Summary: Despite decades of talk about breaking down silos, they persist. In every large organisation, teams still hoard information, avoid collaboration, and stick tightly to their turf. The problem isn’t just structure. It’s social, cultural and personal. If we want to fix silos, we need to understand what fuels them.

Why do we work in silos and at what cost?

First, do silos make us feel important?

Silos seem to serve our egos. When a team controls a process or knowledge, it creates identity and status. You’re the Data Team. The Brand Guardians. The Compliance Experts. That identity creates a boundary—“this is us, that’s them.” This reinforces in-group/ out-group human biases (“you’re from a social unit unrelated to our tribe”).

People protect their turf because it makes their role feel valuable. If you’re the only one who understands how something works, you become indispensable. This isn’t always conscious, but it’s reinforced daily in meetings, org charts, and who gets heard.

Sharing knowledge, in contrast, can feel like giving away power. Suddenly, others can question your choices or replicate your work. For some, that feels like a threat. So they stay in the silo, where their expertise stays unchallenged.

This is so damaging to the highly collaborative work of UX and Service Design. We need to look across a product or service, or understand adjacent processes or details. We need less: keeping each other “in the dark”.

Next, does not sharing give us a sense of security?

Information hoarding often hides behind a mask of “security.” IT teams, compliance, and even senior leaders will often justify silos as a necessary risk management measure. “We can’t share that yet,” they’ll say. Or, “This data isn’t ready to be shared.”

Sometimes, this is valid. But often, the fear is overblown or misused. Risk aversion becomes a default posture. Teams use “security” to delay feedback, dodge scrutiny, or avoid coordination with others.

This creates a feedback loop: one team hides behind the process, so the others stop trying. The result? Collaboration dies off. Trust erodes. Teams start duplicating work or making conflicting decisions because the whole picture is locked away.

“Not my department” makes silos worse

Entire service processes depend on moving customers from department to department. FedEx is a good case in point: I was recently passed between three countries and six different agents, just to send a parcel from one country to another (a birth certificate). From each agent, I was told, “Not my department.”

This mindset is common in large orgs where ownership is fragmented. Everyone is busy. Everyone has their own KPIs. If fixing something means stepping outside your lane, you might hesitate. You’re not rewarded for fixing other people’s problems—so why bother?

Worse, a UX Design that does not look at a system-level experience can lead to a disjointed user journey. Design, technology or process handled by the adjacent department becomes a broken touchpoint. Customers don’t care. But we seem to continue designing to reflect the silos we work in.

Related issues emerge from UX role definitions and boundaries. In UX and Service Design, we work in the Venn Diagram: overlapping interests with BAs, Devs, Business, Marketing, Leadership, etc. When UX roles are defined as tactical over strategic or misunderstood, as is the case in UX, it’s easy to ignore collaboration.

In UX, we’re also not great at stakeholder collaboration. This makes it all more painful. No stakeholder collaboration means no opportunity for influence.

Different incentives keep us divided.

Silos thrive when teams are rewarded for local success. If your goal is shipping features, not improving outcomes, you’ll ship– no matter the impact on support or customers.

Incentives create behaviors. When marketing focuses on leads, sales on closing, and product on features, nobody owns the customer journey. Each team optimises for their metrics. Alignment dies.

This isn’t about bad intent. It’s about mismatched goals. You can’t expect collaboration when success is defined in contradictory ways.

Leaders often overlook this. They talk about “breaking silos” but keep the same incentive structures. Nothing changes. Teams still compete. Collaboration still feels like extra work.

The hidden costs of working in silos

Silos feel safe. They feel efficient. But they’re expensive.

They create delays. Confusion. Duplication. Mixed messages. Teams chase the same user with different tools. Customers get different answers from different channels. Data gets lost in translation.

Innovation suffers too. Fresh ideas come from combining perspectives. When teams stay in their lanes, they don’t challenge each other’s assumptions. They don’t co-create. They don’t learn. Silos grow stronger when no one feels responsible for the end-to-end experience.

Worse, silos erode empathy. When you never speak to other teams—or worse, actively avoid them—you stop understanding what they care about. You stop seeing shared goals.

Much of this is simply about being proactive about silo behavior. Most team members run on autopilot, not starting and ending conversations with two simple questions: “What else can I share with you?; Who else should you talk to?”.

My default is start sharing, if it’s not relevant pivot.

So what can we do?

• Start by naming the problem. Teams need to admit when they’re working in silos, instead of just aligning in a slide deck. Honest retros, feedback loops, and postmortems help surface where silos block value.
• Create shared incentives. Align around outcomes, not outputs. This means tying success to the whole experience, not just your team’s bit.
• Design for collaboration. Use service blueprints, journey maps, and shared planning rituals to make the connections visible. Don’t assume alignment: build it deliberately. Also, don’t assume you’ll get reciprocation or that the person or team knows how to collaborate—or even use your information. This requires follow-up, relationship-building, and tending to the system, including both process and people (team members, colleagues, stakeholders, management, and vendors).
• Protect psychological safety. Cross-functional teams only work when people feel safe to ask, challenge, and share. Build trust by working together, not just meeting occasionally. Remember, cooperating and collaborating are two radically different behaviours and outcomes.
• Finally, reward bridge-building. Promote and encourage others who collaborate, include, connect and infiltrate silo’ed ways of working. Encourage teams to learn and share from one another. Make collaboration a ritual, not something needed when there’s trouble. Because breaking silos isn’t about yelling “collaborate more.” It’s about redesigning how we think, lead, and work.

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