Some years ago, I had the good fortune to work on a government initiative that I still consider one of the best ideas I have ever seen put into practice. The goal was to find alternatives to institutional care for children with developmental disabilities. The insight behind it was simple and powerful: these children were being treated by doctors, psychologists, teachers, physical and occupational therapists, speech therapists, and other specialists who were all trained in separate worlds and rarely worked as one.
So this governmental initiative built a place where they would. Seventeen universities, training professionals across eleven different disciplines, sent their students to a Center for Interdisciplinary Internships. There, the trainees did hands-on treatment of real children, working in close coordination across disciplines to build something none of their separate programs taught: a holistic, integrated approach to children with developmental challenges that affected performance in all areas of their life.
It worked. It worked beautifully. The children’s performance improved across every area. The trainees developed competencies they could never have gained inside their own university silos. By any honest measure the integrated model was a clear success, and everyone involved could see it.
The whole point, the real objective, was for that interdisciplinary competency to flow back and influence universities’ curriculum, to become part of how each discipline trained its specialists from then on. That was the prize. Prove it at the Center, then build it into formal training everywhere.
It never happened.
The siloed structure of each profession’s training was so deeply built into the curriculum that there was simply no room for interdisciplinary competency-building. It was never made a priority. The disciplines went on training the way they always had. The Center kept doing excellent work on its own, helping the children it served, but the larger vision, the one that would have changed the interdisciplinary planning and development of these children, quietly died. The Center itself eventually closed, undone by the usual combination: shifting political support and the sheer durability of silo thinking.
I have carried that one with me for a long time, because it taught me something no amount of good intention can get around. Structure is not neutral. An organization’s structure either integrates people’s contributions or it fragments them, and when it fragments them it will defeat even a proven, successful, demonstrably better way of working. The Center did not fail on the merits. It failed because the structure around it was built for silos, and a structure built for silos will reject an integrated model the way a body rejects a transplant.
This is what leaders miss when they try to release their people’s capability one supervisor, one pep talk, one training, one reorganization at a time. You can have the best intentions and the most talented people, and if the structure routes the work into silos, forces it through too many approval layers, or splits a whole job across boxes on a chart that never talk to each other, the capability has nowhere to go. The org chart is not just a picture of who reports to whom. It is a set of decisions about whose contribution reaches the work and whose gets stranded.
So if you lead at any scale above a single team, this is the question worth sitting with. Take one important piece of work in your organization and trace it across the structure. How many handoffs does it survive? How many boxes does it cross before anyone is actually allowed to integrate the pieces? Every one of those boundaries is a place where someone’s creative genius is asked to stop at a line on a chart. The most capable person in the world cannot integrate what the structure keeps apart.
I still think about those children, and about the trainees who, for one bright stretch, got to practice their professions the way they were always meant to be practiced, as part of a whole. For a while, the genius in that building was fully integrated, and you could see the difference in the children’s lives. It did not last, not because anyone stopped believing in it, but because the structure around it never made room for it. The saddest waste is not the idea that fails. It is the idea that works, and dies anyway, because nothing was built to hold it.