Transcending Silos
Building design communities that ignore fiefdoms in large enterprises
Have you ever played that game where you fold a piece of paper into three sections and have three separate people draw a unified picture on those sections, without peeking at what the other two have drawn? The result is usually ridiculously silly.
It’s fun when it’s just a game. Not so much fun when applied in real-life. What happens when a company grows so much that the divisions become silos, and the silos become fiefdoms? People build walls. They build castles and towers. They build up defenses (aka processes) to control what they “own”.
This results in disjointed messaging and designs across a single, consolidated company…a veritable Frankenstein of experiences.
Habit Kills
I recently spoke to a friend who is a very intelligent, collaborative UX professional. For the sake of her privacy, we'll call her “Jane”.
Jane worked at a huge tech company. She said when she started at the company, she came to realize that the silos where she worked were so rigid that “the PMs, Devs, and other people were used to doing things as the status quo and that didn't include working together.”
I asked Jane to elaborate for me:
Sketching sessions often had the PM dictating what s/he saw as the objective, based on their own opinions and not any research. While I should have been included in every meeting for design decisions, I was often left out. The patterns that we needed to use and what could be accomplished by dev in a tight time frame were not in sync. The best decisions that incorporated testing and customer feedback weren’t incorporated because there wasn't time. Communication between teams often didn't happen and while they spoke of a “collaborative” environment, it was quite the opposite. Work was done in isolation. This left such a bad taste in my mouth that I didn't want to be part of any large company that continued to work in silos where it was like oil and water and the oil moves around the water, but there wasn't any mixing (collaboration). I could tell that I wasn't the only one that felt the frustration and instead of talking about our “teams” that comprised all the stakeholders, it was more about “us” and “them”.
Good old “us” versus “them”. Also referred to as tribe mentality.
Human nature
When you talk about family and friends, tribe mentality can be a very good thing. When you talk about silos within a company, this can become a huge obstacle. When a silo is unable to think about the shared value of transparency and collaboration, and tends to focus on controlling what they think they own, it throws up barriers, hampers research, delays projects, prevents UX designers from reaching the best possible outcome for the people they are creating experiences for.
The glue that holds a user-facing project together is the interactive experience being designed. It’s what people see. You could show stakeholders coded and fully functional test harnesses all the livelong day, but it won't have nearly the impact that even a sketch of a design flow does.
User experience professionals live in that cross-section between business needs, IT constraints and customer needs. It’s up to us to overcome human nature, transcend the corporate reporting structure, tribes, fiefdoms and silos, and talk to each other.
Talk, talk, talk
I've worked for many different types of companies: Health insurance companies, airlines, fundraising companies. All of them had silos like this. There is only one thing I found that overcame the barriers between them. It was to get up off my rear and go talk to people. In person. Constantly.
Once you realize the most important thing to being effective in your job as a designer of other people’s products and experiences is clear and open communication, you come to learn that the onus is largely on you.
You can't expect other people to reach out to you. You can’t get offended if they don’t contact you first. You're the user experience professional. You’re the one who is supposed to work with empathy. Don't just empathize with your end user; empathize with your co-workers regardless of where they live in the corporate reporting structure.
Design professionals, unite!
If you work in a company, no matter the size, and you have these walls between teams, it is up to you to fix that. No matter where design is being done — in the business, in IT, in strategy — encourage your colleagues to talk regularly with each other. To let go of the group think of their tribe (unless it’s a really positive, open, collaborative group), and rise above their reporting structure for the greater good of the customer and the company.
Lead by example. See if the rest of the company follows.
