Silos don't kill organisations dramatically.

They bleed them slowly, one small task at a time.

We talk about silo problems in grand terms.
The product team building something the sales team can't sell.
The finance team making cuts the operations team hears about last.
Visible failures with clear owners and post-mortems.

But that's not where most of the damage happens.

Most of it happens in the thirty-minute task that takes eight hours.

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Here's a scenario that plays out in organisations everywhere.

A leader needs an invitation letter drafted for an upcoming event. Time sensitive. They delegate it quickly to someone available - reasonable enough.

That person goes looking for event details. Nothing on the shared drive. Nothing on the project tool. They message two people working on it. Both offline. An hour passes before someone responds with enough context to start writing.

The letter gets drafted. A few edits. Nearly done, except the person writing it isn't confident they have all the details right, so they flag it to the event lead for a final check.

They don't respond for hours.

Thirty minutes of work. Eight hours of elapsed time.

Nobody obstructed. Nobody was difficult.
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The people working on the event knew exactly what they were doing. They just hadn't made that knowledge visible to anyone outside their small circle.

That's a silo and that invisible time gap? That's what silos actually cost you.

The real price of a silo culture isn't a failed project or a missed deadline.

It's the hours spent chasing context that should have been findable. The messages sent to reconstruct knowledge that already exists somewhere, in someone else's head. The simple tasks that quietly balloon because information doesn't travel unless a human carries it.

It compounds invisibly, across every task that crosses team boundaries. No single moment feels catastrophic. The total cost never appears on any dashboard.

Which is exactly why it persists.

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Here's the part that's harder to say.

In most organisations, leaders already know silos are a problem. They've seen the symptoms. They've mentioned it in all-hands meetings. They genuinely want things to be more open and collaborative.

But knowing the problem and changing the behaviour are different things entirely.

Changing the behaviour requires something uncomfortable: making explicit what was previously left implicit. Telling people directly that shared context is an expectation, not a courtesy. Following up when it doesn't happen.

That's friction. That feels like conflict, even when it's minor.

So instead, many leaders wait. They hope the culture will shift on its own. That people will naturally start sharing more, documenting better and looping others in without being asked.

It rarely happens because the team has no reason to change a habit that has never been named as a problem worth solving.

Waiting for culture to change by osmosis is itself a decision. It just feels like patience.

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Today's Permission Slip:

You have permission to stop waiting and to name the expectation out loud instead.

This is uncomfortable because it means acknowledging directly that the current culture isn't working. It means having specific conversations about how information gets shared. It means following up, which can feel like micromanagement when it isn't.

But consider what the alternative is costing you. Every day the silo stays intact, someone in your organisation is spending hours reconstructing context that already exists. Somewhere. In someone else's inbox.

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The Practice:

Pick one recurring task that regularly crosses team boundaries, something that routinely takes longer than it should.

Ask yourself honestly: can someone do this task without having to ask a human for basic context? If the answer is no, that's your starting point.

Not a culture initiative. Not an offsite. Just one piece of information, made visible and findable.

Then say it out loud to your team: this is the standard now. Context that others need shouldn't live only in your head.

Small. Specific. Said clearly.

That's how cultures actually shift: by someone deciding to name what they expect.

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This Week's Question:

Where in your organisation is critical context living in people's heads, when it should be somewhere anyone can find it?

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Here's to leading differently,

Raghav

P.S. Inherited a silo culture you're trying to fix, or accidentally built one yourself? Either way, hit reply, I've seen both up close.

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