English: Flag of the Iroquois Confederacy, Hiawatha Belt Français : Drapeau de la Confédération Iroquoise (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If ever there was a cooperative organization that had less reason to endure until today, it is the Iroquois League.

First formed sometime between the 15^th and 16^th centuries, it brought together five distinct tribes that had been warring and otherwise squabbling for centuries prior. Each tribe had its own language, customs, and culture. Located mostly in what is today northern New York State, the tribes’ unity (a sixth joined in the 18^th century) allowed them to wield serious political power as Dutch and English colonists came to North America.

Caught on the Wrong Side
The league probably should have fallen apart after it backed and fought with the losing side in the American Revolution, the British. With most of their former lands seized by the Americans, the tribes were forced to move to Canada; those that remained were relocated into small reservations sprinkled across New York.

Yet despite all the wars, relocations, deprivations, and disease epidemics brought upon the individual tribes, the league survives. Perhaps it has to do with the flexible style of governance that has been in place since the beginning. Each tribe has the freedom to govern itself, yet there is a Grand Council of 56 (that number has never changed) Hoyenah (chiefs) or Sachems that confers about issues that concern the league as a whole.

Women hold a strong place in Iroquois society, leading individual clans within tribes, helping determine chiefs, and holding veto power over treaties and declarations of war (the Iroquois declared war on Germany in both world wars). In the 19^th century, no treaty was binding unless it was ratified by 75% of the male voters and 75% of the “mothers of the nation.”

Why Can’t Companies Do This?
So the obvious question becomes, why can’t companies cooperate like this? Most are riven by silo (tribal) warfare, as employees who are all supposed to be working for the same cause – serving the customer – engage in turf battles and subvert one another in an attempt to appear to be the most effective contributors to the company.

It’s happened to me multiple times in my fewer than three years at SAP: nasty emails from someone I’ve never met demanding to know who gave me permission to publish a story that touches on his or her silo but that does not overlap with anything they’re trying to do. There’s no discussion of whether what I’ve published is of good quality or could be helpful to a customer – it’s all about fear and power. I’m guessing you’ve experienced the same thing at some point if you’ve ever worked in a big company (or maybe a small one, too).

This has got to stop.

Customers are demanding that we deal with them in a unified, cross-channel fashion. They don’t want three different calls from three different sales areas of your company. They don’t want duplicative or conflicting messages coming from different parts of the marketing organization.

How Do We Stop the Infighting?
Research by my colleague Rob O’Regan has revealed a few ways to develop cross-channel cooperation:

• Put someone in charge. Organizations need someone to orchestrate the cross-channel experience, even if they don’t own it. This person must be relatively senior in stature and visible across all functions, serving as an internal partner to connect disparate groups around a customer-centric strategy.
• Develop plans collaboratively. More organizations are moving away from traditional top-down, bottom-up planning. Instead of having sales, marketing, finance, and operations each develop their own strategic plans, these companies have introduced collaborative planning, which puts everyone in the same room to create a shared plan, with the customer at the center.
• Talk to the frontliners. Companies should also tap into customer-facing employees, who are a rich source of insights. Whoever heads up customer experience should oversee an effort to ask every frontline employee what’s impeding their ability to deliver excellent service.
• Form temporary problem-solving teams. Companies have pockets of expertise about the customer experience spread across the company. They should look for ways to tap into these people to quickly resolve specific customer problems.
• Focus metrics and incentives on long-term retention. Customer experience initiatives should be measured not on short-term transactions but on longer-term measures, such as lifetime value. For example, instead of measuring how quickly a call center agent answers a customer’s question, measure how infrequently customers call back.

I’m sure there are other ways to reduce silo and channel conflict that I haven’t mentioned. What do you recommend?