Episode 276: The Octopus Organisation: How HR Can Make Transformation Stick (with Phil Le-Brun & Jana Werner)
What would your organisation look like if it worked more like an octopus — distributed, adaptive, and capable of sensing and reacting without waiting for instructions from the centre?
In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Phil Lebrun and Jana Werner, Executives in Residence at Amazon Web Services and authors of The Octopus Organization, to explore why so many transformations fail to stick — and what a more adaptive, human approach to change actually looks like.
Join them as they discuss:
What the octopus organisation metaphor is, and why it offers a different model to the traditional, hierarchical "Tin Man" organisation
The three themes — clarity, ownership, and curiosity — that separate organisations that adapt well from those that don't
Why transformation can no longer be treated as a one-time event
HR's evolving role in driving and supporting transformation
How to measure whether change is actually working, beyond vanity metrics
Real examples of leaders and organisations putting these ideas into practice
This episode is sponsored by Valence.
Nadia, Valence's AI coaching platform, connects talent strategy to the work employees are actually doing — offering coaching from the frontline to the boardroom, and surfacing organisational insights that weren't visible before.
As the most widely deployed coach in the Fortune 500, Nadia is already helping global leaders like Nestlé, Delta, CVS, and Kraft Heinz transform talent at scale.
Learn more at valence.co/insight222
Resources:
This episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast is brought to you by Valence.
[0:00:08] David Green: Did you know that two thirds of an octopus' intelligence isn't in its brain, it's in its tentacles? Each one can sense, react, and act independently without waiting for a signal from the centre. Interesting, right? Imagine if our organisations worked that way. That's exactly the question my guests today set out to answer, and they've written a whole book about it. Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner are executives in residence at Amazon Web Services and the authors of The Octopus Organization. And between them, they've worked with leadership teams across pretty much every industry and geography you can think of, helping organisations approach and adapt successfully to change. So, in this episode, I'm absolutely delighted to get deep into what an octopus organisation actually looks like in practice, and why most companies are still operating more like what Phil and Jana refer to as the Tin Man. We talk about the three things that really separate organisations that adapt well from those that don't, how you actually know where the change is sticking, and why today transformation really can't be a one-time event. So, if you lead people or work in HR, I think there's a lot in this episode for you. And with that, let's get started.
Welcome to the show, Phil, Jana. To kick things off, could you share with listeners a little bit about your roles at Amazon Web Services and a bit about yourselves as well?
[0:01:42] Phil Le-Brun: Yeah, absolutely. We're both what are called executives in residence. So, we spend the majority of our time with leadership teams in every industry, every geography, helping them think through what they're trying to become, helping them make their own mistakes, not someone else's. Because, boy, as companies, do we like to make the same mistake as everyone else because we're unique. And we use some of our learnings from Amazon, our personal backgrounds. We all have come from transformational backgrounds. So, I spent many years in McDonald's in various corporate roles, including as their international CIO. Jana led transformations within financial services and logistics. And we made a lot of mistakes doing those changes. And then, we learn from all the customers we meet as well. So, we try and hold a mirror up to organisations and get them to think a little bit differently about how they can approach the challenges they have today.
[0:02:36] David Green: I'm curious, what kinds of challenges are coming up most often when it comes to successful and maybe unsuccessful transformations?
[0:02:44] Jana Werner: Interestingly, David, we've committed lots of the cardinal sins ourselves of large scale transformations, and yet we should know better, because we see the numbers and the statistics again and again. This whole idea of 70% to 90% fail, or after three years, less than 12% of the transformation deliver the value that they hope to deliver. They can be, as Phil sometimes calls it, 'wiring your organisation with dynamite and pressing the plunger'. It can cause more harm and cause people a lot of unrest and unsettling moments where you're more worried about the politics and where you land than actually recreating value. And it's a lot of this doing transformation and change top-down to people, whereas you actually have hired all these wonderful, creative, thoughtful, really smart experts that are close to the problems, close to the customers, and you're not doing the change with them. And I mean, who likes anything rolled out onto them anyway? That doesn't sound good and doesn't feel great. And as I said, Phil and I made all these little mistakes. You change artifacts, you change an org chart, usually in a pretty PowerPoint, you move the lines, you introduce technology, you create roadmaps. But what we really want is changing behaviour, and that comes from changing mindsets, and then the artifacts follow. So, how your organisation looks should follow your mindset and your behaviour.
It's hard if you do it the other way around, if you start with the artifacts instead of the mindset and the behaviour change. Things don't stick and they don't really scale. And so, we're trying to get a different way that goes more mindset, behaviour, and sticks and scales and taps into all these wonderful, smart people in organisations.
[0:04:30] David Green: And is that really the main reason why so many transformations fail? Is it that failure to change behaviours and do effective change management, as well as the kind of artificial stuff, as you said, about moving the org chart and creating pretty pictures?
