1 · Definition

What does working in silos mean?

Working in silos means that each department operates in isolation: it has its own tools, its own files, its own rituals, and it shares with the others only what travels up the hierarchy or slips into a chat thread. The word comes from the grain silo, a sealed tower that stores grain without letting anything mix.

The image is accurate, with one difference. A grain silo is built on purpose. A company’s silos almost never are. They settle in layer by layer as the business grows: one department adopts a tool, another picks a second one, one team builds its own spreadsheet, the next team builds another. Nobody decided to wall anything off. The system simply grew that way.

“It’s not that they have trouble talking to each other, they’re in the same office, but the info just doesn’t flow as well as it should.”
a manager at a customer contact center

What are the types of organizational silos?

The organizational silo
It separates teams and their decisions. Anything that involves two departments goes up the hierarchy, or waits for a meeting.
The data silo
It locks information inside tools that don’t talk to each other. The same data lives in three versions, and none of them is the source of truth.
The knowledge silo
It keeps know-how in the heads of a few people. When they are away, everything on their subject stops.

Add to these the hierarchical silos, between levels, and the geographic ones, between sites or countries. In the organizations I work with, these are rarely separate problems: they are one and the same architecture, seen from different angles.

Fayol saw it in 1916: the gangplank

Henri Fayol, the French engineer regarded as one of the founders of modern management theory, was already describing the problem in his 1916 book, known in English as General and Industrial Management. In a hierarchy, two people in neighboring departments who need to coordinate send the information all the way up to their common boss, who then sends it back down. His answer takes a single horizontal line: a direct bridge between the two, with their superiors’ consent. Management textbooks know it as Fayol’s gangplank.

More than a century later, the question hasn’t changed: do your departments have direct bridges between them, or does everything go through the top?

What is the opposite of working in silos?

Synonyms: silo mentality, the silo effect, siloed teams, departmental silos
Related terms: information silos and data silos: the same architecture, seen from the IT side
The opposite: cross-functional collaboration: specialized departments connected by clear flows of information. Breaking down silos means building those flows.

2 · The signs

What are the signs of a siloed organization?

The signs of working in silos are repeated habits that everyone ends up treating as normal: the same information entered again and again, work redone without anyone knowing, questions asked instead of answers found, a leadership update that costs hours. Here are the ones I hear most often, in the words of the people who live with them.

Hover or tap an object on the mat to read the sign.

Work gets redone without anyone knowing.

“I worked on something for three weeks, and after a while I realize there’s actually a Notion page that already exists.”

a Customer Success lead at a scale-up

Every team has its own spreadsheet, and no two are alike.

“One of my people has a spreadsheet, the other one has a different spreadsheet. They never agreed on how to build the spreadsheet. Everyone does their own.”

the head of a group of health centers

The same information gets entered three times.

“You enter info that [a colleague] then has to re-enter in Notion, that we then re-enter in Trello, when we know it could be automated.”

the head of operations at a digital agency

People ask instead of finding.

“Everything goes through Slack, because you ask questions in threads, but you don’t even know who’s answering you.”

a Customer Success lead at a scale-up

The same topic exists in four versions.

“I see four pages created by the engineers, each one rehashing the same thing, distorted, on the same topic.”

a head of security at a scale-up

Meetings replace information.

“The reality is I spend at least five hours a day in meetings, even though I get in really early in the morning.”

the head of a production agency

Nobody sees anyone else’s workload.

“We don’t realize the graphic designers already have 15 things to get done by the end of the week.”

a marketing team at a large corporate group

The customer tells their story twice.

“There’s no connection being made between departments, so there are a lot of duplicates.”

a transportation startup of about thirty people

The leadership update costs hours.

In a group of several thousand people, every report to the executive committee required meetings and at least two hours of formatting.

3 · The test

Is your organization working in silos? Take the test

Eight situations, three answers each. Answer for your organization as it really works, not as the org chart describes it. Nothing is sent anywhere: your result appears right here, with the reading organization theory would give it.

