Banished from the Silo

by David Gallaher

In the Apple 's Silo, the walls are high, the rules are carved into bone, and stepping outside is a death sentence. People keep their heads down. They do their jobs. They learn not to look past their level because the air beyond is poison.

In corporate life, silos are worse. Because the poison isn’t out there. It's in here. It’s in the drywall, the ductwork, the stale smell that seeps in when doors stay shut for too long.

I’ve watched it in the wild.

A senior designer in a games studio spent two weeks building something brilliant — a level that told the story without a single line of dialogue. Marketing never saw it. Production never saw it. The game shipped with the level gutted because no one outside the design department even knew it existed.

A customer service lead once told me they stopped logging player feedback because “no one ever reads it.” They’d been told by product that “it's not relevant to development timelines.” That’s how you kill the connection between the people making the thing and the people living with it.

At a comic publisher I worked for, legal redlined an entire series arc without ever talking to the writer or the editor. Killed it in a meeting we weren’t even invited to. By the time we found out, the deadline had passed and the story was dead. Not because it couldn’t be fixed — but because the people with the pen didn’t know we existed.

This is what a silo does. It doesn’t just waste time. It makes people stop trying.

And here's the thing no one in the C-suite wants to admit: silos don’t form at the bottom. They’re poured like concrete at the top. Executives stake their claim, guard their turf, hoard information like it’s gold. That fear and ego drips down until every department is building little fortresses around themselves.

Patrick Lencioni says silos waste resources, kill productivity, and sabotage your goals. I’ll add this: they rot your culture from the inside out. They teach your people that their best ideas will be ignored. They train them to give you less than what they’re capable of not out of laziness, but because they’ve learned it’s pointless to give more.

The cure starts with alignment, and not the fake kind you get from an offsite retreat with golf shirts and a group photo. If your leadership can’t articulate that without tripping over each other, you’re already fractured. And everyone below you knows it.

Once you’ve got that, you name the elephant in the room. Not ten “key priorities.” One. The thing that actually matters. The thing that keeps the lights on and the doors open. And then you connect every single role to it in a way no one can ignore.

After that, you light the fire. Not with slogans, but with tailored fuel. The QA tester needs to know their bug report isn’t just disappearing into Jira purgatory... it’s keeping the release from blowing up. The copywriter needs to see that their words are why players click “buy.” The incentives match the craft. And the trust is baked into the work, not tacked on as an afterthought.

Then you execute without mercy. Timeframes. Benchmarks. Public accountability. No hiding behind “we’re still discussing” when you’re already two months late. You keep momentum alive because the second it dies, the walls start rebuilding themselves.

And you force collaboration like oxygen into a sealed room. You don’t wait for departments to “naturally” share — you shove them into the same space with a shared problem and don’t let them leave until they’ve cracked it. You create feedback loops that skip the chain of command when they have to. You make hoarding information more painful than sharing it.

I learned this the hard way. When I was at Marvel Entertainment , I had friends in every wing of the building: production, editorial, creative services, legal. I didn’t collect these connections like baseball cards; I built them, moment by moment, over coffee, in the elevator, through late-night emails about a licensing snag. And when the company’s tectonic plates started shifting, those relationships didn’t just help me survive: they kept me relevant. They gave me a lifeline when the floor felt like it might drop out from under me. Without them, I would’ve been another casualty of the shuffle — forgotten, filed away, gone. That’s what happens when you stay in your silo. You disappear the second your department stops breathing.

Here's the part that makes people in power squirm: breaking silos means giving up control. It means letting people see the mess you’ve been keeping behind closed doors. It means your title won’t protect you when the truth is out in the open.

Some leaders will never do it. They’ll keep the walls high and thick because that’s where they feel safe. And one day they’ll look around and realize all their best people are gone — the ones who could have built something worth breathing for — because no one could stand the air inside.

In Silo, the worst fate is being sent outside to die. In the real world, the worst fate is staying inside, breathing the same stale air every day, convincing yourself it’s fine, while the walls close in and the oxygen runs out.

And if you’re in a leadership role thinking, this doesn’t apply to me, it does. If your teams aren’t crossing lines, if you can’t name the last time someone from a different department taught you something that changed your work, you are already running a sealed ecosystem. You are the wall. And the cracks won’t come from outside competitors — they’ll come from the people inside who’ve had enough.

So make the choice now.

Tear down the barriers you’ve built, even the ones with your fingerprints all over them. Breathe the air you’ve been warning others about. And if you can’t, don’t be surprised when the next tectonic shift leaves you gasping alone in your perfect, empty silo.