[0:04:45] Jana Werner: Yeah, I also think it's because we treat them as a one-time thing and we think we can plan them ahead. But organisations are complex creatures, they're not complicated like a machine, like a jet engine that might have lots of parts, but you can replace a part and you're really clear and you have all the rules of how it works. They're complex. You do one thing on one side of the organisation and it has unforeseen ripple effects. For example, Phil and I, at some point, sat down and we calculated if you wanted to install agentic workflows in an organisation that isn't set up for this, it takes more than 250 things you have to change. Anything from your legal frameworks, how managers are compensated and reviewed and rewarded, all the way to the tech, of course. You can't do this top-down and in one way, you have to learn your way through that. And in a world now where tech changes so quickly and nobody has the answers anymore, you have to learn with your people, and your people have to be able to learn and innovate and quickly learn what works and doesn't work. This top-down stuff just doesn't work anymore. It's outdated for this new world.
[0:05:52] David Green: And again, before we delve into what you cover in the Octopus Organization, there's an argument that transformation, you talked about it not being a one-time thing, there's an argument that transformation is continuous now, given how fast things are moving. I don't know if either of you could talk to that and maybe give any examples that you think would help listeners understand?
[0:06:14] Phil Le-Brun: Yeah, I think if you look at the rate of change in the world today, this idea that I'm going to have a two-year plan, I can predict everything that needs to change, so Jana's point about the 250 changes for agentic workflow, are you really going to sit down and try and predict every one of those and the second- and third- and fourth-order effects of that? And then, this idea that you execute the plan, you get to the end of two years, it's pretty soul-destroying these transformations. It changes people's roles, how the organisation's configured, and such like. And with relief, you say, "Transformation done". It just doesn't work. I mean, if we did that with generative AI, and then shortly on the hills of it, we'd had to do agentic AI transformation, and then whatever comes next. So, the different approach is what we call in Amazon a day-one culture, this idea that even if things seem to be going right, there's always a better way of doing something. And this idea of continuous transformation is much more human, how do I change my role, how I perform, the technology I use every single day versus as a one-time change? Then I get back to my normal job. Because as soon as you stop transforming, you go backwards.
[0:07:25] David Green: How have you seen HR help and maybe hinder transformation? And what do you see as HR's role in transformation?
[0:07:36] Jana Werner: I can make a start and I think we can build on this, because we have probably complementary views. I've seen HR organisations that worked quite in silos, where organisations actually worked in silos and they considered themselves looking at, again, steps in a planning cycle, looking at how do you attract talent? How do you onboard talent? How do you then manage talent? How do you grow talent? And that can be also, again, a very kind of rigid and mechanical way of looking at it. The organisations that we see HR doing really, really well, and interestingly, Amazon is one of them, I learned a lot in Amazon from colleagues who were in HR, where this becomes almost a product where you manage it like a product organisation. You think about who are your customers in each given moment? What is an end-to-end view of the flow of this? And how can I continuously improve what I do here?
To Phil's point, it's not a one-time thing and it's not separate, siloed things, but how can HR be in the middle of these conversations, in the middle of supporting and learning and creating flywheels, where we learn from the people that have onboarded, learn from the people that have experiences? How can they use technology themselves and not only be a recipient of technology changes from the CIO organisations? At Amazon, we do a lot of technical changes within the HR function as well and look at creating these positive flywheels and really being part of the heart of what's important for supporting the people, and seeing that as an extension of supporting our customers well. So, the focus isn't just inwards, it's actually a function that connects directly to the outside world as well, to how we best serve our customers. Then, you have a really true guiding purpose that connects everything nicely.
[0:09:28] Phil Le-Brun: And after all, I mean, if you look at the competitive weapons organisations have, technology, money, people, data, every organisation has access to that. It's only those organisations that really switch them all on and use them strategically that make a difference. So, this is really a shift from many of those mechanical functions HR do today. For instance, annual performance reviews are really archaic in most organisations, even most HR professionals. I think the last data I saw said something like 89% of HR professionals don't like their performance review system. And it's done once a year, it's feedback that feels like a corporate colonoscopy, it's unpleasant. You just want to get it over with and forget about it, as opposed to HR that creates and reinforces cultural norms, like having feedback that flows like water, giving feedback for kindness and development, not just as some sort of abstract end-of-year performance, raising the bar on how we hire people. And then, most importantly, we truly believe most organisations have the people they need, they just don't necessarily have the skills they need. And skills, this isn't about sending people on a training course anymore. This is really creating an environment where people can learn, not just perform. And HR has an awesome accountability to bake in that culture, but then also bring it to life with things like micro learning, having retrospectives, for instance, which are truly learning opportunities as opposed to seeking people to blame.
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Let's talk about the Octopus Organization now. I think you talked about organisations that need to be more adaptive, powered by intelligence and speed. In the book, The Octopus, where did the metaphor come from, first of all? And maybe if you can explain, Jana, to listeners, what's The Octopus Organization about? What will readers gain from reading it?
