Template:Silos capsule: Difference between revisions

Silos, as anyone who has worked in financial services will know, are endemic. They are no regrettable externality of a modern organisation, but a ''fundamental ideological choice'' that it makes. “[[Downskilling]]” and specialisation — and by “specialisation” I mean “atomising a process into a myriad of functions so limited in scope that they can be carried out by ''non'' specialists, following a [[playbook]]” — is no accident, but precisely what our [[modernist]], [[reductionist]], data-obsessed times demand. Not an accident, but ''one waiting to happen''.

Silos also give everyone grand pooh-bah titles and diffused responsibility. Co-heads of ''anything'' is either a failure of nerve (the case here) or a Spartan fight to the death to [[Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens|see who is strongest]] (the [[Goldman]] approach), but the more practical point is that, {{shitfan}}, it is not co-grand-pooh-bahs you want directing the traffic — far better to lock them in a dark cupboard, actually — but [[subject matter expert]]s with time to think and space to act who can figure out what has happened, what needs to happen, and how best to make it happen.

Silos are kryptonite to subject matter experts: there is a [[reverse-emergence]] problem here though. If you diffuse one [[subject matter expert]]’s skills among five [[school-leavers from Bucharest]], you ''lose'' something: you trade a somewhat expensive ''capacity for a small amount of magic'' for a whole lot of cheap faffing around: lateral escalation. misunderstanding; confusion. If you cut open the golden goose, you do not get an infinite supply of golden eggs.