Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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25 November 2005

Are silo's always bad?

Are more ties always a better thing from the systemic point of view? Are silo's necessarily disfunctional for organizations? A lot of popular rhetoric out there regarding silo's, and the need to move toward networked ("boundaryless") forms suggests that this is the case. However, it is also plausible that it is valuable to buffer the various parts of an organization from each other so as to maintain a healthy diversity of viewpoints, and that efforts to bridge the silo's can, in the long run, bring about an unhealthy organization-wide "groupthink." Below I link to a paper on the Social Science Research Network by Allan Friedman and myself that explores this idea.

Paper:
The Parable of the Hare and the Tortoise: Small Worlds, Diversity, and System Performance

Abstract:
Whether as team members brainstorming, or cultures experimenting with new technologies, problem solvers communicate and share ideas. This paper examines how the structure of these communication networks can affect system-level performance. We present an agent-based model of information sharing, where the less successful emulate the more successful. Results suggest that where agents are dealing with a complex problem, the more efficient the network at disseminating information, and the higher the velocity of information over that network, the better the short run and lower the long run performance of the system. The dynamic underlying this result is that an inefficient network is better at exploration than an efficient network, supporting a more thorough search for solutions in the long run. This suggests that the efficient network is the hare - the fast starter - and the poorly connected network is the tortoise - slow at the start of the race, but ultimately triumphant.

Posted by David Lazer at November 25, 2005 11:16 AM

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Posted by: Jordi Comas at December 19, 2005 11:43 PM

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