5. Silos Are For Corn, Not For People

At Work with The Ready

Ask anyone about organizational silos and they’re bound to tell you they’re bad. When we run Tension and Practice exercises with clients, “We work in silos” often shows up as Tension No. 1 holding a team back. Yet like a moth to a flame, we keep gravitating toward them, building walls that are higher and more insurmountable than ever before. What gives?

In this episode of At Work with The Ready, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin dive into the bottomless ball pit that is organizational silos, exploring why we think they’ll solve all our problems, how they’re actually sabotaging organizations from being effective, and why trying to build bridges between them (rather than designing something new from the ground up) is one of the worst things we can do.

Mentioned references:

• "Ready for Anything structure episode": BNW Ep. 23
• "Hollywood Model episode": FoHR Miniseries, Ep. 1
• The Ready's Tension & Practice Cards
• "the previous episode": AWWTR Ep. 4
• value stream mapping
• Spotify chapters and guilds video Sam promised
• "IDM consent-based governance": BNW Ep. 43
• "movies and studios"
• "retro": BNW Ep. 10 with Jordan Husney

We’re on LinkedIn! Follow Rodney, Sam and The Ready for more org design nerdery and join the conversation around episodes after they air.

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