Dr Gavin Miller (@drgavinmiller) is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow. This blog post draws on his recent article, ‘Disruption, transformation and silos: medical humanities and the management gurus’ published in Medical Humanities.
Like me, you’ve probably grumbled about silos in your university – metaphorical walls between disciplines, between academics and professional services, and who knows what else. The word sounds like hard-nosed business talk, but it’s founded in fable, metaphor, and myth – not to mention a pejorative rhetoric of illness and disability. The term ‘silo’ invokes a mystifying metaphor – that of the university as a living, intelligent organism.
Organisational silos are of course regarded as an obstacle to innovation. Universities that break down silos – between disciplines, between academia and knowledge users – will be more innovative and responsive partners in the contemporary knowledge economy. This common sense is endorsed by the UKRI 2022–27 strategy, which understands silos as an impediment to a ‘new industrial revolution’.
Figuratively, silos are an organisational disease or disability. The ailment was invented, or discovered, by management consultant Phil S. Ensor in 1988. He diagnosed ‘functional silo syndrome’, where organisational communication was top-down, with little dialogue across divisional boundaries. Silo syndrome constituted ‘a very damaging learning disability’ for the organisation.
Ensor’s metaphor was echoed by the management guru Peter M. Senge in The Fifth Discipline (1990). He writes though of ‘stovepipes’ that cut off communication between the functional divisions of an organisation. Whether your organisation has a nasty case of the silos or the stovepipes, the ‘tragic’ result is the same: in Senge’s words, ‘fundamental learning disabilities’.
Leaving aside Senge’s ableist assumption that disabilities are ‘tragic’, how do we know that the metaphorical disease (or impairment) of silos is real? For the convenience of busy managers, the consultant Arie de Geus in The Living Company (1997) illustrates Nature’s teachings with an avian fable. British tits have learned to get cream from glass milk bottles by pecking through their aluminium lids. While occasional robins do so as well, they do not share this wisdom. This is because they ‘communicate with each other in an antagonistic manner, with fixed boundaries that they do not cross’. Silos! Of course!
Corporations that can’t break down silos – that can’t learn from the clever tits and the silly robins – are sick and disabled. That’s why they die early, according to de Geus. Corporations should naturally live for centuries, he believes, but are instead dying before they are fifty years old.
De Geus means living and dying literally. As a senior leader in the hydrocarbon multinational Royal Dutch/Shell, he realised that ‘Shell, as a whole, was an unfathomable being. It, too, was alive.’ In Presence (2005) Senge has a similar view. Not only are big companies alive, potentially sick or cognitively impaired, they are literally ‘a new species on earth’.
Since corporations are alive, then for de Geus, they have an immune system that responds when the organism is attacked by ‘individuals or groups of individuals who do not want to be part of the whole’. For de Geus, these pathogens include workers threatened with redundancy who have recourse to their trade union.
We might well laugh at the absurdity of business gurus. We might also smile ruefully at a paradox: by de Geus’s standards, ancient, thus long-lived, universities must be supremely evolved survivors – despite their many silos.
But we’re naïve to think we might simply snip out the silo metaphor from the tangled context from which it emerged. Troubling implications remain – in fact, they’re harder to spot because they aren’t accompanied by the florid rhetoric of business gurus.
The rhetoric of the ‘living company’ and the ‘learning organisation’ – and the commonsense of the ‘silo’ – is a persuasive apparatus. It tacitly presumes that organisations are, by their nature, functionally integrated and purposive wholes – that’s why de Geus thinks of industrial disputes as pathogenic.
Silo-busting as a solution to supposed organisational pathology revives the original medical meaning of the word ‘consensus’. It doesn’t quite mean ‘unanimity’, as in the familiar modern sense. This term originally referred to the communication and cooperation between organs of the body. In the eighteenth century, the physician Bernard Mandeville marvelled that were was ‘such a Communication and Agreement, such an extraordinary Consensus between the Brain and the Stomach’ (OED).
If Messrs Brain and Stomach must communicate in pursuit of their specialised tasks, then surely organisational health requires the same consensus between divisions – and, in the university, between disciplines.
But silo rhetoric presumes that successful organisations are characterised by integration rather than differentiation, by ultimate agreement rather than ongoing conflict. As Joanne Martin observes in Cultures in Organizations (1992), managers may well assume, or aspire to, integration, but perhaps they are merely one subgroup in an aggregate of organisational subcultures, each in varying relations of power and conflict to the others. The mythology of the organisation as organism conceals these antagonisms.
Something similar applies to the breaking down of research silos between disciplines, as if they were specialised functions of an organism (a university) with a single purpose, ‘to know the world’ perhaps. As Jonathan Kramnick has observed, the emphasis moves from disciplines toward ‘a cluster that might take shape on a given problem or challenge while sharing temporary space on a hiring plan’. We move from organic consensus to interdisciplinary consilience – a convergence on a single common answer.
The degree of potential consilience between disciplines remains however highly contested. Whatever the merits of the various arguments and counterarguments on interdisciplinarity, the silo metaphor has little to contribute, other than an obfuscatory tangle of organic, zoological and medical metaphors. Moreover, it encourages us to think of conflict and difference within the university as a disease or disability. That is why we should use the word ‘silo’ with great caution – and avoid it if possible.
de Geus, A. 1999. The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business. London: Nicholas Brealey
Martin, J. P. D. (1992). Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives. New York, Oxford University Press.
Senge, P. M. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. London: Century Business.
Senge P., Scharmer C. O., Jaworski J., and Flowers B. S.. 2005. Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society. London: Nicholas Brealey
Thank you for this thought-provoking piece!
In a spirit of consilience, may I share some of the thoughts provoked – in particular, by those closing words: “Moreover, [the use of the word ‘silo’] encourages us to think of conflict and difference within the university as a disease or disability.” ?
Does this assertion imply an equivalence of “conflict” and “difference”, and that both are “a disease or disability”?
If so, may I disagree? To me, “conflict” and “difference” are not the same at all – my experience of “conflict” is that it is often uncomfortable, and also hugely wasteful. But now always – “conflict” in the sense of “the conditions of generative discussion whereby great ideas emerge from a variety of initial views” can be stimulating indeed. In that first, harsh, sense, though, I can appreciate the “disease” metaphor.
“Difference”, by contrast can be energising and empowering, and is perhaps a necessary feature of creating “the conditions of generative discussion whereby great ideas emerge from a variety of initial views”. But, once again, not always – if “difference” is the basis of exclusion, surely this too is individually, and quite likely, organisationally, “disabling”.
Underpinning much of the writing of both Peter Senge and Arie de Geus (and many others too) is, I believe, the question “How can an organisation achieve more than the sum of its parts?”. In its simplest form, the concerns two actors, A and B, each of whom can achieve one ‘unit of output’ in a given time. If A and B each ‘do their own thing’ independently, the total output in that time is two units. But what happens when they attempt to work together?
I certainly have had the experience that the output is less than two units, if not substantially so.
Sometimes, the outcome is two units – but this has happened primarily when, in reality, A and B have worked alone.
But I have also had the experience in which the outcome has genuinely been more than two units. Which is truly magical. For where has that surplus come from?
The quest for the ‘magic surplus’ is, I believe, the essence of the work of Senge et al. And their answer is all about connectedness, and the emergence that arises when a group truly coheres. Any barriers to that coherence therefore impede the achievement of that ‘magic surplus’ – hence the ‘silo’ metaphor. But ‘silos’ aren’t just between [this] Department and [that] one. They can be between ‘you’ and ‘me’.
So a question, if I may. How do you think that ‘magic surplus’ might be achieved, and sustained over time?