Break Down Barriers

Transfers

Deming’s Point 9 — “Break down barriers between departments” — uses an architectural metaphor so thoroughly absorbed into management language that most speakers do not register its spatial structure. Departments are rooms separated by walls. Information is a physical substance that cannot pass through walls. The solution is demolition. This dead metaphor shapes how organizations think about collaboration by making organizational structure literally spatial.

Key structural parallels:

• Departments as rooms, information as physical flow — the barrier metaphor makes organizational structure architectural. Departments are enclosed spaces. Information, materials, and cooperation are substances that flow (another metaphor) between spaces. Barriers block this flow. The metaphor is so naturalized that “silo” (a vertical enclosed container) has become the standard term for departmental isolation, and no one notices they are describing an organization as a grain storage facility.
• Local optimization as a topological problem — when departments are separated by barriers, each department can only see and optimize its own space. The sales department optimizes for closing deals (even if fulfillment cannot deliver). The engineering department optimizes for technical elegance (even if customers cannot use the result). The finance department optimizes for cost reduction (even if it starves the functions that generate revenue). Deming’s insight: these local optima are not merely suboptimal — they are structurally guaranteed to produce system-level dysfunction because the barriers prevent the information that would reveal the dysfunction from reaching the people who could address it.
• Barriers are constructed, not natural — the architectural framing implies that someone built the walls. Organizational silos do not emerge from physics; they are created by org charts, budget structures, reporting lines, physical office layouts, incentive systems, and cultural norms. This means they can be un-built. But it also means someone chose to build them, likely for reasons that seemed good at the time, and those reasons may still apply.
• Demolition vs. doors — the metaphor says “break down” barriers, not “install doors in” barriers. This frames the solution as destruction, not managed access. In practice, organizations need selective permeability (some information should flow freely, some should be controlled), but the demolition metaphor encourages all-or-nothing thinking about organizational boundaries.

Limits

• Boundaries serve structural functions — in architecture, walls are not just barriers to movement; they are load-bearing structures, fire partitions, acoustic separators, and privacy screens. Removing them without understanding their structural role can collapse the building. Similarly, organizational boundaries serve functions: they concentrate expertise (the legal department exists because legal knowledge is specialized), they create accountability (someone must own each function), they manage cognitive load (you cannot attend to everything), and they satisfy regulatory requirements (Chinese walls in financial services exist for legal reasons). “Break down barriers” ignores these functions.
• The open-plan office lesson — the most literal application of “break down barriers” in workplace design — the open-plan office — has been extensively studied and found to reduce rather than increase collaboration. When physical barriers are removed, people compensate by erecting social barriers (headphones, averted gazes, email instead of conversation). The architectural metaphor misleads because human communication is not a physical substance that flows through open space; it is a social behavior that requires specific conditions, including sometimes the condition of having a private space to think.
• Asymmetric barriers are invisible — physical barriers block movement symmetrically: if you cannot go through a wall from this side, no one can go through from the other side. But organizational barriers are often asymmetric. Information flows easily from executives to staff but not the reverse. Sales can make promises that engineering must keep but not vice versa. The symmetric barrier metaphor misses these power asymmetries, which are often the actual problem.
• Cross-functional does not mean cross-competent — breaking down barriers between departments assumes that the people on either side can usefully communicate once the barrier is gone. But departmental boundaries often reflect genuine differences in expertise, vocabulary, methodology, and epistemology. A statistician and a marketing manager in the same room may still not be able to collaborate effectively because their barriers are cognitive, not organizational. The architectural metaphor suggests that proximity equals integration, which is often false.

Expressions

• “Silo mentality” — the dominant expression for departmental isolation, extending the architectural metaphor to a vertical enclosed container (grain silo)
• “Break down silos” — the management consultant’s version, combining Deming’s barrier metaphor with the silo metaphor
• “Cross-functional team” — the organizational design response to barriers, assembling people from different departments into a single unit
• “We need to get everyone in the same room” — literal spatial metaphor for overcoming organizational barriers
• “Left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” — body metaphor for the same organizational dysfunction, predating Deming
• “Turf war” — territorial metaphor for the conflict that barriers create, where departments defend their enclosed space
• “Open door policy” — the gentler version: not demolishing the barrier but making it permeable, though often more rhetorical than structural
• “Walled garden” — technology sector expression for a deliberately enclosed ecosystem, the strategic silo

Origin Story

Deming’s Point 9 reads: “Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.” He included this in Out of the Crisis (1986) based on his observation that American manufacturing was plagued by departmental optimization at the expense of system performance.

The barrier/wall metaphor for organizational separation is older than Deming — it appears in management literature throughout the 20th century. But Deming elevated it from a complaint to a structural principle: barriers between departments are not merely inconvenient but are the primary mechanism by which organizations defeat themselves. His contribution was not the metaphor but the systems-thinking analysis of why barriers produce dysfunction.

The concept was operationalized in various ways: Toyota’s obeya (big room) practice of co-locating cross-functional teams, agile software development’s emphasis on cross-functional teams, and the modern tech industry’s DevOps movement, which explicitly addresses the barrier between development and operations teams.

References

• Deming, W.E. Out of the Crisis (1986) — Point 9 of the 14 Points
• Womack, J.P. and Jones, D.T. Lean Thinking (1996) — value-stream analysis as a method for identifying and addressing cross-departmental barriers
• Bernstein, E. and Turban, S. “The Impact of the ‘Open’ Workspace on Human Collaboration,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373 (2018) — empirical evidence that removing physical barriers can reduce collaboration
• Kim, G. et al. The Phoenix Project (2013) — fictionalized account of breaking down the development-operations barrier