Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Silos: Culture Versus Change

I've written before on the problems of combining organizations--typically I've seen the problem through the lens of organizational culture--for example, ASCS and SCS had very different cultures when I was working.

But I saw something today which caused me to think of another consideration.  The story: I was doing my morning walk, coming through the Hunters Mills shopping center, which now is your standard strip mall. In a couple places I saw they'd placed cobblestones and fine stone next to the curb.  The places were at the corner of an intersection and the logic of placing the stones was to handle cases where the turning radius of a long tractor trailer was larger than the radius of the intersection, meaning the rear wheels of the trailer would jump the curb and put ruts into the grass.

I came up with a "just so" story to explain this:  back in the day when Reston's roads were designed, some 30-50 years ago, tractor trailers were shorter than they are now.  So you had one organization working on road design standards and other organizations designing tractor trailers to provide the most cost efficient transportation.  Each organization had its own focus and its own evolutionary history and impulses, their culture.  But what's important is the changes happening within the organization, not any cultural conflict between the two organizations. 

So, coming back to ASCS and SCS--the bigshots in USDA could look at them and see a static picture, meaning changes ordered by management would be the only thing going on (particularly when IT types were ignorant of programs).

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