Silos No More

A convention against domain walls: what is learned in one part of the work is written where every other part can find it.

A silo is not usually built on purpose. It forms because a group is busy, its own vocabulary works well enough internally, and writing for outsiders costs time that the week does not obviously contain. Then one day the same problem is being solved in four places at once, in four vocabularies, and nobody in any of them knows about the other three.

The convention is the standing refusal of that. Work is written where the whole can meet it, in words the whole can read; the trades do not each keep a private canon; a solution found in one domain is pushed up to the commons rather than kept in the tool that produced it. It is the writing-side expression of what integrated delivery does structurally — dissolving the walls between domains so that a whole can be optimized rather than each part optimizing itself into the whole's way.

It also has a reading side. A person who works in one Pillar is expected to know the others exist, to be able to say roughly what they hold, and to ask across before inventing. A Pillar is realized only in a place, by people who hold a craft, and the crafts have to be able to talk.

The failure this guards against is old and well-documented: local optimization displacing the purpose of the whole. That is why the pattern of production names it among the things that must be built in rather than hoped for.

Also called: no domain walls Stands on: Integrated Delivery · Cross-Functional Integration · Knowledge as commons Opens onto: Design To The Goal · Polycentric Implementation of Shared Solutions · Shared Services, Infrastructure, and Support · The Meta Project · Communication Debt · One canonical home per concept In play: Home · beyond Sources: the Pattern Language inventory, convention patterns (ore; named in a list, body not written) · The LIØNSBERG Book of Conventions (canon-grade for its role) · The DNA of Heaven, Part VII (Fable synthesis, unreviewed) · lionsberg.wiki: The LIØNSBERG Pattern Language Open: the name is listed among the convention patterns and has no page and no body anywhere; the reading above is inferred from the production pattern it belongs to, and should be checked against whatever the pattern's author intended.