Furthermore, Ensor’s use of the term silo “reflects his rural Illinois origins and the many grain silos he would pass on return visits as he contemplated the challenges of the modern organizations with which he worked.” Aha – here’s the source of our food storage container metaphor!īack in Terre Haute, I was on the fence, but finally decided to go with the silo image. “In understanding organizational behaviour, the term silo mentality often refers to a mindset which creates and maintains information silos within an organization.” He noted that the chain of communication in organizational structures seemed to be more top down rather than having people communicating with each other across an organization. On Wikipedia I learned that much more recently, the term functional silo syndrome was coined in 1988 by Phil Ensor, an organizational development consultant for Goodyear, located in Akron, Ohio: What Is Silo Mentality (With Disadvantages of Having One) Indeed Editorial Team Updated 24 March 2023 Being able to work closely and effectively with the other employees in an organisation or company can be crucial in enabling you to achieve your goals at work effectively. On a farm, silo prevents different grains from mixing. I’ll summarize: the Ancient Greeks have a word, “siros” this becomes “sirus” in Latin which becomes “silo” in Spanish – but not all experts agree. Silo may be defined as groups of employees that tend to work as autonomous units within an organization. The long version is here in the BBC’s The Vocabularist: How did ‘silo’ get to mean something else? and in Grammarphobia‘s The silo syndrome. I kept digging, and here’s where it gets a little murky, as the word silo is a bit of an etymological mystery.
So how did the term silo make the transition from Grain Street to Wall Street to Main Street? So I looked up silo, and was surprised that Google’s resulting definition did not even list it as a noun – it was a verb, and I have certainly heard it used this way as well. I mean, I guess the grain in one silo is isolated from grain in another silo? And they can sometimes stand alone out on a farmstead? But it seemed like a farfetched metaphor to me, and not one that necessarily merited a visual to accompany and reinforce it. Photo by /jessrivets of her family’s farm in Martinsville, IndianaĪs I considered drawing a grain silo - but not a missile silo, which leads me to think more of a ‘fortress under seige’ mentality - I realized it did not immediately resonate with me as being a synonym for “place of isolation”, which is the meaning I think the speaker intended.
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