This was an interesting read on the WonkHE about higher education silos, Institutional silos are making it harder to build learning environments for student success.

Ask any higher education institution leader about the organisational challenges they’re grappling with, and they’ll start talking about silos.

Though talking about silos, the article is more about integrating digital into learning and teaching. The article concludes

As the digital learning and teaching landscape continues to evolve, institutional strategic agendas to make the most of technology to enhance student engagement and support won’t be driven by small teams of experts, or even by digital leadership. It will require all student-facing staff to have the confidence and skills not just to follow processes and use systems but to actively work to deploy technology creatively and interpret data to take forward improvements to learning and teaching (and that don’t depend on staff simply working harder and longer). To get to that point, institutional leaders will need to continue to find creative ways to break down those silos and build whole-organisation digital capability.

Though as anyone knows breaking down silos is hard. We often think of grain silos, metal cylinders that are close together, they should be easy to break, shouldn’t they? I always now think of higher education silos as missile silos, embedded into reinforced concrete and dispersed across a wide area.

One question that I have been thinking about after reading his article was, what typifies a silo mentality, and what enables cross-silo working? I think a key aspect is strategic thinking within the silo. If you have a unique strategy for your department, this is symptomatic of silo thinking. If you have a strategy based on, say the student journey, the staff experience, research impact, then you probably have already broken down your silos.

Last year I wrote this;

I wondered if silo working is another word for non-strategic working? People often complain about silo working and the resulting challenges that can arise. I think part of the reason why there are problems with duplication, conflict, and lack of communication, across silo working, is teams are working to their own objectives and aren’t necessarily working towards common objectives.

The WonkHE article talks about digital learning and teaching, if the owner of the digital learning strategy is the head of the digital learning team, then how will that strategy, not only communicate across the university, but how will it compete with all the other departmental strategies out there.

Breaking down silo working, isn’t just about saying, we need to break down the silos but is so much more about thinking strategically about what your organisation is trying to achieve. Recognising that even if your department is successful in achieving your strategic goals, doesn’t mean that the university is being successful.