A piece of customer information changes. How many times is it entered before it is up to date everywhere?Once: everyone reads it in the same placeTwo or three times, in different toolsWe don’t really know
Two departments need to agree on a shared issue. Where does the decision go?They agree directlyUp to the manager, then back downAll the way up to leadership
A project moves from one team to another. How does the handoff happen?In a shared space, on a format everyone knowsThrough a meeting or a recap emailThrough scattered messages, whenever someone remembers to tell the others
How many tools are used to track projects across the company?One shared foundation and a few specialist toolsOne per departmentEveryone has their own, often a personal spreadsheet
Someone goes on vacation. Their work…carries on: everything is readable by othersslows down: you have to reach them to move forwardstops until they’re back
Leadership wants the status of every project for the executive committee.They read it liveSomeone spends hours pulling it togetherA meeting is called to get an update
Your teams’ objectives are set…on results shared across departmentsby department, with one shared objective on topby department, and only by department
Your internal search tool, or your AI agent, has to answer a question that involves several departments.It finds a reliable, up-to-date sourceIt gives incomplete or contradictory answersWe have no knowledge base to connect it to

How to read your score

0 to 4 points: A connected organization: Your teams have their own ways of working and a shared view. It is the balance Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch described at Harvard in 1967: high differentiation and high integration. The work now is to keep that balance as you grow.
5 to 10 points: Silos taking hold: Growth is stacking up tools faster than it connects them. Your gangplanks, in Henri Fayol’s sense, still exist, but they depend on a handful of people. Now is the time to design them, before they design themselves in your chat threads.
11 to 16 points: A siloed organization: Your departments talk through the hierarchy and through chat. Melvin Conway put it as early as 1968: organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. A team-building retreat won’t fix that. What fixes it is redesigning how information flows.

4 · The causes

Why do departments end up working in silos?

Departments end up working in silos because of four mechanisms that growth adds together: tools stacked up faster than they are connected, objectives set by department, handoffs nobody designed, and specialization that has turned into isolation. Rarely for lack of goodwill. As one team lead told me: “I don’t think the teams are hiding, that’s not it at all.”

1Growth stacks up tools faster than it connects them

Each department picks the tool that suits it, at the moment it needs one. Taken one by one, these choices are reasonable. Put end to end, they draw a company where information lives in several side-by-side systems that don’t talk to each other.

In 1968, computer scientist Melvin Conway stated the law that now bears his name: organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. The reverse holds true as well: siloed tools end up siloing the teams that use them.

“Today we use Dropbox, Evernote, Excel, Google Docs, Google Sheets. With all these tools we manage to do good things, but it’s never complete and we lose time.”
the head of a small business

2Objectives set by department, never by flow

When each department is judged on its own results, it optimizes its own scope. That is normal, and human. Value, however, is created in the flows that cut across departments: a quote that becomes a project, a request that becomes a deliverable, a product that reaches production with all its supporting materials. These flows often have no owner.

3Handoffs nobody designed

Silos show most clearly at the borders: between production and post-production in an agency, between the design office and marketing at a manufacturer, between the team that sells and the team that delivers, between support and the developers. When a handoff has no structure, it relies on memory, a message or a meeting. And information gets lost along the way.

“He creates a Notion thing, maybe, if he does his job right and he’s really conscientious. But, well, we’re not super automated.”
an executive at a SaaS company, on support tickets

4Specializing does not mean isolating

Specialization and silos are not the same thing. Specialization has real advantages: expertise, focus, clear responsibilities. Some separation is even healthy, when information needs to stay confidential. In 1967, Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch showed that the best-performing organizations are not the least specialized: they combine high differentiation between departments with high integration of their work.

5 · The cost

How much does working in silos cost?

Working in silos costs time, money and missed commitments: ineffective communication accounts for 56% of the project budget at risk, according to the Project Management Institute, and searching for information takes up nearly one day a week, according to McKinsey. These costs stay invisible because they dissolve into daily work. Yet they can be measured.

What serious research says

9%of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other functions “all the time,” while 84% can rely on their boss and direct reports all or most of the timeHarvard Business Review, Sull, Homkes and Sull, March 2015
56%of the money at risk on projects is at risk because of ineffective communication, which causes one project in five to failProject Management Institute, Pulse of the Profession, May 2013
47%of employees struggle to find the information they need to do their jobsGartner, survey of 4,861 employees, May 2023
20%of a knowledge worker’s week, roughly, goes to searching for internal information or tracking down the right colleagueMcKinsey Global Institute, “The social economy,” July 2012

What we measured with our clients

Organization	What changed	Before	After
Confidential clientFuneral services group	The executive committee report	2 hours of formatting	1 click, updated in real time
Nematis360° digital agency	A quote and its project	45 to 60 minutes	5 minutes, no re-entry
DC GroupeIndustrial group	A new product	steps forgotten between departments	61 steps launched in one click
Confidential clientFintech scale-up	Questions to the People team	a wiki more than 70% out of date	half as many requests
SPOACreative agency	An agency’s production	briefs lost in chat threads	7 teams in a single system
GetaroundCar-sharing platform	Knowledge after a merger	each team with its own references	one knowledge base, in two languages

Estimate the cost in your organization

Three settings are enough for an order of magnitude. Nothing is sent anywhere: the calculation happens right here.