[0:12:30] Jana Werner: Yeah, of course. We were inspired by this incredible animal that almost has an outer-worldly functioning body. It's almost a bit alien and has survived dinosaurs and a lot of other things. It's absurdly sophisticated, it can adapt in crazy ways, it can shape-shift, it can change the texture of its skin, it can even alter its RNA, so its chemical makeup, within hours, for example, to switch from cold to hot water and how to function there as well. It's unbelievable. But most importantly, it has two-thirds of its intelligence, of its neurons, not in its central brain, but in its arms. So, the arms can operate independently. They can sense and react, but they can also operate in concert. And that's what we found really exciting, the idea that things don't just have to happen in these 19th-century factory models from Frederick Taylor and co that are top-down and management-and leadership-heavy, but you actually have all these people close to customers, close to the edge of the organisation, close to the new technology, and really being able to learn and iterate what works and innovate together. And that's the idea, how can we create more of that kind of organisation?
We called it an Octopus Organization because we didn't want to use names, because no company is ever perfect in this, but some are closer to these kinds of distributed intelligence traits, where ownership sits much more at the edges, where there's clarity and context to act in that way. So, we also learned a lot of interesting facts, like octopuses can learn to play the piano, and other interesting things.
[0:14:05] David Green: Yeah, they're highly intelligent creatures, aren't they?
[0:14:09] Jana Werner: And they have a sense of humour as well, which we both love. We need more humour at our workplace.
[0:14:13] David Green: We definitely need lots more humour than with the world at the moment. I think we all agree with that. And in the book, what do you cover? What's the kind of two-paragraph or three-paragraph summary of the book, and what listeners would gain from reading it?
[0:14:32] Phil Le-Brun: Well, we haven't gone down the traditional approach of many books, which is to say, "If you do these two things, your organisation will be great. You've determined a great strategy, roll it out, everything's good". They never work. And it's to Jana's point earlier, rolling out stuff doesn't work, it's not human. So, we found over 300 dysfunctions of organisations. We balled those up into 38 what we call antipatterns, which are habitual conditioned responses, like if you're a multinational company, "Let's centralise everything because it's efficient". But all you've done is really create a massive bottleneck in your organisation. And then, each of those 38 antipatterns we balled up into three themes. And we're both technologists so ironically, none of this was to do with technology, but it was clarity, ownership and curiosity, and we'll probably come back and describe those in a moment. But within each of those antipatterns, we've described what a Tin Man organisation looks like, what a sort of dated mechanical, industrial revolution organisation looks like and feels like, what an octopus organisation looks and feels like. But then, most importantly, with a systems-thinking mindset, it's what levers can you pull practically to nudge your way into a better direction, into being more adaptable, more resilient.
All of these levers, what we take heart from is it doesn't require a lot of management committees and management consultants and millions of dollars. A lot of it starts with you as a leader, for instance, just being curious and asking questions, as opposed to thinking you have all of the answers. So, we tried to make this a pick your own adventure, not a linear book where you read it from cover to cover and just go implement something, because we know that simply doesn't work.
[0:16:13] David Green: Let's explore some of those topics. I love the analogy of the Tin Man organisation. And it's crazy that most organisations are still structured, as you said, from the thinking of Frederick Taylor and then Henry Ford. That's over 100 years ago now. It's mad. The world's moved on, hasn't it? What does a Tin Man organisation actually feel like from the inside, Jana?
[0:16:38] Jana Werner: It's essentially still like a factory. It's built on standardisation, on specialisation, on control. We focus on individual performance, rather than those wonderful cross-functional teams, and the diversity we need now to solve problems together. It's about compliance, about outcomes, so we get targets set, we get annual performance reviews. It's essentially built on a foundation of permission, permission to speak up, to innovate, waiting times, and interesting, great ideas going into cycles of waiting, decisions going up and down chains and waiting, ideas having to jump across silos or having to try and corral people when you have a great idea, or building a business case, which I know most of us had to lie in what they think will the result of the business case, because we simply don't know. So, playing kind of the system despite the system trying to get work done. And it's like in the UK, we call it a bit like 'rowing in syrup'. It can be exhausting, it's siloed, and that's the opposite of actually enabling people to do their best work, to use new technology and to serve customers.
It's also finally, the point I want to make, very inward-focused. At Amazon, we call this focusing on proxies. So, we think it's success when we've created a PowerPoint, we think it's success if we follow the process. That has nothing to do with serving customers. And as I said, I've worked in such places, I've done such things too. So, it's just something we get used to, we don't question anymore, but we need to.
[0:18:13] David Green: Phil, you mentioned the three antipatterns, the clarity, the ownership, and the curiosity. Can you cover that a little bit more, and maybe give some examples of organisations that are doing the clarity, the ownership, and the curiosity well?
