Harold Jarche wrote a book review of The Silo Effect by Gillian Tett.
« The challenge is to find ways to get outside their boundaries and see from multiple perspectives. Silo thinking can be countered by engaging ‘cultural translators’ — “people who are able to move between specialist silos and explain to those sitting inside one department what is happening elsewhere” — but only about 10% of an organization’s staff need these skills. »
This reminds me of the H-shaped skills described in The Non-Designer’s Guide to Design Thinking: What a Marketer Learned in Design School by Kunitake Saso.
« Helping information to flow… Cultural translators are also ‘knowledge catalysts’. »
« data + knowledge = information.
data + story = context.
knowledge + story = culture. »
« People also have to regularly question their taxonomies — how they classify the world. I find that senior staff, with decades of experience, often have different taxonomies from younger staff. »
« all models are imperfect explanations of the world. »
Gillian Tett is U.S. Managing Editor of the Financial Times. She is author of The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers (2016), Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (2009), and Saving the Sun: How Wall Street Mavericks Shook Up Japan’s Financial World and Made Billions (2004).
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