The Silo Effect

by Gillian Tett

  A third lesson is that information flows matter too. The stories of UBS or Sony show that when departments hug information to themselves, huge risks can build up. One solution to this is for everybody to share more data, and modern computing technology now makes that much easier. However, it should be stressed that you cannot combat silos simply by opening the data spigot and letting information spill out. What is equally important is to create a culture that enables everyone to interpret information—and let different interpretations be heard. This is not easy to do when there are teams of experts who use complex technical language that only they understand, or when they refuse to listen to alternative ideas. Or as Paul Tucker (formerly of the Bank of England) points out, what big institutions really need are “cultural translators,” people who are able to move between specialist silos and explain to those sitting inside one department what is happening elsewhere. “You don’t need everyone to be a cultural translator—perhaps just 10 percent of the staff, or so. Most people can be specialists, and you need different types of specialists,” argues Tucker. “But any large organization needs to have somebody, or some people, who can play that translation role because they are literate in a number of specialisms.” Mutual respect for different “languages”—be that economics jargon, trader-speak, or anything else—is important too. “It is about epistemology, about what counts as knowledge. If someone is saying something in a different language from the one you use, that does not mean you should just ignore it.”

  A fourth lesson is that it pays if people can periodically try to reimagine the taxonomies they use to reorganize the world, or even experiment with alternatives. Most of the time, most of us simply accept the classification systems we have inherited. But these are almost never ideal: they can become outdated, or end up serving just narrow interest groups. At Sony, the engineers did not question their silos, and ended up missing huge opportunities to innovate as a result. The economics profession before 2008 suffered a similar flaw, and as a result economists failed to see the scale of leverage that was developing in the system. But at Cleveland Clinic, doctors have tried to flip their mental maps of how medicine should be organized upside down, to visualize the world around how the patient experiences health, rather than how a doctor is trained. The same principle could be applied to numerous other businesses. Media groups, for example, are often arranged into departments defined according to how journalists have traditionally organized themselves (as, say, “political reporters” or “banking reporters” or “sub-editors” or “writers”) rather than how consumers experience the news. Banks tend to offer their financial products in departments defined by bankers, not investors or savers. Industrial companies often organize themselves according to how products were made fifty or a hundred years ago, or the different skills that engineers have, rather than around the problems that their modern customers want to solve. If those patterns are rigid, they risk becoming outmoded or clumsy and cause people to do foolish things. Changing them can spark innovation or, at the very least, a broader perspective.

  And a fifth lesson is that it can also pay to use technology to challenge our silos. Computers do not automatically remove silos from our lives. Far from it. The sheer volume of digital data that now exists in our system forces us to constantly keep creating new systems to organize data, which inevitably forces us—or, more accurately, prompts computers—to put information into specific buckets. But the beauty of computers is that they are not born with indelible mental biases. They can be programmed to rearrange information in different ways and test out different ways of organizing data. Indeed, it is usually dramatically faster and easier to rearrange computer bytes than people, particularly given the power of data processing in modern computing systems (and the fact that data, unlike real-life people, cannot rebel against an order or foot-drag). The story of the New York skunkworks shows how effective this process of data reorganization can sometimes be in driving subtle, but potentially important, policy shifts. So does the tale of Brett Goldstein’s battle to cut the murder rate in Chicago. But these stories also reveal an important caveat. Data does not reorganize itself, or break down silos by itself; somebody needs to program the computers. What is needed above all is a big dose of human imagination. Like that displayed by Mike Flowers.

  SO HOW WE GET that all-important sense of imagination that enables us to challenge classification systems, be that in cyberspace or real life? One potential tool is to borrow some of the principles of anthropology. This does not mean studying far-flung exotic cultures, lurid rituals, or dusty bones. As I explained in Chapter One, these days anthropologists are as likely to work in complex industrialized settings as non-Western cultures. Moreover, the discipline is not really defined by the types of people that anthropologists happen to study (be they Berber nomads, Swiss bankers, or anyone else). Instead anthropology is best viewed as a mind-set, or a way of looking on the world. It has several defining traits. First, anthropologists tend to take a bottom-up view of life. They usually get out of their offices and experience life on the ground, trying to understand micro-level patterns to make sense of the macro picture. Second, they listen and look with an open mind and try to see how all the different pieces of a social group or system interconnect. They tend to be flies on the wall. Third, because anthropologists try to look at the totality of what they see, they end up examining the parts of life that people do not want to talk about, because they are considered taboo, dull, or boring. They are fascinated by social silences. Fourth, they listen carefully to what people say about their life, and then compare it to what people actually do. Anthropologists are obsessed with the gap between rhetoric and reality.