People affected20 peopleAverage annual salary$70,000Hours lost per person per week2 h

$100,000

per year, in time lost re-entering, searching for or redoing work

or the equivalent of 1.0 full-time position

This cost can come down. Let’s talk about it.

Send an inquiry

How it is calculated: people × hours lost per week × 48 working weeks × fully loaded hourly cost. The fully loaded cost is the annual salary divided by 0.70, because wages and salaries make up 70% of employer compensation costs in US private industry (Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026), spread over a 1,920-hour working year (48 weeks of 40 hours). Twenty people who each lose two hours a week, at an average salary of $70,000, cost $100,000 a year, the equivalent of one full-time position.

6 · The way out

How do you break down silos?

To break down silos, redesign how information flows between departments: map the real flows, set one source of truth for each piece of information, design the bridges and put lasting governance in place. Neither a team-building retreat nor a reorganization is enough. It is the core of my work as a transformation partner, and it always follows the same path.

Hover or tap a step to open it.

Step 1

Map the real flows, not the org chart

We meet every team and follow the real path of information: who creates it, who re-enters it, where it gets lost. We map the system before touching a single tool, and along the way we measure what the silo costs: coordination time, duplicate entry, questions asked twice.

At the funeral services group, ten interviews brought to light flows the org chart did not show.

Step 2

One single source of truth for each piece of information

Each piece of information has one place where it is the reference, and an owner. Teams read it in their own view, without copying it, in tools like Notion connected through automation. Each team keeps its own way of working: we connect what needs connecting and leave the rest alone. Adding a tool is rarely the answer, when what is often needed is one tool fewer.

At Nematis, the brief is entered once, and each specialist reads it in their own way.

Step 3

Design the bridges

At the borders between departments, we design clear handoffs: who passes what, at what moment, in what form. We connect silos rather than tear them down: a reorganization often just moves the problem, bridges solve it.

At DC, every new product automatically launches the 61 steps that connect the design office, marketing, procurement and production.

Step 4

Governance that holds over time

Owners, review dates, a few simple rituals. Without them, old habits come back at the first unexpected event. And what was measured before gets measured after.

At DC, the rule fits in one sentence: every Friday, everyone updates the system before leaving.

7 · AI

Can AI break down silos?

No. Plugging AI into a siloed organization does not break down its silos: it inherits them, and often amplifies them. An AI agent answers with the sources it is given. If those sources are scattered, contradictory or outdated, so are its answers, only with more confidence.

The fintech scale-up I worked with learned this firsthand. “It’s going to give me an analysis based on a doc from 2019, and it’s combined with a doc from 2024,” an operations manager summed up. Its AI agent was drawing on a wiki more than 70% out of date. Once the knowledge was restored to a single source, governed and up to date, its answers became 80% more reliable. At SPOA, AI now works from a complete base, with the agency’s real context.

8 · The cases

They stopped working in silos

Six organizations, six different silos, one approach.

“Fred, who has been at DC for 16 years, told me about the documentation: I can’t even remember how I used to do it before.”
a communications and marketing lead at an industrial group

Funeral services group
Funeral services group: one system for every marketing team, executive committee reporting in one click: 1 click for executive committee reporting
up to date in real time, instead of 2 hours
Confidential
- 9,000 people
- Notion
360° digital agency
Digital agency: systematized production, with quotes in 5 minutes: 5 min instead of 45 to 60 per quote
project created automatically at signing
- 30 people
- Notion, HubSpot
Industrial group
Structuring a product development management system for a growing industrial group: 61 steps launched in one click for each product
100% of exchanges recorded on the project
- 350 people
- Notion
Creative agency
Creative agency: 7 departments in a single system, from sales to bookkeeping prep: 7 teams in a single system
from sales to bookkeeping prep, for 3 years
- 20 people
- Notion, Notion AI, Make, Pennylane, Qonto
Fintech scale-up
Fintech scale-up: a governed knowledge base and 80% more reliable AI answers: +80% reliability for internal AI
and half as many questions to HR
Confidential
- 300 people
- Notion, Dust
Car-sharing platform
Car sharing: a reliable, bilingual knowledge base to bring teams together after a merger: EN + FR one knowledge base
designed with the VP Product, as an advisor
- 200+ people
- Notion

See all 18 case studies

Where to start

Start with a flow that is costly and visible: the request that changes hands three times, the report that takes half a day. That is where proof arrives fastest. If you would like to talk it through, tell me about it below.

Let’s talk about your project.

Tell me a little about what you’re working on. I’ll get back to you personally to discuss the next steps.