Sunday 23 June 2019

I love silos but I can't live in one


Academic disciplines tend to work in silos.  
The services involved in the lives of people who use care and support services tend to work in silos too.

There are good reasons for working in silos, as Paul Taylor/BromfordLab make clear. There are also dangers to working in silos, particularly if you are on the receiving end of ‘stuff’ from different silos.

My doctorate cuts across silos. This diagram was created to show how I picture my doctoral research in relation to different academic disciplines.

I can see the benefits of doing what I am doing. But I don’t have the benefits of working in a silo (if you want to know the benefits, you'll need to follow the link above to Paul Taylor's blog). I haven't gone deep enough into any particular discipline to become expert in it. And we do need experts, as long as they are still open to learning and changing and growing and don't see achieving 'expert status' as an end point.

So where does that leave me? Am I just spreading myself too thinly, a jack of all trades with nothing to contribute? That's one way that people within academic silos may see me. But I'd challenge that. What I bring is the ability to speak the language of multiple disciplines well enough to try to synthesise their different ways of thinking about a topic – and the topic of interest to me is the relationship between public services and members of the public (and its twin, the relationship between academic research and members of the public).

One of the languages I have learned to speak is the language of social capital. In the world of social capital, people and what they bring to the social world can build cohesion within a group (bonders) or build wider cohesion by having a foothold within many groups (bridgers).

I am one of life’s bridgers. In a previous job, I had to visit the London office every six weeks or so. I’d go and say hello to people on each of the five floors. Each team was on a different floor. Some floors had more than one team. I’d start at the top and work my way down, and then I’d usually need to work my way back up again passing on the ‘Did you know so-and-so is working on this, which might be relevant to your work?’ It makes sense that I am a ‘bridger’ in academic life too.

If everyone in London had been a bridger, it would have been an inefficient waste of time; a recipe for constant talking about work rather than doing work. When I left, the organisation became more inefficient because the synergy between teams and ideas was lost.

Maybe what we need in order to get the best of both worlds is to honour our organisational bridgers, and allow them the time and space to have those informal conversations. Let them have longer coffee breaks. Let them pop into another public service’s building without needing any reason other than saying ‘hi’ to different teams in that building.

It’s how Indycube works for me. Except in Indycube, so many people are bridgers that I have the joyful experience of chatting to someone over the coffee machine, and they’ll be doing the ‘Do you know so-and-so? What they are doing might be relevant to your work’.

Conclusion?

I love silos. Without silos, I’d have to learn more than any single human can learn in order to do my job. With silos, I can go ‘This is the problem, where should I go looking for a solution?’ and they can tell me where to look within their in-depth knowledge of their silo.

So in the search for the Holy Grail of seamless public services, please don’t get rid of silos. Rather, find ways to support your bridgers so they can do their thing. And maybe for you, that could mean starting to learn about bridging capital