  Fifth, anthropologists often compare different societies and cultures and systems. A key reason they do this is because comparison can help illuminate the underlying patterns of different social groups. That is useful when looking at another culture. It is also invaluable if we want to understand our own society. When we immerse ourselves in another world, we not only learn about the “other” but can look back on our own lives with fresh eyes and a clearer perspective. We become insider-outsiders.

  The sixth and most important point about anthropology, though, is that the discipline celebrates the idea that there is more than one valid way for humans to live. That sounds obvious. But humans in any society tend to assume that their own culture is natural. Our own social rules and classification systems feel so normal, if not inevitable, that we rarely devote much effort to thinking about them at all. But anthropologists know that the classification systems we use to organize our worlds and minds are not inevitable; they are usually a function of nurture not nature. We can change our cultural patterns if we really want to do that. We can also change the formal and informal rules that we use to organize the world. Or we can if we stop and think.

  These six principles from anthropology can offer a good perspective for thinking about silos. As I have argued repeatedly in this book, we cannot live without silos in the modern world. But we can avoid succumbing to the problems they pose. Looking at how we organize the world with an insider-outsider perspective—as anthropologists do—is one way to combat the risks. Being an insider-outsider enables us to see our classification systems in context. It also helps us to see the overlaps, the underlaps, the issues that fall between the cracks of our taxonomies, or the ways that our boundaries have become dangerously rigid or outdated. Being an insider-outsider helps us see the risks of sclerotic boundaries. And it can also give us the imagination to mix up our borders, imagine a different world, and seek innovation “on the edge” of our classification systems and organizations, as John Seely Brown, the scientist, has observed.3

  You do not need to be an anthropologist to get that insider-outsider view. Having that training certainly helps (and I think that many organizations could benefit enormously from hiring an anthropologist to look at how they operate). However, some people get that all-important insider-outsider perspective on life because they have b
een tossed across borders, or moved between different worlds. Sometimes this is accidental. Mike Flowers never expected to learn about data mixing in Baghdad. Sometimes the journey is deliberate. When Brett Goldstein, in Chapter Five, plunged into the police department, he was voluntarily jumping out of one cozy world into a much less familiar one, in a manner that later enabled him to break down silos in an innovative way. But change does not always need to involve a dramatic switch in career. We can temporarily jump into a different world by changing the information and news we consume, moving our location, talking to different people and trying to imagine how life might look through their eyes. “I think we need to do a mental exercise sometimes, and imagine that we are at the optician’s, with those old-fashioned eye frames that they used to drop different lens into,” suggests Bob Steel, the former deputy mayor of New York. “I sometimes try to imagine slotting a different lens into my glasses and asking what I would see. How the world would look through somebody else’s eyes.” We can also travel to collide with new people and ideas. “The Internet provides priceless access to a world of ideas and information. But even the Internet is no substitute for ‘innovation trips’ and safaris to strange places to encounter new ideas ‘in the wild,’ ” argues Cleveland Clinic’s Toby Cosgrove, who urges his doctors to travel to conferences, other hospitals, and nonmedical sites. “Ambitious individuals in every field need to close their laptops, get out of their chairs, and take trips to explore new places and meet people who are doing things differently.” Above all, we need to leave ourselves open to collisions with people and ideas outside whatever silo we inhabit. If we make space in our lives to collide with the unexpected, we often end up changing our cultural lens.

  THE CURSE OF EFFICIENCY

  Of course, there is at least one big obstacle to this goal: it takes time and energy to make enough space to collide with the unexpected, roam around the world, and gain an insider-outsider perspective. Staying in a silo, or just accepting the boundaries we inherit, often appears a lot easier. After all, we live in a world where people are expected to streamline their careers and become specialists. Our schools and universities put students into boxes at a young age, and academic departments are fragmented. As Fareed Zakaria, the American journalist, points out, the main thrust of educational policy in America today is to support specialized technical subjects, not generalist courses like liberal arts degrees, where students jump between different topics.4 We tend to assume that people will be penalized if they jump between professions or jobs. The people running institutions also face pressure to make these as efficient as they can by cutting out waste. Specialization and focus is considered desirable in the modern world. That makes it hard to justify time-consuming activities that do not deliver instant results, such as talking to people from other departments, rotating people across departments, or sending people out on innovation safaris. “Running something like Hackamonth takes a lot of time,” as Michael Schroepfer of Facebook, observed. “You have to have some slack in the system, or it won’t work, so it’s wasteful in a way.” Letting people “roam” in an undirected way tends to seem like a self-indulgent luxury. So is the idea of creating cultural translators, conducting social analysis, or—dare I say it—looking at life through an anthropologist’s lens. There is a constant tendency for people to organize themselves into silos in the name of hyper efficiency, accountability, and effectiveness.

