---
title: The Power of Knowing Together (3) — Silos, the Cost of Walls
url: https://oosioo.com/en/p/%ED%95%A8%EA%BB%98-%EC%95%84%EB%8A%94-%ED%9E%98-3
date: 2026-10-17T10:18:09+00:00
author: SYSOP
summary: When walls go up between departments and each guards only its own turf, the same company ends up doing the same work twice. That is the price of not sharing information.
---
# The Power of Knowing Together (3) — Silos, the Cost of Walls

When information is used as power, walls go up inside an organization. Partitions rise between departments, and each one starts guarding only its own turf. This is a silo.

## Doing the Same Work Twice

This happened at one company. Two teams were separately developing almost the same feature. Neither team knew what the other was doing. The truth only came out three months later, when it was time to merge the products. Three months' worth of labor costs and time had simply vanished. If the information had been shared, they would have known in the first week: "Oh, they're already doing that over there."

![An illustration of a silo: two teams separately build the same feature behind a wall, only discovering the duplication three months later](/uploads/628306ddcfa2c4c3.webp =720)

This isn't just a story about small companies. Sony, the company that changed how the world listened to music with the Walkman, brought a digital music player to market before Apple did — and still handed the market to Apple. Two of its divisions competed with each other and released separate products, and the music division refused to cooperate for fear its own sales would be cannibalized. While walls went up on the inside, an integrated competitor on the outside took the market.

## The Bill for the Wall

The same thing happens in government. The Board of Audit and Inspection uncovered a case like this. One ministry spent over a trillion won to build and release more than 900 types of AI training datasets — while twenty-six other agencies were separately building overlapping datasets of their own. For one dataset from the Seoul city government, 63% turned out to be duplicates. If they had simply checked once what the others were building, there would have been no need to build it twice. In another audit, a ministry reportedly spent 4.6 billion won building a new system from scratch, unaware that a neighboring ministry already had one that would have cost just 500 million won.

| Inside the wall | What wasn't shared | The bill |
|---|---|---|
| Two dev teams | Each other's work | Three months of labor costs |
| Sony's two divisions | Product direction | The digital music market |
| Public agencies | Dataset-building status | Wasted, duplicated budget |

Walls don't only rise inside an organization. The bill is bigger when information is sealed off from the outside. One foreign carmaker, facing a string of vehicle fires, knew about the defect but understated when it had first learned of it, and submitted materials requested by regulators more than 150 days late. The longer it concealed things, the more distrust grew — and it ultimately came back as fines exceeding ten billion won and a criminal referral. It wasn't hiding the defect itself that caused the bigger damage — it was hiding *when they knew*.

A shipbuilder that had long concealed its accounting books walked the same path. Financial statements that hid losses eventually came back as court-ordered damages. Whether inside or outside, a wall built to block information eventually collapses — and the whole organization is left to clean up the wreckage.

The reason silos form is simple: people feel that sharing information diminishes their own worth. Departmental self-interest, friction between units — the root cause is one and the same: the defensive instinct that says "I have to protect what's mine." The bill for the wall that instinct builds is always split among the whole organization in the end.

In the next piece, we'll talk about the people who tear down that wall — the rules of an organization that puts everything out on the table.