“Editing your silo” is about gravitating to your own belief system compatible information, instead of challenging your believe system. Stated another way, it is tuning your thoughts and words to arguing your perspective as opposed to drilling down to why you, and others, believe what they believe. Are you editing your silo? If you focus more on the minutia of the social strata of who and why someone has a particular perspective, instead of trying to understand the perspective itself, you are probably editing your silo. “All my friends believe this”, “I am only friends with others who believe like me”, or “I believe this, therefore I am right”.

Doubt is the driving force of both innovation and faith. The innovative process, like faith in your belief system, is strengthened through challenges. Just like exercise develops your body’s strength and stamina, allowing for doubt and belief system challenges develops the quality of your ideas and the depth of your faith.

Sync’ing is a way to exit “editing your silo” thinking. Sync’ing is about listening to and seeking to understand others first, then trying to be understood yourself second (Stephen Covey). Sync’ing your knowledge, information and perceptions with others brings alignment by way of shrinking the differences between people’s perspectives. There will always be differing perspectives between people, but understanding will allow appreciation of the differences instead of fearing the differences.

One of the main reasons behind the failure to bring a good idea from concept to profit production is silo editing. Innovators that fail to get out of their self made box (fail to sync with others) also typically fail to obtain, or use, the contextual information that will convert facts to truth. This manifests itself as thinking for the customer, prospect or teammate instead of sync’ing with their perspectives. Two heads are better than one only if they are synced and working together. The result is often a hybrid idea or perspective that employees the best of the various view points. This is the back bone of consultative sales. It is also the back bone of innovative idea generation and innovative engineering.