Silos

These imposing monolithic structures, silhouetted against the moody twilight sky, are silos. Actual silos. Not theoretical silos in a book about organisational structures or systems design, but vast, towering, dirty, functional, tangible silos, silently displacing thousands upon thousands of cubic metres of air, somewhere out in the middle of the Staffordshire countryside last night.

But as we stand amidst their darkening shadows in the still evening, we need to listen carefully. These soundless giants have a message for us about their cousins – those other silos we sometimes read about in management textbooks. It’s a really simple message about a really simple concept.

Imagine that 100 people are working hard inside the left hand silo, completing the first stage of a product or service. It doesn’t matter what it is. Stage One takes two hours.

Now imagine that another 100 people are inside the right hand silo, working hard on Stage…