Top 7 'Silo-Busting' Systems Thinking Skills to develop for career growth - Goh Ling Yong
Ever felt like you're working on a tiny island? You’re an expert in your domain, you hit your targets, and you do great work. But just beyond your shoreline, there’s a fog. You’re not quite sure what the "island" next to you is doing, how your work connects to theirs, or why a decision made three departments away just created a tidal wave of new tasks for you.
This, my friends, is the "silo effect," and it’s one of the biggest silent killers of productivity and career growth in modern organizations. Silos make us feel disconnected and turn collaborative potential into departmental friction. We focus on our little piece of the puzzle so intensely that we forget we’re all working together to create a single, beautiful picture. The antidote? A powerful mindset shift known as systems thinking.
Systems thinking is the ability to see the organization not as a collection of separate parts, but as a dynamic, interconnected whole. It’s about understanding the relationships, patterns, and feedback loops that truly drive results. Developing this skill set is like gaining a superpower. It transforms you from someone who just completes tasks into a strategic thinker who solves core problems, builds bridges, and becomes utterly indispensable. Ready to break down some walls?
Here are the top 7 'silo-busting' systems thinking skills you need to cultivate for massive career growth.
1. Seeing the Big Picture (Holistic Perspective)
The most fundamental skill in systems thinking is zooming out. It's the conscious effort to lift your head up from your daily to-do list and look at the entire landscape. A siloed employee knows what they need to do. A systems thinker understands why it matters to the entire organization. This means grasping the company's mission, its key business goals for the quarter, the competitive pressures it faces, and how your specific role contributes to its success or failure.
When you have a holistic perspective, your decisions become smarter and more strategic. You stop suggesting ideas that only benefit your team and start proposing solutions that create a win-win-win across departments. You can anticipate needs before they become urgent requests and communicate your work in a context that senior leadership immediately understands and values. This is the first step in moving from a tactical player to a strategic partner within your company.
How to develop it:
- Become a student of your company: Spend 30 minutes a week reading internal communications you might normally ignore. Read the all-hands meeting notes, the quarterly financial reports, and the CEO's latest update. Ask yourself: "What are the top 3 priorities for the company right now, and how does my work connect to them?"
- Schedule 'curiosity coffees': Once a month, invite someone from a completely different department (e.g., if you're in Engineering, talk to someone in Sales) for a 15-minute virtual coffee. Don't talk about a specific project. Instead, ask questions like: "What does success look like for your team?" or "What's the biggest challenge you're facing this quarter?"
2. Identifying Interconnections and Dependencies
Organizations are complex webs of cause and effect. The marketing team's new ad campaign directly impacts the number and quality of leads the sales team receives. The sales team's promises to clients set expectations for the customer success team. The product team's roadmap dictates the workload for the engineering team. A systems thinker doesn't just see these as handoffs; they see them as critical interdependencies.
By mapping these connections, you can predict the ripple effects of any action. You’ll be the person in the meeting who raises their hand and says, "That's a great idea, but have we considered how this will impact the support team's ticket volume?" This foresight prevents bottlenecks, reduces inter-departmental friction, and saves the company from costly surprises. You become the glue that holds cross-functional projects together because you understand how all the pieces need to fit.
How to develop it:
- Create a "Stakeholder Map" for your next project: Before you begin, draw a simple diagram. Put your project in the center. Then, draw lines to every person or team that will be affected, that you need input from, or that simply needs to be kept informed. This simple exercise forces you to think beyond your own team from day one.
- "Trace the workflow": Pick a core process in your company (e.g., from a customer's first click on an ad to them receiving their product). Mentally or on a whiteboard, trace its path through different departments. Where are the handoffs? Where is information most likely to get lost? This helps you visualize the system in action.
3. Recognizing Patterns and Trends
A single customer complaint is an anecdote. Ten customers complaining about the exact same issue over three weeks is a pattern. A siloed approach deals with each complaint individually. A systems thinking approach asks, "What underlying process or issue is causing this recurring problem?" This skill is about moving beyond treating symptoms to diagnosing the root cause.
Are project deadlines always missed at the same stage? Does a specific team always seem to be a bottleneck right before a major launch? Recognizing these patterns allows you to address systemic flaws instead of constantly fighting fires. When you can articulate a pattern and propose a solution to the underlying cause, you demonstrate a level of insight that is highly valued in leadership roles. You’re not just solving today's problem; you're preventing all the future versions of it.
How to develop it:
- Keep a "Pattern Log": For one month, dedicate a small section of your notebook to jotting down recurring frustrations, repeated questions from colleagues, or problems that seem to pop up again and again. At the end of the month, review your log. The patterns will often jump right off the page.
- Use the "Five Whys" technique: When a problem occurs, ask "Why?" five times to dig deeper than the surface-level cause. For example: 1. Why did the client report a bug? (Because the new feature had an error.) 2. Why? (Because it wasn't tested properly.) 3. Why? (Because the QA team was rushed.) 4. Why? (Because the development timeline was too aggressive.) 5. Why? (Because we didn't account for dependencies on another team's work.) Now you have a systemic issue to solve, not just a bug to fix.
4. Understanding Feedback Loops
In any system, actions create results, and those results circle back to influence future actions. These are "feedback loops," and they come in two main flavors. Reinforcing loops are like snowballs rolling downhill; they amplify an effect. For instance, a great product leads to positive reviews, which drives more sales, which provides more money for R&D to make the product even better.
