the whole of the organization, reducing the fragmentation caused by silos. Like in neural networks, the more you stimulate connections with an organization, the stronger they grow. The stronger the connections, the more resilient the organization becomes. This is the principle of the collaboration culture. Collaboration and institutional learning go hand in hand.
A Mix of Employees
Conversations across silos bring together people from across an organization in conversational formats that provide opportunities for them to understand how other parts of an organization function. One participant of CoachingOurselves noted, “We’ve worked in the same organization for years, but I never truly understood what you did until we started having these sessions.” The mix of employees also improves problem-solving, given that it brings together people with different specialties, environments, and investigative approaches. In problem-solving, diversity trumps homogeneity, as we saw with the scientist at the Cavendish Lab. Diversity enables the participants to find more and more effective solutions to each other’s problems.
Meeting Multiple Times
For members of these groups to openly share their concerns, mistakes, and needs, they must develop trust in one another. Creating trust takes time. Nilsson and Mattes (2015) describe two types of trust, Initial and Gradual. Initial trust is based on a) belonging to a group, b) information about team members from third parties, c) trusting the system, or d) perceived shared interest. On the other hand, gradual trust results from repeated first-hand interactions over time. Gradual trust is based on a) experiencing another’s capability to perform a specific task, b) that person’s reliability to perform the agreed-upon task and c) witnessing the integrity and kindness of another in the work situation. The conversations in the above examples occur in multiple meetings with enough time and regularity for members to build gradual trust. With that trust, participants experience the immediate benefit of helping each other address current problems and the long-term benefit of knowing others well enough to call on them for advice about conflicts or difficulties between parts of the organization.
Small Groups As the Unit of Learning
Small groups are where most of the learning in an organization takes place. But for that to happen, groups need to be small enough (4-7 participants) to enable people to get to know each other and build trusting relationships. Groups must be large enough to contain diverse views yet small enough for members to engage each other. Engaging each other means members have time to state their ideas and the reasoning behind them fully. And then sufficient time for others to ask questions that helps them gain a deeper understanding of what has been said. When a group exceeds seven or eight, it tends to no longer be in conversation; instead, the exchange becomes more like turn-taking, with each member declaring their perspective to the others without exploring meaning, which potentially leads to developing new thinking.
Personalized Learning
The learning that results from conversations across silos is unique to that group of participants. The topics of conversation emerge from the situations participants are currently facing. The extended time over weeks allows participants to decide upon an action to take, take that action, and then reflect with others on the outcome they achieved. Learning is most effective when there is time for the complete action-reflection cycle. As John Dewey famously said, “We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience.” It is while learning from each other that relationship grows. It is difficult to be helpful to another person without caring about them, having compassion for them, and understanding. Without the human element, help becomes formulaic.
No Moderator Or Appointed Leader
Facilitators are unnecessary and often get in the way of learning and relationship-building. If a group is on its own, which they are in the CoachingOurselves modules, Action Learning, and Collaborative Care, the group has to get good at establishing its own social norms. Phil LeNir notes, “If you always have facilitators, aside from it being costly and unscalable, the group never does what we as human beings are good at – establishing social norms to learn and work together. When facilitators are present, it is taken out of our hands.” (personal correspondence, 2022) In the end, it is not having shared norms that is most important; it is the joint creation of shared norms. A group that creates shared norms over time is also free to alter them when needed and thus improve their effectiveness.
The Percentage of Participation Matters
The larger the percentage of an organization’s members participating in conversations across silos, the greater the impact on the organization. This rule of thumb was evident in the Fujitsu Social Science Laboratory study. But it is also common sense that the greater the density of the web of conversations across an organization, the better the organization knows itself. The members of an organization must know each other if those members are to participate in the governance of the whole. With the expanded understanding of other parts of the organization that occurs through conversation across silos, members can help guide an organization toward agreed-upon goals
Group Based Learning
The goal of conversations across silos is to continuously improve organization performance by reducing fragmentation while expanding the culture of care and belonging developed in teams. With this rule of thumb, I am questioning a belief, long held by organizations, that an organization will improve by providing individual training. That might work for technical training, but as Heifetz (1994) has noted, it doesn’t work well for adaptive issues. Adaptive issues, such as how to work together effectively, deal with conflict, make better decisions, bring about needed change, etc., are embedded in an organization’s culture and are learned and unlearned through the daily conversations among organization members. Too often, we have seen that nothing much changes when individual learners return to the system after a training program. Organizational performance and culture are both group efforts. Learning with and from each other is more productive for individuals and the organization than individuals learning separately. Conversation across silos allows members to discover that they are not isolated in thought – that others have similar ideas. Changing a culture within teams and then between units of an organization is a big step toward changing an organization’s culture.
As these rules of thumb illustrate, we know how to reduce the silos that fragment our organizations. Perhaps the difficulty lies not in a lack of knowledge but in an underlying and possibly unrecognized belief that silos are a natural aspect of organization life, a nuisance that we simply have to put up with.
To conclude, conversations across silos have the possibility of benefiting an organization in five ways, 1) reducing organizational fragmentation by helping each part of the organization understand how it is connected to other parts, 2) becoming a source of new ideas, new ways of thinking, and problem-solving for the team by helping team members learn about the knowledge individuals in other parts of the organization have, 3) extending a culture of care and belonging beyond teams, 4) developing long term relationships that are sustained long after group meetings end, 5) and with a broader perspective on organizational issues, team members can help to guide and direct the whole of the organization, which is the topic of the next section.
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