The Power of Guilds

For a technical enterprise, collaborative communication is one of the most powerful tools leaders have to enact meaningful change in the presence of silos. How many times have you as an enterprise leader heard something along the lines of...

• "You built what? We solved problem that two years ago."
• "I don't know what team owns that service."
• "Every application logs differently."
• "Only two people really understand that system."
• "We have four different authentication APIs."

Technical silos develop naturally through segmented responsibilities and a lack of architectural governance. If there is no business reason for teams to talk, the flow of ideas outside each team can effectively stop. Most of us have felt the silo problem at least once in our technical careers, so how do you start to solve it?

I had a very good success story last year when I resurrected an architectural guild. The premise was simple: make space for connection and communication, invite some business teams to talk about what they are doing, seed it with some questions and problems that are visible from a leadership level, and give the smart people you've hired a forum to talk. 

The benefits I personally saw were striking. I could see them in the collaborations that grew, the common issues that surfaced, the solution sharing, and the alignment that started forming across teams. We were on track to build at least three independent identity solutions before we stood up a team to build a proof of concept around one common solution. Quantifying the value difference on something like that is remarkably difficult, but the long-term enterprise benefit is easy to understand.

How would I go about standing up something like this again? I would do the following:

• Assign a high-level leadership sponsor: This role will add legitimacy, push the meeting forward, and keep it focused. Their responsibility is to ask leading questions, fill the awkward silence, capture common friction to solve at a higher level, and reach out to other verticals to present.
• Carve out calendar time: not Friday at 4 p.m. and not during lunch. In my experience, an hour was a good container.
• Make attendance voluntary: Leaders should stress why participating in the forum matters and create the space for people to attend so the group can deliver real value. If you create value, they will come.
• Invite the right audience: A cross-functional cohort of business and technical representatives helps keep the discussion balanced and focused on enterprise value. There is nothing like having a group of engineers talk through a solution and then hearing a business partner say, "That is not the part of the problem we need to solve."
• Avoid mandating outcomes. You want to establish a safe space for communication and connection, not create another place where people have to report on assigned work items. There are better methods for driving mandates without killing the vibe of the forum.

The larger leadership lesson is simple: communication forums do not solve silos by themselves, but they create the conditions to help alleviate the problems they cause. When leaders make those conversations possible, it can unlock value opportunities across the enterprise.