[0:18:30] Phil Le-Brun: Yeah, absolutely. And those three themes are actually reinforcing. So, the clearer someone is about what good looks like, what a company stands for, what the purpose is, the more likely they are to take ownership. The more ownership they take, the more likely they are to experiment, because it's theirs. And the more experimentation that happens, the clearer we become about the problem. So, clarity is really about having a shared understanding of purpose, values, priorities, and the such like, which sounds really obvious. But research tells us that while most leaders think most of their employees know what the company's purpose and priorities are, typically it's in a single digit in terms of how many employees really understand what good looks like. And even if they understand the priorities, often they don't understand why those priorities are important, and they're driven as tasks rather than outcomes. So, simple things like me getting feedback on my performance designed to help me improve, or understanding the purpose, which many organisations have purpose statements like, "We're going to become a platform-based, AI-enabled, data-led organisation that leverages our synergies". It's meaningless.
I'll take an example from Amazon. Amazon's mission statement is quite simply to be Earth's most customer-centric company. Very simple. And it's why our jobs exist, because our job is to help customers be successful by sharing mistakes and common practices. Reed Hastings at Netflix used to talk about setting context for employees. So, not telling them how to do things, but what problems need to be solved and the context for those problems. And if those employees made a mistake, his first question would be, "What context didn't I give them which led them down this path?"
On the ownership side, the tin man behaviour is to treat people like interchangeable capital, just unplug one person, plug someone else in. We believe ownership is about having responsibility and authorship, so having people really own their work so they feel responsible for an outcome, not just a task. And both Jana and I have been in situations where we've had that opportunity, and magic happens where you truly feel like your job connects to a much bigger purpose. So, it's about giving up control and getting away from this permission-based culture, where everyone feels like they have to ask for permission for everything, in which case they feel robbed of agency. And then, thirdly, curiosity, that innately human characteristic, moving away from this idea that we can predict the future, we can have certainty around everything, which clearly in today's environment, predicting what's going to happen next year is almost impossible. But coming up with really big ideas, and giving people the opportunity to experiment, figure out what works, what doesn't work, take great ideas that work and be able to get those into the hands of customers or citizens quickly; but even the ideas that don't work, using those as learning opportunities.
Curiosity, we find, emerges in a culture where failure is feedback and leaders are positively discontent with the status quo. So, they're continually pushing for people to think a little bit differently and not get complacent with their current situation.
[0:21:48] David Green: What you've just outlined, Phil, operating under those three principles, as such, is really how organisations can kind of move from that tin man command-and-control structure to more of an octopus organisation, where obviously there's clarity, there's ownership, but above all, by the sound of it, there's curiosity, that freedom to experiment and fail fast. How have you seen organisations move successfully from tin men to octopus organisations? And do you maybe have any examples that you're able to share with listeners?
[0:22:24] Jana Werner: Yeah, we find that they switch from doing change to people, where the power of the interpretation is in the hands of the few, and they push the plans to actually doing change with people, so creating the conditions for emergent solutions to arrive, to flourish, people closest to the problems to do that. So, they kind of cultivate the organisation's innate capacity for change itself. So, they become leaders who help others change. We spoke to, I think it was the CEO of a South African Stock Exchange, calling that 'lighting a thousand fires'. And they also intertwine learning with impact all the time. So, instead of tin men mistaking activity for progress, you embed learning into the daily value of the work. We've spoken to an SVP at Airbus who lets their people learn before a project, for the project, and then learn during the project as well. So, this isn't a classroom and then you come back and you can't apply what you learned in the classroom, because the real world doesn't work, but actually learning while you do things. So, embedding experiments in the daily flow of work, ensuring every initiative has the opportunity to create impact, but also learning like, what are the underlying assumptions or beliefs we've operated on that actually don't get us any further? What are the mental models? How do we change our view on customer impact and business value?
Lastly, do less to achieve more, so taking things away, a subtractive mindset, removing things that are in the way, dissolving a dependency, removing a sign of a gatekeeper. The whole idea is they create momentum and they sustain momentum with their people, not to their people. So, progress over perfection and continuously driving this idea of being, as Phil said, discontent with the status quo and driving this desire to do better and different and leaner, and at the same time, meeting that desire with a sense of possibility that, "I can and I can help and do this. It's my organisation too for the purpose that I buy into", to Phil's point.
[0:24:30] David Green: So, that sounds very different to top-down transformation programs.
