This isn’t an exciting new game you can download for your iPhone.  It’s not the most esoteric science fiction story you’ve never read.  In actuality, it’s the heart of how we structure our entire operation here in Investor Services at Grid151.  I believe it’s the best possible way for us to run and manage our business.  And I believe this because I’ve managed teams that operated in both a silo and a pod type of structure, and I have a firm belief in one being better than the other.  Let me explain a bit further, if I may.

When I think about a business that operates in silos, I think not only about the structure of operations in place in that business, but I also think about the culture that takes root.  Every area of the business has its own team, its own leadership group, its own philosophy of operating, despite the fact that all of these various areas are also related to each other.  Unquestionably there are higher level operating principles in place, focuses that drive the overall culture, upper tiers of leadership that set expectations and manage progress.  The team concept, driving the performance, is present in both theory and in concept, although it is stretched pretty thin in actual practice.

Certainly, there are some advantages to operating in this manner, or nobody would do so.  There are very specialized knowledge bases and skillsets built into these silos.  A “divide and conquer” ethos is always present.  Your ability to scale up quickly around volume spikes is ever ready (although there are other ways to do this as well – see my blog last month for a bit more of my philosophy on this particular topic Read Here.  I don’t want to sound biased.  It isn’t all doom and gloom here.

But the fact that there are multiple stakeholders, often with very focused agendas and their own priorities, and very often NOT thinking about how what they do may affect other people down the line in their business, also causes all kinds of problems.  I know the idea that comes down to us from on high (stop me if you’ve been hearing this since kindergarten) is that everyone in the sandbox is expected to play nicely together.  That all sounds great, of course.  But what actually happens?  You end up playing with your friends in the sandbox, I play with mine, and occasionally we might look at each other.  Often to fight over the best toys.

Let’s translate all of that to an operating principle for a business.

Have you ever been in a room where you talked about a single topic for two hours, heard everybody give their opinion and explain what’s important to them, and walked out of the room having never even come close to solving the issue at hand?  I have.

Have you ever needed to solve an issue and had no idea where to go, who to speak with, how to explain what you need, or how to explain WHY that other person should care about what you need, because the relationships you need to have in place to allow for all of those answers to come together simply aren’t supported by the business structure?  I have.

Have you ever felt like the people and the processes and the very personality of your business, all of which are supposed to be tipped towards empowering you to achieve your purpose and results, are actually de-empowering you through the sheer number of voices in the room?  Let’s call it the curse of plenty.  Yes, once again, I have.

I lived this through large parts of my career in management.  It’s the reason why I was determined to manage and operate our Investor Services group in a much different way.  We call it our “pod” structure.  You can think of it as the opposite of a structure built on silos.  The goal is simple – have a team of stakeholders who are empowered to work together, make decisions, and see the full scope of the work they do and the impact they have on our clients.  I like to think of it as a much more client-centric approach, even though it is also process-centric as well.  I also like to think of it as horizontal rather than vertical in terms of how it translates theory into actual practice.

In our “pod” structure, where we have specific teams of people assigned to each of our clients who oversee the entire process (and progress) on a transaction, we have a significant advantage over vendors who have more of a silo type of structure in their processes.  Our teams know exactly what is happening from end to end in a transaction, in every single aspect of our processes, and they have input and control over all of it.  They also have specific insight into areas that may be more likely to cause issues for a particular client.  I think you lose some of this oversight in a process that is broken up into multiple stakeholders, which is why the way we structure things is so important to us.

Pods vs. silos.  I think you know which way I am going here.

There are lots of ways to run a business.  But I believe our operating structure puts us in a position where we can comfortably say there is absolutely no vendor in our industry who is set up better to confront your needs head on, whether they are in the pre- or post-closing side of the Secondary Mortgage Market.  Let us put our principles to work for you, so you can spend more time succeeding at the things that are most important, and less time getting lost in the inertia of a process filled with silos.  Curse of plenty, indeed.