Balancing loops, on the other hand, are stabilizing. They resist change and try to maintain an equilibrium. Think of a thermostat. If a team works too hard (overtime), burnout increases, which in turn reduces productivity, bringing the output back down. A systems thinker can identify these loops in an organization and understand how to intervene. They know when to nurture a positive reinforcing loop or how to break a negative one.
How to develop it:
- Ask "And then what happens?": When analyzing a situation or decision, repeatedly ask this question to trace its ripple effects. "We're going to lower our prices." -> And then what happens? -> "We'll get more customers." -> And then what happens? -> "Our support team will be overwhelmed." -> And then what happens? -> "Customer satisfaction will drop." This helps you spot potential negative feedback loops before they start.
- Map a loop: Think of a goal your team has. What actions drive it forward? (e.g., More sales calls). What are the results? (e.g., More revenue). How does that result feed back into the system? (e.g., Higher commissions, which motivates more sales calls). You’ve just mapped a reinforcing loop!
5. Mastering Cross-Functional Communication
Communicating across silos isn't just about being friendly; it's about being a translator. An engineer, a marketer, and a finance analyst all have different priorities, metrics, and vocabularies. A brilliant technical solution is useless if you can't explain its business value to the people holding the purse strings. A marketing campaign's creative genius is lost if you can't explain the lead-generation strategy to the sales team.
Silo-busters are masters of empathy and translation. They instinctively reframe their message for their audience. They drop the jargon and focus on shared goals. Instead of saying, "We need to deprecate the legacy codebase," they say, "We need to invest time now to overhaul our old system so that the website stops crashing during peak sales events." One is a technical problem; the other is a business solution.
How to develop it:
- Define your acronyms: In any email or presentation to a mixed audience, always spell out acronyms the first time you use them. It’s a small act of courtesy that makes your communication instantly more inclusive.
- Start with their "WIIFM" (What's In It For Me?): Before you ask another department for something, frame your request around their priorities. Instead of, "I need you to get me this data," try, "To help your team hit its Q4 conversion goal, my team can provide a better analysis if we can get access to the recent user survey data. Can you help with that?"
6. Thinking in Time (Short-term vs. Long-term)
Silos often create short-term thinking. A team is incentivized to hit its quarterly target, even if the method they use creates problems for another team down the line. A classic example is a sales team over-promising on features to close a deal, leaving the product team to deal with the long-term consequences of building something that doesn't scale.
A systems thinker has a longer time horizon. They constantly weigh the immediate benefits of a decision against its second- and third-order consequences. As my colleague and mentor Goh Ling Yong often advises leaders, true strategic advantage comes from making decisions that pay dividends long after the initial effort is forgotten. This means advocating for a "quick fix" when it's appropriate, but also having the courage to push for a more sustainable, long-term solution, even if it’s harder in the short run.
How to develop it:
- Use the "10-10-10" framework: When facing a tough decision, ask yourself: What are the consequences of this decision in 10 minutes? In 10 months? And in 10 years? This simple but powerful mental model forces you to expand your time horizon beyond the immediate pressure of the moment.
- Conduct "pre-mortems": For a new project, gather the team and imagine it's one year in the future and the project has failed spectacularly. Have everyone write down all the reasons why it might have failed. This exercise uncovers potential long-term risks that short-term optimism might otherwise obscure.
7. Embracing Emergence and Unintended Consequences
In a complex system like a company, the whole is often greater and more unpredictable than the sum of its parts. You can have a team of brilliant individuals who, when put together, produce dysfunctional results. Conversely, sometimes a small change can create surprisingly large, positive outcomes. This is "emergence." Systems thinkers accept that they can't predict everything.
Instead of seeking perfect control, they create conditions for positive emergence to occur and remain vigilant for unintended consequences. They understand that a new "work from anywhere" policy designed to improve flexibility might unintentionally weaken the company culture. They don't see this as a failure, but as new information from the system that requires adaptation. This mindset makes you more resilient, agile, and effective in a constantly changing environment.
How to develop it:
- Run pilot programs: Instead of launching a major initiative company-wide, test it with a small, representative group first. This creates a safe space to learn, observe unintended consequences, and adapt your strategy before a full-scale rollout.
- Embrace the question "What might happen if...?": In planning sessions, actively brainstorm not just the intended outcomes, but the potential side effects. "What might happen if this feature is too popular and our servers can't handle the traffic?" "What might happen if this new sales commission structure encourages unhealthy competition?" Thinking about these possibilities prepares you to manage them if they arise.
From Cog to Strategist
Breaking out of a siloed mindset isn't an overnight change. It’s a continuous practice of curiosity, empathy, and perspective-shifting. By developing these seven systems thinking skills, you do more than just become better at your job—you fundamentally change your value to the organization. You become the person who connects the dots, who sees the whole chessboard, and who solves the problems behind the problems.
These are the people who are tapped for high-impact projects. They are the ones who are trusted to lead cross-functional teams and are fast-tracked into leadership positions. They are seen not as a cog in one department's machine, but as a critical strategist for the entire organization's success.
So, what's the first step you can take this week? Will you schedule a "curiosity coffee" or try the "Five Whys" on a nagging problem?
Share which skill you're most excited to work on in the comments below! I'd love to hear your thoughts.
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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