As human beings, we generally find it easier to feel team-spirit in smaller rather than larger groups. We need to actively cultivate organisation-wide integration; holistic thinking is not a sure-fire success.

Two senior teams of a global financial conglomerate’s Investment and Risk Assessment departments were caught in a spiral of stagnation. Many deals ended up being vetoed by either team. The risk-assessors were accused of being too careful and diminishing competitiveness, while the investors were said to act prematurely with too little procedural thoroughness. The so-called silo-mentality directed energy into finger-pointing rather than joint problem-solving.

We conducted preliminary interviews revealing that both teams perceived each other in strikingly similar terms: they withhold information from us, exclude us from decision-making meetings on purpose, and believe their own expertise is more relevant than ours. How could that be? Presenting these results in the follow-up workshop helped the teams realise that in fact they knew very little about each other’s operational procedures, related pain points, prioritisation criteria, and trouble-shooting mechanisms.

We came up with a long-term collaboration strategy that enabled both teams to jointly look at new investment proposals early in the process, thereby breaking the so-called ping-pong pattern of product ownership, as well as encompassing regular joint review points. In the long-term, both teams started to draw out a multitude of lessons learnt from each other, therefore increasing decision-making efficiency drastically.