Imploding Silos with Games and Behavioral Science

Mishari will illustrate how a single, well-implemented tool successfully dissolved an organizational silo.

Organizational silos frequently emerge as a natural consequence of communication structures. As a result, attempts by team members to dismantle these barriers often feel counterproductive and yield frustratingly limited success.

A common approach is gamification, which typically focuses on points, badges, and leaderboards (PBL)—like GitHub’s stars or CHAOSS’s community leaderboard. However, these elements often have limited success in driving engagement.

To understand environments where hard work feels organic, we can look to games like chess, football, or Wordle. In these examples, points are not ends in themselves but rather tools within a comprehensive system of rules and incentives designed to achieve a desired outcome.

In this talk, the speaker will illustrate how a single, well-implemented tool successfully dissolved an organizational silo. The presentation will then introduce the Octalysis framework, offering proposals on factors that can be considered when crafting environments where collaboration across organizational boundaries becomes organic and effortless.