Your First Broken Silo

You have the principle, the method, and thirty-five cases' worth of proof. This chapter is the part where it becomes Monday morning. One quarter (ninety days) from blank page to one working exchange. Not a strategy. Not a programme. One broken silo, closed and earning. Small on purpose: remember Kalundborg started with one pipe, and remember what the launch-event projects in this book are now worth.

Days 1–30: Scan. Take the map from chapter 5 and walk your organisation with it (physically, where possible); waste hides from dashboards and shows itself to visitors. Fill five lists: what do we throw away (trash), what do we vent or flare (energy), what stands still and when (assets), what are our people good at that we never ask (capabilities), what data do we collect and never use (information)? Then the sixth list, the chain: every step between you and your suppliers, and between you and your final buyer, and next to each step, the function it performs. Three rules make the scan real. Numbers, however rough: "two megawatts at thirty degrees, October to April" trades; "we vent some heat" doesn't. Ask the floor, not the org chart: the operators know where the waste is, the forklift drivers know what stands still, and nobody has ever asked them. And include the embarrassing: the half-empty office, the licence nobody uses, the expertise that retired last year and still lives ten minutes away. Deliverable: one page per category, numbers attached. If the page is empty, you didn't walk far enough.