[0:24:34] Jana Werner: Yes, very. And we see companies, I don't think they're perfect octopuses, but we see companies doing things well and leaders doing things well. We've spoken to Dame Julia Hoggett at the London Stock Exchange, she's the CEO, and she talked about spending a third of her time creating clarity, so one of these three themes of antipatterns, having senior leadership meetings every week, where people learn how to work that interacts with each other, and communicating and re-communicating and not giving the communicating task to a comms department, but continuously learning. We've seen leaders of massive supermarket chains having their top 200 leaders mix between the hierarchies and come together, so that topics permeate and can bubble back up and go back into the organisation. And we've seen Benedetto Vigna, the CEO of Ferrari, doing this really well, learning, being very curious. He signed 300 NDAs in his first weeks as CEO, being curious to learn from other companies and challenging, giving his people what he, I think, called management pills, so little things to learn every day and having this humble posture of being curious all the time. And as Phil always says, if you meet these CEOs in the street, you wouldn't think they're CEOs. They're humble and they're curious and learning.
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Data is obviously, you mentioned, Phil, data is one of the kind of superpowers that organisations have access to. So, again, a question for either of you really. Number one, how do you know you're on the right track with transformation? What are some of the things that you would suggest people measure? And that's the first one. And then the second one is, in your research and in your experience, are octopus organisations, or companies that operate more like octopus organisations, are they more likely to have a successful transformation than those that are still operating like tin men?
[0:27:39] Phil Le-Brun: Wow, yeah, there's a few avenues we could go down there. Firstly, I think the metrics are really important. We often measure what we can or what feels good. We measure things like employee satisfaction, but what does that really tell us? Or we put in place what are called perverse metrics. There was a great story out of India from decades ago, where the government started to reward people for killing cobras, because there was a cobra infestation. Guess what happened? A cobra breeding industry started up because, "Hey, if I breed cobras, kill them, I get more money". So, by the end of the program, they ended up with more cobras than they started with. And we do that all the time in organisations. How many times has my app been downloaded? Who cares? How many people are actually using it? So, things like vanity metrics, perverse metrics get in the way. So, some of the metrics are hard to measure, but invaluable, like how long does it take from having an idea to getting it into the hands of a customer? And we find most organisations don't actually understand their flow of work. So, within your silo, you may understand how long it takes you to do something. But when you look horizontally from idea to value delivery, no one has a clue.
We did this in McDonald's years ago. We looked at that for e-commerce. We had 160 handoffs. No one designs a system like that, but everyone was optimising for their thing. As soon as you're aware of that, you can start to remove things like dependencies or weaken dependencies or automate them. You can start to remove gatekeepers, because we have what we call a lot of chickens in organisations. There's a joke we came across, which a pig and chicken walks down the road. Chicken says to pig, "Let's open a restaurant". Pig says to chicken, "What are we going to sell?" I think you can see where this is going. Chicken says to pig, "Ham and eggs, of course". And the pig stops and says, "You know, I need to be far more committed than you do". And the moral of the story is we have lots of folks who are involved, but not accountable. We don't have enough pigs in organisations. Now, we call them single-threaded leaders in Amazon; Apple calls them directly-responsible individuals. But those people are waking up every morning saying, "Are we making progress, not in my function, but to deliver business value?"
So, even looking at, you know, do you have people accountable for driving outcomes or not? Are you running experiments? Maybe how many experiments you're running isn't the right metric, because then people just start running experiments. But you get that feeling for, are people quickly learning, so learning velocity. Because we believe speed is one of the last competitive advantages for most organisations. The faster I get something into the hands of a customer, the faster I can determine if it's the right thing or not, the faster I can pivot or scale that idea.
On your second question about octopus transformations, we try and stay away from the word, 'transformation' completely, because it feels like it's a project, it has an end date, and as soon as something has an end date, you stop. And as Jana mentioned, we wouldn't even call an organisation an octopus organisation, because as soon as you do, it says, "We're fully octopus, we can stop changing". So, this is really a lifestyle choice. It's about a way of living in an organisation, it's not about a programme of work. It's about those leaders who are thinking beyond their tenure, but who want to see their organisation get better and better, as opposed to jumping to that end stakes and declaring victory.
[0:31:04] David Green: You've talked a little bit about this, but let's maybe focus now on what this means for leaders. What does this all mean for leadership?
[0:31:12] Jana Werner: Yeah, it means redefining your role as a leader, and that sounds really, really scary. But actually, I would like to give a bit of inspiration and say that's a wonderful thing. I've been a micromanager didn't realise I was until one of the people working with me was finally brave enough to tell me and help me learn, unlearn this behaviour. So, the idea of leaders having to have answers, which is very stressful and exhausting, isn't necessary all the time. Yes, we believe that leaders are right a lot. We even have a principle at Amazon that because you have experience, you have knowledge, you listen. But there's also space now more and more, especially in the world of fast, rapidly-changing AI, there's a lot here where we can say leaders set the conditions for their teams to experiment and learn quickly what works and what doesn't. In a world where you can create 50,000 prototypes in minutes or days, what used to take weeks or months, how can leaders coach people to assess second- and third-order impacts and loops, learning loops of what are they building, what for, what should you build, what shouldn't you maybe do? What's also safe and what isn't safe with this technology we learn our way around?
