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Please Don't Work in Silos!

It seems that the more we specialise, the more we siloise (no pun intended). Siloisation is, according to Wikipedia, "The splitting of personnel, data, etc. into isolated units with poor communication."

One danger of siloisation is that we are only interested in our own field of work or research. "I'm a linguist", or "I'm a literacy specialist" becomes an excuse for ignoring other areas of work, all of which are important.

Another danger is poor communication between the various fields of work. We don't have time to attend all the Communities of Practice, or read all the emails in all of the email groups, so we just pick our own field of interest, without interacting with related fields.

Yet another problem is those who want to subsume all other fields under their own. "It's all education!" Or, "It's all language development!"

Finally, we may over-simplify other areas of work. "Scripture engagement is about getting people to read Bibles that linguists have spent 20 years translating" (a huge over-simplification).

So, how do these various areas relate to one another? How does linguistics relate to literacy and literacy to Scripture engagement and linguistics to Scripture engagement etc. etc.? How does anthropology fit in? What about arts? 

One way of answering this is by asking how another department can help yours. For instance arts people can help Scripture engagement (SE) workers by training local artists to use their creativity for the Kingdom. Scripture engagement workers can help linguists by building relationships with churches and with ordinary believers so that the translation is more relevant to its intended audience, and ends up getting used (engaged with). They can also advise the team on what products are needed to meet the felt needs of the audience. Literacy and SE specialists can work together to produce health booklets on e.g. the dangers of AIDS or substance abuse. When trauma healing workers make booklets the literacy workers can advise which languages to use (or not use). In addition orality specialists can train trauma healing trainers in how to lead the course orally. Linguists can help SE workers understand what goes on under the bonnet, so to speak i.e. how translation works, what the difficulties are, and why certain key terms were chosen in the local language. This will help SE people to understand the importance of using accepted key terms (accepted by the local community). Anthropologists can help everyone understand the significance of a patrilineal group, or why polygyny is one of their practices. 

Without this cross-fertilisation we are stuck in a very long, and potentially very tedious rut. Even if it isn't tedious, because we love our work, we sometimes need help to get out of that rut because it isn't helping local people make progress. So siloisation is a problem, but if we are open to working together well as a team, things can work out well!

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