How big is your team?

The language of silos.

"Oh, well the IT department haven't responded yet, they are always late." Ever heard anything similar to that from the members in your team? I have heard countless of versions of this in almost every organisation I worked in. The blame game that always include We and They and that builds solid barriers between silos.

So who are They? This is really what you should pay attention to. The boarder of your team is where your team members go from We to They. In one team I recently did a workshop, one team member drew that line at himself. He explained that he is the only one doing this specific task in his team, and he didn't really know what the others did, what They did. This really hit me and it got me thinking about what constitute a team.

In very strict hierarchal organisations, the manager is in control of all work tasks and almost all information flow. This is usually called a need-to-know basis. This leaves team members with little or basically no clue of what others are working on, the team is really just a group of people working for the same manager. Suddenly We includes only Me... The silos has become very small and isolated islands in the ocean of the organisation.

But if we were to lift the attention to a higher perspective, we would see that in an organisation we all serve the customer, we all contribute to the end product, no matter what that product is. This means, we are all really just one big team. We are all part of the same puzzle, and if we could see that, we could identify that the boarders of our team also includes the rest of the group, the managers, the IT department and so on. One of my amazing Lean coach colleges defined the vision of his company as One Team. Now that is a good vision of what Lean should be! And as a further thought, maybe the puzzle pieces continuous on beyond the limit of our company's walls, into the society around us, and the climate and world we operate in? Think about it. How big is your puzzle?

One way to start is to pay attention to the language you use in your company, where do you go from We to They? And then start by expanding that limit.