So, they become guides, they guide and they become designers and creators and influencers of the system, rather than having to work in the system. That's a much more rewarding task, it's more indirect. Yes, it requires us to switch from controlling and directing to coaching. And coaching is hard. I'm impatient, I know a lot, I've learned a lot, I just want to give the answer because I know I've had a long career. It's this idea of coaching, of waiting 30 seconds longer than you want to say something, or being the last person that speaks in the meeting and asking questions, generative, genuine, curious questions, rather than having the answers or trying to have the answers and taking this pressure off yourself. And that means you need to get away from this idea of managing operationally, but creating the space in your diary, in your brain to do so.
They also more than ever need to be tech teenagers. We are doing a lot of work with a lot of companies right now, and those that are ahead in how they create octopuses and AI-forward organisations, the board, the executives are all hands-on curious about technology. And lastly, we learned this from Indra Nooyi, she was the CEO of PepsiCo. We interviewed her for the book and she's now a board member at Amazon. Leaders that are doing this well are endlessly curious and they story-tell and they involve their people and they create the space where there is psychological safety. As you said, we spoke to Amy as well, wonderful conversations. So, these are the kinds of different qualities. And yeah, that requires you to unlearn. I had to unlearn. I still slip back sometimes into this idea of having the answers and running ahead, but going back and thinking, "How can I manoeuvre the system?" And that's actually really rewarding, because you get away from little dopamine hits to this whole serotonin oxytocin, when you see people thrive and succeed in this new space. So, I really encourage people to try and do this. It's scary, but it's wonderful.
[0:34:29] David Green: And listening to you there, Jana, that important role that leaders can play around role-modelling, it's not just enough to tell people in the organisation that they need to improve their technical abilities with AI, for example, they need to do it themselves, lead from the front.
[0:34:46] Jana Werner: Yeah. And it's okay to not know, and it's okay to ask your senior engineer to sit down with you or to join skills labs or ask the vendors you work with to help you and learn. It's all fine, we're all learning together right now. It's okay to be vulnerable and a little bit uncomfortable about it.
[0:35:02] Phil Le-Brun: Well, and you talked to David about data earlier on. One of the most insidious ways of preventing an organisation from using data is the leader who stands up and says, "We're going to be a data-enabled organisation". "But I've been here 20 years, so what the customer really wants…" That shadow of the leader is so impactful, more impactful today on organisations than it ever was. Standing up and saying, "Everyone needs to use generative AI, except me, I've got an EA". So, all of these things send a clear message about the culture you want to be working in as a leader.
[0:35:35] David Green: And back to what we talked about earlier, and thinking about the listeners here predominantly being in HR, there's an important role for HR here, thinking about their leadership development programs, thinking about how they retrain leaders, how they identify potential successors for senior roles within the organisation as well. Again, I don't know what you've seen in some of the organisations that you're working with around those topics.
[0:36:00] Jana Werner: Absolutely. We learn hiring for things, like we love Patrick Lencioni's Hungry, Humble, and Smart. So, the hunger to learn, the humility, and this smart, meaning people-smart and human-smart. And part of this then, also from an HR perspective, is you see in the actions that happen in your organisation what's important. So, are people promoted that are playing the games that have the answers, or are people promoted that take risks and that ask questions and that don't always get it right? Are people promoted that actually take ownership of a little startup idea and then quickly say, "This is never going to work, and therefore we're going to stop it and direct our resources to something more important. We have learned something and it hasn't worked. I now move on to the next topic"? Is that a failure or is that a massive strength that you then promote people for? How is that perceived? So, there's a lot of cultural influence that HR has in that space, and how to enable people in a different type of operating and thinking.
The same with learning with AI. So many ways now, for example, we say, "Oh, we don't want junior talent anymore". That's not true. Many of the companies we speak to want junior talent, and they now use AI to train this junior talent in scenarios that a company has delivered. So, the talent already learns how to act, how to operate, and how to deliver scenarios, and then they can go in the workforce. So, an AI-forward HR function can do a lot to prepare these people coming into the workforce, and also helping to dissolve structures and learn very quickly what works. Product teams no longer work in the way they do. Our skills are getting expanded because of AI. We can start covering other parts of work. We can think about how we embed into our roles and role descriptions that AI becomes a normal thing to use now, etc. So, there's a lot of brilliant things. HR, they need to be in the middle, in the centre of this.
[0:38:03] Phil Le-Brun: And I was going to say that, Jana. We need to stop using language like 'support functions' and 'back-office functions' when we talk about HR and IT. I mean, why do we even use these terms ourselves in organisations? These are strategic functions which are powering your organisation now. And I think as leaders of an HR function, people need to step up and take that accountability, not just for running their function, but seeing themselves as having this massive impact on the organisation overall.
