A meeting. Negotiating a partnership with a publicly listed company, twelve people sitting across from us. Business cards collected across the table, each person politely introducing themselves with titles ranging from manager to vice president.

After the meeting, I asked my colleague: “So, who can actually make the decision today?”

My colleague looked at me: “Probably… none of them.”

This isn’t an isolated incident. Doing B2B in Taiwan, I encounter this scenario at least once a month. The other party takes your proposal seriously—so they send many people. But many people attending doesn’t mean things will move forward. The more common result is: each department leaves with their own concerns, goes back to digest in their respective silos, then the next meeting has a third of different people, and the conversation starts over from scratch.

Three months later, besides consuming dozens of business cards and several pots of coffee, there’s been zero progress.

Division of Labor Isn’t the Problem, Fragmentation Is

Gillian Tett, author of “The Silo Effect,” uses “silos” to describe information isolation within organizations. Each department is like an independent silo where the grain (information) can neither enter nor exit.

But I want to push her observation further: the problem isn’t division of labor itself. Division of labor is the foundation of civilization—you can’t expect one person to simultaneously understand finance, legal, technology, and marketing. The problem is that after division of labor, the channels for information flow have been severed.

In more technical terms: the organizational problem isn’t modularization, but that the interfaces between modules are poorly designed.

Each department has its own language, its own KPIs, its own priorities. Finance looks at cash flow and risk, sales looks at revenue and growth, legal looks at compliance and liability. They might be discussing the same project, but “is this project good” translates completely differently in each department.

When these different translations cannot be integrated into a common judgment, the organization becomes paralyzed. Not because no one wants to get things done, but because no one has the ability to translate all departments’ languages into the same story.

How I Learned to Identify Silos

After over a decade in business development, I’ve developed a method for quickly identifying silos. It’s not some theory—just intuition grown from stepping on too many landmines.

Scenario One: The grand lineup. A meeting with dozen-plus attendees, representatives from every department. The more diverse the titles on business cards, the deeper the silos. Because if internal communication were smooth, they wouldn’t need every department sending someone—one or two people with a holistic view could represent everyone. The lineup means: they can’t sort things out internally either, so they’re making you the integrative catalyst.

The problem is, you’re not their employee. You have no authority to drive anything within their organization.

Scenario Two: Constantly changing contacts. Planning, procurement, contracts—different people for each phase. You think you’re negotiating with one company, but you’re actually negotiating separate segments with three departments that don’t communicate. Most frustrating: conditions you negotiated with Department A are completely unknown to Department B, and directly rejected by Department C.

When encountering these situations, my advice is: extremely carefully manage the time and resources you invest. Because this indicates their internal communication costs are ten times higher than you imagine, and these costs will ultimately be transferred to you.

The Translator’s Value

So what do you do? Give up? Sometimes yes, giving up is the most rational choice. But if the opportunity is truly worth pursuing, what you need to do isn’t “push harder in sales,” but become a translator.

What does this mean?

You need to understand what each department cares about, then use their respective languages to tell the same solution as different stories. When talking to finance, emphasize ROI and risk control; when talking to tech, emphasize architectural compatibility and maintenance costs; when talking to sales, emphasize market opportunities and competitive advantages.

Then—this is the crucial part—you need to help them integrate these stories into one. Because they can’t do it themselves.

This doesn’t sound like business development work. Correct, it’s more like consulting work, even like what an internal project manager at their company would do. But this is the reality of B2B business development: before selling anything, you need to help the other party’s organization run through a decision-making process.

When training my company’s sales team, what I emphasize most isn’t scripts and presentation skills, but “can you map out the other company’s decision-making structure?” Who influences whom? Who has veto power? Whose KPIs relate to your solution? If you can’t draw this map, even the best product won’t get through.

Transcending Organization to Break Organization

Here’s a paradox: To break others’ silos, you can’t be a silo yourself.

What does this mean? If you only understand technology, only sales, or only finance, you can only dialogue with one of their silos. What you need is the ability to freely switch between different dimensions—today discussing technical architecture with the CTO, tomorrow discussing investment returns with the CFO, the day after understanding real pain points with front-line employees.

This cross-dimensional ability is essentially what I’ve been calling cross-domain connection. Not knowing everything, but knowing enough to translate between different professional languages.

My own cross-domain background—theology, circular economy, AI, entrepreneurship—has actually become a huge advantage in business development. Because I can discuss technology with engineers, strategy with executives, and organizational culture with HR, and not just pretending to understand, but genuinely dialoguing within their contexts.

The Silo Effect in the AI Era

Interestingly, AI’s emergence makes the silo effect more worth discussing.

On one hand, AI can accelerate silo formation. Each department implements its own AI tools, builds its own data pipelines, develops its own automation processes. Without unified architecture, information fragmentation between these AI systems might be more severe than fragmentation between people. At least when people meet, they can hear between the lines; AI only recognizes the data formats it’s been fed.

On the other hand, AI can also be a tool for breaking silos. When organizations have unified data platforms and AI agents, information from different departments can be immediately integrated, cross-analyzed, and formed into a global view. What used to take three meetings to piece together can now be presented in one dashboard.

But tools are just tools. The root of the silo effect is human problems—territorialism, distrust, unwillingness to spend time understanding others’ languages. These problems won’t automatically disappear because of AI.

Either Translate or Leave

Back to the most practical level. If you’re doing business development, facing an organization with deep silos, you have two choices.

First, become a translator. Understand each silo’s logic, find common interests between them, help them build dialogue bridges. Then conversely “lead” your partner’s team—not with authority, but with holistic vision and information advantage—guiding them through the decision-making process.

Second, immediately end the negotiations, don’t waste time spinning wheels. Save your energy for the next opportunity with healthier organization and clearer decision-making processes.

There’s no third option.

Pushing hard against silos, you’ll only become a consumable in their internal politics. Retreating from silos, you lose the meaning of business development’s existence.

The highest level of business development isn’t selling things. It’s enabling information to flow where it should flow, giving people who couldn’t make decisions the ability to make decisions because of your presence.