It's the '80s Again
Why every generation rediscovers the same organizational problems — and what's actually keeping them in place.
James is frustrated. He's been watching the same problems circle the organization for months — decisions that should take days taking weeks, work getting dropped at the handoff between teams, people solving the same problems independently because nobody knew the other group was working on it.
He calls a meeting. The right people are in the room. And somewhere in the first twenty minutes, someone names it.
The problem is silos. We're not working across functions. Everyone's focused on their own lane.
The room nods. Because the room knows. Everyone in that room has felt the friction, lost time to the handoffs, wondered why information that existed somewhere in the organization never seemed to reach them.
From somewhere near the end of the table, someone says it quietly.
We've talked about this before. I remember we did something about silos — maybe ten, twelve years ago.
A beat.
What happened? someone asks.
I'm not sure exactly. It kind of faded out.
A brief pause. Then the room moves forward, because there's a problem to solve and a plan to make. And this time, everyone agrees, they're going to do it right.
I know that room well. A few decades ago I was James — the one with the energy, the idea, the certainty that this time we'd get it right. Now I'm the frustrated one at the end of the table, saying we tried something like this in the '80s, watching the room absorb it and move on anyway.
Both of us are right. Neither of us has the whole picture.
—
They make a real plan. Not a vague commitment — an actual structure. A cross-functional team, pulling one person from each key function. A standing meeting, every two weeks. A shared mandate: bring your stuck problems here, look across the boundaries, solve together.
People leave the room with energy. James feels it. This is how it should work.
—
Fast forward a year.
The cross-functional team has stopped meeting. It didn't end dramatically — there was no moment of dissolution, no announcement. The meetings just got harder to schedule. People were pulled into other priorities. The standing agenda got thin. Eventually someone suggested they reconvene when there was something specific to bring, and that moment never quite arrived.
The silos are still there. The handoffs still drop work. Decisions still take too long. And here's what's strange: the conversation about silos has disappeared too. Not because the problem was solved. Because the energy around solving it was spent, and the organization moved on to the next thing.
If you asked James today, he'd probably say they tried something and it didn't really take. He might not remember exactly why.
In ten years, he'll be the one at the end of the table.
—
There's a simulation used in business schools called the Beer Game. Players take on roles in a supply chain — retailer, wholesaler, distributor, manufacturer. Their goal is simple: keep the beer flowing without running out or overordering.
They always fail. Not because the players are careless or inexperienced. Because the structure of the game — the delays, the information gaps, the incentives baked into each role — produces the failure regardless of who's playing. You can swap in the smartest people in the room. The outcome doesn't change.
The system determines the behavior. Not the people inside it.
That's what happened to James's cross-functional team. Every person on it went back to a boss who evaluated them on their function's results. A budget that belonged to their department. A performance review that asked what they delivered for their team — not what they did for the whole. The team asked people to think horizontally. The structure around them rewarded vertical. Collaboration was the stated goal. The path of least resistance ran the other way.
The team didn't fail because people stopped caring. It failed because the structure never changed. And structure, left untouched, keeps producing the same outcome — regardless of the plan made in the meeting room, regardless of the energy people walked out with.
The silos didn't come back after the team disbanded. They never went anywhere.
—
Which raises the harder question: if the structure is the problem, why doesn't anyone change it?
Because structure isn't just a set of org chart boxes. Every organization carries what I think of as cultural DNA — the invisible instructions that define the organization. It lives in budgets, incentives, reporting relationships, performance measures, and countless decisions made years ago that no one questions anymore.
The organizational structure creates the conditions. The human nervous system adapts to those conditions. Over time the two reinforce each other until what feels like common sense is simply the encoding made visible.
Nobody in James's organization chose silos. The structure made silos the easiest, safest, most rewarded behavior available. People followed the logic. Of course they did.
—
This is why I keep saying it's the '80s again.
I've sat in versions of this meeting since the 1980s. The slides change. The language changes. The consulting firms change. But eventually someone says we're too siloed, someone forms a cross-functional team, and everyone leaves convinced this time will be different.
It isn't that organizations can't learn. It's that learning without redesigning the structure is like pulling weeds without touching the root. The symptom disappears. The system keeps growing it back.
New leaders inherit old systems. Old systems keep producing familiar outcomes. The problems look new because the people experiencing them are new. The structure producing them is not.
Different technology. Different corporate speak. Different people. Same outcome.
—
The Beer Game doesn't change when smarter players sit at the table. It changes when the rules change. Organizations are no different.
The work that actually changes things doesn't begin with what the organization is doing wrong. It begins with what the system is making easy, safe, and rewarded — and what it's making costly, risky, and invisible.
Until an organization changes what it measures, funds, and expects, people aren't choosing silos. They're simply following the logic the structure encoded long before they arrived.
That's where the redesign begins. Not in the meeting room. In the architecture beneath it.
Next: The Roles Grow Back — why organizational structure always rebuilds itself, and what's really holding it in place.
Structure teaches culture what to become.