[0:38:32] David Green: Once something works, of course, the instinct is to scale it. But actually, in the book, you make an important point of distinguishing between scaling and spreading. Why does that difference matter so much, Jana?
[0:38:46] Jana Werner: I've become a little bit allergic to the term, 'scaling', because it still feels like a big rollout. It's shorthand for implementing a uniform process or a tool organisation, right? And it has this risk that it turns all these wonderful, experimental, local successes to curiosity, the local desire to take ownership and do something, into broad failures of standard compliance and standardisation. And Phil, as you always say, when we scale best practices, then it means we no longer have any more new better practices, they are already best practices. So, we do believe, don't get me wrong, we do believe there are certain things that should be scaled, but the tenant or the principle we share is, only ever scale what makes the organisation faster and nimbler, nothing else, so things like technology platforms, for example. Other than that, you rob people of local ownership and ignore context. You assume that it's a machine again. Once people do something locally, if that is a good thing they're doing that's of value, like building certain types of agents, certain types of generative AI or machine-learning solutions that work, if they are really good, they will naturally spread.
Now, we have in many companies, the instrumentation even to see which agents are being taken up, which agentic solutions spread naturally through the organisation. Because if they spread, it means the value is innate and obvious to others. And because leaders no longer know what the detailed jobs are of the people that they have in their team, let alone beyond their teams, this is a really nice feedback loop. If something scales or if something spreads, it means the work that gets done has value and the tool has value. And then, you support the spreading and you can actively put a little bit of fuel and support against it. So, scaling in a very careful and thoughtful way anything that makes you faster and nimbler; the rest, watch what spreads, as Aaron Dignan nicely put that. I love that sentence.
[0:40:49] David Green: And as you said, it's about adaptability as well. So, even if you are scaling or spreading good practice across the organisation, you've always got to be ready to evolve it in the current environment. So, nothing stands still anymore, does it?
[0:41:07] Jana Werner: It's more and more the case now that what's really good today, what works well, when you found an agentic or whatever solution that works well, in a few weeks, it can already be outdated. So, it's more and more important to think about what spreads, but also what do you need to let go of quickly?
[0:41:25] David Green: Phil, a lot of leaders listening and HR leaders listening as well will be thinking, "This all makes a lot of sense, but where do I start?" Where should they start?
[0:41:36] Phil Le-Brun: The most important step is start. This doesn't require a governance meeting, a committee, a bunch of external folks coming in. What we find quite effective is, sit down with one of your teams, flip through the book, read out some of the antipatterns. And we found this time and time again, most of the problems in an organisation: unknown; most of the solutions: unknown, if you get to the right people. So, when we read our antipatterns, we often hear the audience laugh, because they recognise themselves in it, or their shoulders grow heavy, or their eyes roll, or there's some sort of visual clue. So, share the antipatterns. And then most importantly, allow the team to actually go and propose a hypothesis, "I believe if we do X, then Y will result". And the hypothesis is important, because this isn't about saying, "Phil thinks…" because that becomes very personal, "I'm going to prove that Phil's right, because failure feels painful and shameful". But come up with a hypothesis, test the hypothesis. Best case, you find something that's going to edge your organisation's ability to be adaptive and resilient forward. Even the worst case is a good case, which is you learn about something that doesn't work, which will inform your next iteration.
Second thing we recommend is stop doing something. Our organisations are so wired to be additive. Jana, you often talk about the tyranny of 'and', "We can do this and this and this and this". And us humans are really bad at multitasking. So, go find something to stop. Again, your teams know the processes they have to follow which make no sense, but they've always done it this way. So, go ask people, let them just stop doing something and see what happens as an experiment. And then, one of the things we've both done in our previous lives is set up what Amazon's called 'two-pizza teams', this idea that you put together a small team that's no larger than can be fed on an American-sized pizza, give them an outcome to go after, and let them do it. We did this at McDonald's when we set up home delivery, which became a multi-billion dollar business. It doesn't require thousands of people, it required a team that understood the why and the what of the problem they were solving, and they were given the agency to decide the how. And they did in three-and-a-half months what would have normally taken two years. So, start small, think big about some of the opportunities, but give people the opportunity to contribute here.
[0:43:58] David Green: I laughed when you say two-pizza team. I have a 17-year-old son; I think he'd be on a team on his own for his two pizzas.
[0:44:05] Jana Werner: But you could notice the two-pizza teams are getting smaller and smaller now in the world of AI, so that's okay.
[0:44:12] David Green: It doesn't surprise me. Actually, you mentioned the antipatterns, and I think, correct me, you said 38 antipatterns that you'd identified. And I just thought of a great follow-up here for each of you. For each of you, what was an antipattern that made you laugh? And what was an antipattern that made your shoulders feel heavy? So, Phil, I'll come to you first on that.
