The Board is a team of ten hard-working divers running their business in the beautiful waters of a tropical cove.
Nine of them are best described as a non-synchronised team, all busy looking after their own area of the seabed, bobbing up and down whenever they need air, but rarely at the same time. Their job is to rake the underwater sand into intricate patterns in order to attract and please an elusive shoal of fish. Nobody has ever asked why.
The diving Board work over a circular area only a couple of hundred metres across but never realise how near they are to each other, because their diving and raking keeps churning up the water – which never stops for long enough to let the water clear.
When they come up for air they usually see nobody else, so they just take a deep breath and dive back to the seabed thinking, “Where is everyone…?”, or “If it wasn’t for me this business would fall apart!”The tenth member of the Board is the CEO. He stays on the surface. Every time one of the others comes up for air he swims towards them as fast as he can. He wants to find out what they’re doing and how they are getting on. Sometimes he catches them in time for a short conversation, but usually he’s too late and they have already dived. He spends a lot of time on his own, but he enjoys swimming, and it gives him time to think (“Where is everyone?” … “If it wasn’t for me this business would fall apart!” etc.)
Meanwhile down below his divers carry on raking their piece of sand – trying to keep their shoal of fish happy. It’s hard work as the fish never do what they’re told and keep disappearing. In theory, each of the divers also has a trained crab to help with the raking, but in practice he is a difficult character who keeps swimming into the murky waters.
It’s not easy.
Sometimes when divers surface they see other heads bobbing in the distance. They just wave to each other and dive (“Work to do!”).
Every four weeks, following some kind of internal clock, they all surface at the same time.
This is the Board Meeting. A large circle of bobbing heads about 50 metres apart, with the CEO in the middle. Shouting distance.
Board meetings don’t last long. It’s hard to hear what anyone else is saying, particularly when they all shout at the same time.
In any case, what’s the point? There is so much to be done below.
One by one the heads disappear and the Diving Board gets back to work.
One day the tide goes out and doesn’t come back. Ten divers are left standing on the seabed in a big circle, looking round at each other, the CEO in the middle.
This is the first time they have seen each other completely, not just as bobbing heads. They had no idea what their colleagues actually looked like. It’s like they had never really met.
They also see, at last, that the sand they had been working on, is just one large strip which they were raking in different directions.
It doesn’t matter any more because now the tide has gone out and all the rake marks have disappeared.
In silent dismay they walk slowly towards each other, trying to make sense of it all.
It doesn’t take long to work out that there was only one shoal of fish, and they’ve gone.
Also, there was only one crab, no wonder he was so hard to pin down.
No sign of him either.
Having a silo mentality reduces efficiency in the workplace, and is likely to be a contributing factor to an ineffective corporate culture.
Our communication programs will assist in combating this business mindset.
For further information, please contact us.
Peter Nowlan – Natural Direction Associate
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