  But if there is one key message from this book, it is that our world does not function effectively if it is always rigidly streamlined. Living in specialized silos might make life seem more efficient in the short-term. But a world that is always divided into a fragmented and specialist pattern is a place of missed risks and opportunities. If we become blind creatures of habit—or habitus, as the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu liked to say—our lives are poorer as a result.

  Or to put it another way, in today’s complex twenty-first-century world we are all faced with a subtle challenge: we can either be mastered by our mental and structural silos or we can try to master them instead. The choice lies with us. And the first step to mastering our silos is the most basic one of all: to think how we all unthinkingly classify the world around us each day.

  And then try to imagine an alternative.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK AROSE OUT OF various silo-busting journeys I have experienced in my own life: since the age of eighteen, I have lived on several different continents, moved from the world of academic anthropology into a career in journalism, and written about numerous different topics, ranging from finance to politics to culture to economics and wars. Along the way, I have collected the intellectual threads that are woven into the tapestry of this manuscript, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who has deliberately or inadvertently offered me these ideas, sometimes through extensive debate, but usually simply through an offhand comment, chance meeting, or unplanned collision.

  One particularly big thank-you must go to the anthropology department at Cambridge University, where Ernest Gellner (my former PhD supervisor), Caroline Humphreys, and Keith Hart all provided great inspiration. Subsequently, anthropologists such as Douglas Holmes, Martha Poon, Gitti Jordan, and Craig Calhoun have offered valuable insights, as has the work of the ReD consultancy in New York. Another source of inspiration has come from my colleagues at the Financial Times, where Lionel Barber (editor) and John Thornhill (deputy editor) have been endlessly supportive, not least by letting me take time off to write this book. Many FT colleagues also kindly read early drafts of different chapters and offered helpful comments; one joy of the FT is that my colleagues are not just smart but very collegiate. Particular thanks must go to Andrew Edgecliffe Johnson, Richard Waters, Hannah Kuchler, Tom Braithwaite, Greg Meyer, and Cardiff Garcia.

  In the last two years, a plethora of people outside the FT have provided inspiration, discussed the book with me, or read different parts of it. In that respect I am particularly grateful to William Janeway, William Haseltine, Rana Faroohar, Hugh Van Steemis, Carlos de la Cruz, Richard Blum, John Seely Brown, Hans Helmut-Kotz, Andy Haldane, Sandy Pentland, Rolf Renders, Donald Marron, Daniel Glazer, Biz Stone, Merryn Somerset Webb, Mark Ein, Ben Hardy, Scott Malkin, Andrew McCaffee, Daniel Goroff, Jon Ledecky, Thomas Snitch, Gary Gensler, Peter Hancock, Adam Glick, and Laura Nolen. Jon was very supportive and a source of many great ideas; Gary provided constant intellectual challenge, and without his diligent, patient input the book would be far weaker. Amanda Urban, my agent at ICM, has been a tireless champion and friend. Ben Loehnen, my book editor at Simon & Schuster, did a stunning job of overseeing the project, constantly pushing me to improve my ideas, challenging my thesis, and then tightening up the writing. Tim Whiting of Little Brown has also been very helpful. Emily Loose, the first editor with whom I discussed this book at Simon & Schuster, also deserves great thanks for having faith in the project. Joy Crane was a fabulous researcher for the book and a fount of ideas and laughter.

  I am also deeply grateful to everyone who agreed to be interviewed for this book; many of them were very generous with their time and comments, even when my questions were apt to be irritating or inconvenient. If I have misunderstood what they were trying to say, the fault is entirely mine.

  I am very grateful to my brother and father, Richard and Peter Tett, for all the help they have offered me over the years. A huge thank-you goes to Joshua Brockner, for bringing joy, fun, and order and making me see beyond my own mental silos. But, the biggest thanks of all go to my two wonderful daughters, Analiese and Helen. They are at the center of my heart and remind me every day why it is important to live a holistic life, to celebrate and explore the world in all its dimensions.

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  © THE FINANCIAL TIMES

  GILLIAN TETT is the U.S. managing editor and columnist at the Financial Times, the world’s leading newspaper covering finance and business. In 2
014 she was named Columnist of the Year in the British Press Awards, and was previously named Journalist of the Year (2009), Business Journalist of the Year (2008), and Wincott Financial Journalist of the Year (2007). In 2011 she was awarded the British Academy’s President’s Medal. Tett is the author of Saving the Sun and Fool’s Gold.

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  Notes

  In the course of writing this book I conducted numerous interviews with the people mentioned in the narrative. Some of these were done explicitly for my book. Others were carried out for the Financial Times. Unless otherwise stipulated, the quotes in this book are taken from author interviews. Any mistakes in interpretation are mine.