[0:44:36] Phil Le-Brun: The one that always makes me laugh is we have a true story about squirrels. So, 400 squirrels were transported from China to Greece and they stopped at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands at the end of the '90s, didn't have the right paperwork. And the employee responsible for errant squirrels picked up the manual to find out what to do with them. No process was there, but there was a process for livestock. So, he followed the process, took 400 live squirrels and dropped them into a chicken shredder. 40 escaped. There was outrage. The CEO was on TV reacting to this and saying, "I know it didn't look good, but we were just following the process". That makes me laugh every time because we've all done that
[0:45:21] Jana Werner: That one makes me cry.
[0:41:23] Phil Le-Brun: But we've all done that though. "Why did you do this?" "Oh, it's the process". "Why does the process exist?" "I don't know". So, we've all been guilty of that.
[0:45:32] David Green: And, Jana, can you beat squirrels?
[0:45:36] Jana Werner: No, I don't think I can. What makes me laugh is the jargon one, which we call, 'corporate teeth', where a colleague of mine said in a call, "I want to cut my teeth on that". And I'm just imagining him cutting his teeth, or things like, "Let's circle back or take this offline". I used to use this language, especially as a foreigner. I came into an English-speaking work environment and I just copied what people used. And eventually at home, my children at the dinner table were like, "I have no clue what you're saying, mommy". Like, "Oh my God, I'm speaking so, so stupidly". And we just do it. And I just have so many. Like, I collect the most hideous and ridiculous ones. So, those ones make me laugh.
[0:46:20] David Green: Phil, I'm going to come to you. This is the question of the series, and I think that it will help you kind of pull together a few things that we've already talked about as well. How does HR connect culture to measurable performance?
[0:46:32] Phil Le-Brun: I think there's a few things. One is, we talked about flow of work earlier on. How fast do things get done? Things could be a decision, it could be delivering value. It's a really good indicator to us for the trust in an organisation. If we trust each other, then we're not going to have as many governance meetings, steering meetings, and all of this. There's going to be a much more seamless flow of work in organisations. So, again, it comes back to speed. Feedback loops. Are there feedback loops built into every team, every process, performance processes, and such like? Again, if you've got information, data, feedback flowing like water in an organisation, then that's a really good indicator you've got a solid level of trust and psychological safety. And we know those things fuel innovation in organisations. How many gatekeepers do you have? So, how can you connect someone's role to value delivery as opposed to, and no one's going to claim they do this, but value prevention, the people who can say no? So, how much of your organisation is actually aligned towards value delivery?
We stole the concept of BMI, not Body Mass Index, but Bureaucratic Mass Index. What percentage of an employee's time is spent delivering value as opposed to waiting on someone to make a decision or doing things of low value? So, even getting into the weeds of the organisation, understanding how much of your organisation is actually oriented towards delivering value.
[0:47:59] David Green: It's crazy, isn't it? If we were to redesign organisations from scratch, we would design them very differently to the way most companies are structured.
[0:48:09] Jana Werner: It's even obvious, simple things. When you walk into a boardroom, is it a room that has a screen at the end of the room and no whiteboards, or is it a room that has whiteboards in the room? Because you know if it's a boardroom with just screens, there's very little generative work that happens. If it's a room where ideas and half-baked ideas can be discussed, then you see it's a generative culture. So, you can even assess a company just by walking into their boardroom.
[0:48:35] David Green: Well, really fascinating conversation, Jana, Phil, I've really enjoyed it. And I certainly recommend the Octopus Organization to our listeners. Jana, where can people connect with the two of you and where can they find out more about the Octopus Organization?
[0:48:51] Jana Werner: Join us at theoctopusorganization.com and it will lead you to some free experiments and ideas you can do. And of course, join us, as we're just starting to open a Substack and really want to get a community going of curious people. So, if you've read the book, we're grateful for an Amazon review, because they really mean that other people find the book. So, thank you for that in advance.
[0:49:13] David Green: Well, thanks both of you for being guests on the show and look forward to learning more about your work as it develops us even further. Thank you.
[0:49:22] Phil Le-Brun: Thank you, David.
[0:49:23] Jana Werner: Thank you so much for having us. This was awesome.
[0:49:27] David Green: And that's a wrap. A huge thank you to Phil and Jana for such a thought-provoking conversation. For those of you listening, if anything we discussed today got you thinking, I'd love to hear from you. Come find me on LinkedIn, find my post about this episode, and let me know your thoughts in the comments. I read every single one. And honestly, the conversations that happen there invariably build on the one we have on the show. And if you think a colleague or friend would get something out of this episode, please do share it with them. It really does help us bring more of these conversations to HR professionals across the world. One last thing before we go. For those who would like to keep up with what we're working on at Insight222, follow us on LinkedIn, or head to insight222.com. You can also sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter at myHRfuture.com to get the latest thinking on HR, people analytics, and everything shaping our field. Right, that's us for the day. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week with another episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Until then, take care and stay well.