Information silos are a structural problem, not a people problem

The scene is familiar: one group has almost no interaction with the others, or a particular person seems to have vanished from the team.

What follows is usually quick. Talk to that group's lead. Adjust that person's responsibilities. Schedule a cross-team meeting. All three have something in common — they treat the silo as a people problem.

They usually fail. Not because execution was poor, but because the diagnosis was wrong.

Start with the structural hole

A silo has a clear shape on the map: between two clusters, far fewer edges than exist within each cluster.

Social network research calls this position a structural hole — not "that group is closed off," but "there is no bridge between the two clusters."

The distinction matters in practice:

• If it's "closed off," that's a matter of willingness or culture. You talk, you mobilise.
• If it's a missing bridge, willingness won't help. There is simply no usable channel between the two groups, and nobody will build one on their own — the benefit of a new channel accrues to both sides, while the cost falls on the individual.

Almost everything called a "department wall" is the second case.

Why adding a meeting doesn't work

The most common response is a recurring cross-team meeting.

It has two problems. First, a meeting is a synchronous cost: several people from each group, and an hour of the meeting consumes an hour from everyone. Second, if the meeting produces no artefact, it's a temporary edge — the channel closes when the meeting ends, and next week you hold it again.

What you need is an edge that doesn't require ongoing maintenance. This is why moving artefacts across groups beats meetings: a document both groups read, a shared board, a jointly maintained interface list. They take no synchronous time and carry information continuously. Once an edge rests on an artefact, it no longer depends on anyone's diligence to survive.

Why replacing people doesn't work

There's an intuition that if a group doesn't interact with others, maybe the lead isn't the right fit. Bring in someone who communicates better.

You can. But first consider: the new person takes the same seat and faces the same structure. The people they need to talk to, the approvals they need, the interfaces they must coordinate — none of it changed. The role dictates who they deal with daily, and if the position doesn't change, the structure reappears.

This isn't to say individuals don't matter. A capable person maintains a given edge better. But one person cannot change the fact that a bridge is missing. If the structural edge doesn't exist, the more proactive they are, the more they become a new bottleneck — every piece of cross-team information funnelling through them alone.

Three moves that actually work

Cheapest to most expensive:

1. Add a direct edge. Name one point of contact on each side, and define what they discuss directly and at what cadence. The operative word is direct — routed through a third party, it isn't a real edge.

2. Let an artefact carry the edge. Create something both groups maintain and read: an interface contract, a shared board, a jointly owned checklist. The virtue of an artefact is that it doesn't depend on anyone remembering to sync.

3. Rotate or pair people. The most expensive and the most durable, because it builds several edges and shared context at once. Worth it when a critical interface keeps failing.

None of these require anyone to change their personality or attitude. That's the test for whether you've found the structural cause: if the core of the plan is "we hope people will be more proactive," you probably haven't.

How to tell whether it worked

Re-measure, using the same window length as before, and watch two numbers:

• Whether the count of cross-group edges rose
• Whether the new edges persist — still there next round, not only in the round right after the change

The second number matters more. Edges that appear once usually come from a meeting or an event. Edges that survive are the ones genuinely connected.