How to build silos and decrease collaboration on purpose
In this model communication has to go up to go across the silo. The &quot;white space&quot; in the organization is filled with poison gas (or strong cultural taboos against &quot;breaking the chain of command&quot;). Before you talk to someone you need to talk to their manager (or your manager must talk to their manager).<p>It&#x27;s an interesting thought experiment for organizational design. If you had enough information you could partition the challenges an organization faces into a set of mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive set and assign one team to each challenge. Of course the world does not stand still and your perfect decomposition of teams to problems starts to go obsolete as soon as you announce it.<p>In &quot;organize for Complexity&quot; (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B010CL1X66&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;gp&#x2F;product&#x2F;B010CL1X66&#x2F;</a>) Niels Pfaegling suggests every organization has three kinds of networks:<p>1. Formal Reporting Hierarchy: manages formal budget and compliance with laws and regulations.<p>2. Informal Networks: hold social capital and operate in the “white space.”<p>3. Expertise Networks: hold intellectual capital and procedural knowledge that enables value creation.<p>This model remove the second and third category of networks as options. I suspect that an organization with only a formal hierarchy would be neither robust or resilient in the face of changes in the outside world (e.g new competitors, new opportunities, changes in customer needs, etc..). Christopher Alexander wrote about the value of multiple overlapping networks and a messy but lively organization in &quot;A City is not a Tree&quot; (See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patternlanguage.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;cityisnotatree.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patternlanguage.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;cityisnotatree.html</a> ). I think his insights also apply to organizations.<p>I blogged about Pflaeging&#x27;s insights in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skmurphy.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;24&#x2F;7-sets-of-insights-from-organize-for-complexity-by-niels-pflaeging&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skmurphy.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;24&#x2F;7-sets-of-insights-...</a>