How to break down silos with internal scouting excursions

Locking information within departments diminishes staff trust and impedes progress for your organization. Try this exchange program to forge bonds and unfetter innovative minds.

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It’s a vicious circle.

Workplace silos hinder interaction with other groups and individual colleagues; therefore information isn’t exchanged, and ideas wither.

That paucity of creative thinking puts a steep premium on innovative thoughts, so people become loath to reveal them to others, and the silo walls get thicker—and the thinking gets even narrower.

What if, instead, you created a vibrant circle? Envision an exuberant network of colleagues who, because of their discrete areas of expertise—not despite them—would exchange information and insights, posing “outsider” questions about how things are done, and why.

Consider the “experiment” of “The Most Unknown,” a 2018 documentary that pairs scientists from different disciplines—psychology, astronomy, physics, microbiology and more—in a chain spanning the world.

Though each scientist has a specific objective as he or she posits and explores, tests and analyzes, the common purpose is to widen our collective understanding of life and our place in the cosmos.

Quests for new information

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