Silos Were Never the Problem
A grain silo is built to keep things apart. Different harvests, different grades, different moisture levels - mix them and you get spoilage, contamination, a store nobody can sell out of. The separation isn't a design flaw waiting to be fixed. It's the entire reason the structure exists.
It's a strange word, then, for a business to have adopted as shorthand for something broken. When a manager says two departments are "working in silos," the implication is that the separation itself is the failure, and that pulling the walls down would solve it. Nobody actually wants that outcome. You don't want catering signing off on capital works, or the exams office setting lettings prices. Departments are supposed to be separate. The usual fix people reach for - get the teams talking more, run a joint away day, build the relationship - treats the walls as the problem, when the walls were never the point.
The actual failure happens at the intersection: the moment something in one silo needs to reach the next one, and doesn't. That's a narrower, more specific problem than "we need to break down silos," and it's usually where the conversation stops before it gets useful.
In a review where the estates team had booked in the annual deep-clean and resurfacing of the sports hall floor for the exact week hospitality had confirmed the school's largest external lettings booking of the year (a two-day conference generating good income). Both bookings had gone through what each team considered the correct process. Both teams were, by any reasonable measure, on good terms. Neither calendar mentioned the other's booking, because there wasn't one calendar. There were two, kept by two teams who had simply never needed a shared moment where someone checked one against the other - well, until the week both bookings collided and somebody had to explain to a paying client why the sports hall was not available as planned.
Nobody in that scenario failed to communicate in any meaningful sense. They talked to each other regularly, about all sorts of things. What they didn't have was a defined point where a booking made by one function became something the other function needed to know about before it was confirmed. That's a different problem to "these teams don't get on," and it doesn't respond to the same fix. You could put those two teams through a joint away day every month and the sports hall would still get double-booked, because the away day isn't where the problem (or the calendars) live.
It's one of the most common things we see repeat across reviews - not two departments who dislike each other, but two departments whose good relationship is quietly doing the work a process should be doing. It holds up fine for years. It stops holding up the moment the person who happens to remember to mention things is off sick, or has just left, or genuinely didn't think a floor resurfacing counted as something hospitality needed to know about.
The instinct to treat this as a relationship problem is understandable, because when the clash happens, what you see on the surface looks exactly like a communication failure - two teams that clearly didn't tell each other something important. But the absence isn't communication in general. It's a specific, nameable moment: the point where a commitment made in one part of the building needs to become a check in another part of the building before either side is allowed to confirm.
The actual fix is almost boring by comparison to "improve communication." It's to identify the handoff, to be clear who owns checking it, to define what "checked" means before either team is allowed to confirm a booking. It's a smaller, less inspiring intervention than a joint strategy day, and it's also the version that survives someone leaving, someone being off sick, or someone simply having an off week.
It's usually the first thing we look for when we run an operational review for an organisation - not whether people are talking, but where a commitment made in one part of the building quietly becomes someone else's problem, with nobody named at the exact point it happens.
The organisations that get this right afterwards don't necessarily become chattier. The corridor relationships often look exactly the same as they did before. What's changed is smaller and harder to see from outside: a process- and somebody now has a name next to the moment where two calendars might collide, and checking it is their job rather than their luck.
About Stone Owl
Stone Owl specialises in operational insight and performance improvement for complex, heritage-led organisations.
We go beyond standard consulting to uncover the real dynamics shaping performance - not just the ones that are easy to document.
Contact us for a no obligation conversation about how we might be able to help - hello@stoneowlpartners.co.uk
*Stone Owl works with universities, independent schools, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, and heritage venues on operational process improvement and project implementation.
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