Fix What Bugs You, Share What Works: Breaking Silos by Making Value Visible

This is Part 3 of a four-part series documenting practitioner conversations from the Future of People at Work Lean Coffee session at the LEI Lean Summit in Houston, March 13, 2026. Each post focuses on one of the four cross-initiative themes the community explored: succession planning, time poverty, organizational silos, and AI integration.

“Anytime somebody tries to keep their values close to the vest, it’s like anti-lean.” That was Dan Miano, a manufacturing leader from Santa Maria, California, speaking to a group of higher education practitioners in a Zoom breakout at the LEI Lean Summit in Houston. They had known each other for about twelve minutes.

Sally Gatlin from Michigan State University described the wall she keeps hitting: after training 25 people across MSU’s five administrative units in a lean learning series, the same pattern persists—people want to own their processes rather than share them. The group traced this to a misunderstanding of where personal value lies. People believe their job security depends on being the only one who knows how to do something.

Miro breakout on "silos"

From Hoarding to Sharing

Dan, who recently sold his flexible coupling manufacturing business, brought a different frame: knowledge transfer as a professional obligation. “The equipment had the value, and what’s even more valuable is the knowledge that my business partners and I have. It’s our responsibility to share.” He observed that people who guard their knowledge “are really pigeonholing themselves.”

The group developed practical countermeasures: communities of practice with scheduled office hours, and a paired slogan—“Fix what bugs you, share what works”—reframing sharing as the natural completion of the improvement cycle. One practitioner warned that word-of-mouth alone is too slow: for seasonal processes, it can take a full year for an improvement to spread. The unifying framework became “make it visible, make it better”—once a process is written down and shared, the community can improve it in ways no individual working alone could accomplish.

In the main room, Jeanne Carey added that financial reward structures often reinforce the very silo behavior organizations say they want to eliminate—bonuses tied to cost-center performance, for example, that incentivize hoarding over sharing. She offered the software industry’s community code model as an alternative. The in-room table arrived at a complementary insight: it’s nearly impossible to account for the return on investing in cross-silo relationships, even though the cost of not investing is visible everywhere.

Knowledge Map: Connecting to Your Context

Process Keywords: Knowledge hoarding diagnosis, communities of practice, process documentation, visual management, cross-functional sharing, word-of-mouth diffusion analysis, reward structure redesign, knowledge transfer obligation

Context Keywords: Departmental competition, expertise hoarding, undocumented processes, seasonal diffusion delays, matrixed leadership friction, Not Invented Here syndrome, Covid-era isolation effects

Application Triggers:

• People hoarding expertise for job security → Reframe value: sharing builds professional worth, not diminishes it

• Improvements spreading too slowly → “Fix what bugs you, share what works” and structured sharing channels

• Undocumented processes living in people’s heads → “Make it visible, make it better” framework

• Reward structures reinforcing silos → Community code model and financial incentive redesign

Related Continual Improvement Themes: Respect for people, systems thinking, visual management, organizational learning, knowledge transfer, community building, hidden factories of waste (knowledge delay, duplication, rework)

This post was developed from practitioner conversations at the LEI Lean Summit Lean Coffee session (March 13, 2026), with Zoom breakout recording from Sally Gatlin and synthesized with Claude.AI assistance. Editorial contributions by Eric Olsen, Rachel Reuter, Colleen Soppelsa, and Dave Ostreicher.  It represents ongoing work by the Future of People at Work initiative, a collaboration of Catalysis, Central Coast Lean, GBMP Consulting Group, Imagining Excellence, Lean Enterprise Institute, Shingo Institute, The Ohio State University Center for Operational Excellence, Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), and University of Kentucky Pigman College of Engineering.

Continue the conversation:

• Join our monthly community gatherings: https://fpwork.org 

• Miro Board: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVKm4rtGI=/?moveToWidget=3458764664033400655&cot=14

People to Connect With: @Sally Gatlin @Dan Miano @Jeanne Carey @Bruce Hamilton @Rachel Reuter @Eric O. Olsen

Hashtags: #FutureOfPeopleAtWork #ContinuousImprovement #LeanSummit #OrganizationalSilos #KnowledgeSharing #RespectForPeople