Most organisations are built to withstand complicated processes, but few are equipped to thrive within the complexity we find ourselves facing today. That’s why this expert wants you to embrace becoming an ‘Octopus Organisation’.
The organisational structures prevalent today were built for a different era, says Phil Le-Brun, executive in residence of enterprise strategy at Amazon Web Services in London.
They were designed for environments that were complicated, but not for those that are complex – and the distinction is critical for organisations to understand, he says.
Le-Brun describes a complicated world as one filled with “blueprints and recipes”. In such a world, the pathway ahead might not be easy to navigate, but instructions exist to get you there. In complex environments, however, there is often no playbook, no best practice and no other organisation to learn from.
“Changing the tyre on a bicycle is complicated. You may not know how to do it, but you pick up a manual, read about it, take one tyre off and plug another one in. But that’s not how human organisations work now,” says Le-Brun.
“Complex organisations mean that if you change one thing, it has second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth-order effects.”
Most of our systems, he argues, are legacies of a work environment that no longer exists.
“[Previously], we knew how to do a job. It was just a case of, how do we ramp up productivity? It was all about predictability and compliance and minimising variation.”
While this approach was a primary driver of productivity in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it fails the modern business, which must frequently deal with the unknown.
“We don’t even know what the customer wants a lot of the time. Being more adaptable has become even more important, and the reality is, [most] organisations are complex.”
Tin Man versus Octopus
In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, Le-Brun and his co-author, Jana Werner, unpacked the concept of the ‘Octopus Organisation’ – an entity that is adaptive, highly intelligent and largely autonomous.
This stands in stark contrast to ‘Tin Man Organisations’ – those that they say are rigid, clumsy and slow to move and react, much like the Wizard of Oz character.
“Too often, we find organisations today in the same state Dorothy found him in: rusted solid, waiting for an outside fix of oil just to get moving again,” the pair wrote. “These companies… were optimised for an era of mass production, adherence to process and top-down planning. They struggle to cope with a complex world in which success depends on adapting and discovering.”
In contrast, the biological octopus offers a masterclass in decentralised intelligence.
“When we think about an octopus, it’s got two thirds of its neurons in its arms, so it’s highly decentralised. It grows up in a hostile environment, but can learn very quickly. It can reprogram its structure,” says Le-Brun in an interview with AHRI.
“So with its RNA, when it goes from hot water to cold water, or vice-versa, it can reprogram its molecular structure to adapt to the environment, which is pretty much how we want organisations to be today.”
“When we think about an octopus, it’s got two thirds of its neurons in its arms, so it’s highly decentralised. It grows up in a hostile environment, but can learn very quickly. It can reprogram its structure.” – Phil Le-Brun
By empowering these “tentacles” to move independently yet in unison, organisations can stay closer to the ground and respond to local challenges in real-time.
However, this decentralisation requires a fundamental shift in how we view change. Le-Brun argues that we need to shift from seeing transformation as a one-off project with a fixed end-date, and instead treat it as a continuous state of being.
This means the traditional “big bang” change management approach is often a trap, he says.
“Leaders [often] try to come up with the perfect project plan for organisational change… it’s not possible.”
Phil Le-Brun
Rather than following a static playbook, an Octopus Organisation embraces “double-loop learning”, which encompasses making a change, observing the results then adjusting the underlying mental models and assumptions that drive the business.
Identify your organisation’s anti-patterns
In order to embrace a more octopus-like way of operating, Le-Brun says to first identify the barriers getting in the way – or what he calls “anti-patterns”.
“We identified over 300 dysfunctions of organisational change [and] we boiled those down into 36 anti-patterns, so habitual, conditioned responses to a problem.”
“For instance, it’s not uncommon for a CEO to say we’re going to centralise everything… because doing that means we do things once. Normally they’re wrong, because you create this massive bottleneck, and you pretend that the different variations across business units and geographies don’t exist.”
Thinking like this leads to the oft-cited McKinsey research, which flags that just 12 per cent of transformation efforts result in meaningful performance gains.
All of the 36 anti-patterns start with people, says Le-Brun. For HR practitioners, he highlights three specific areas where anti-patterns frequently take root:
- Reactive hiring
“We often hire to scratch an immediate itch. [People say:] “I need a data scientist. This person has transformed two companies. We’ll bring him or her on”. What we miss is that the ability to get something done in one organisation does not translate to the ability to do it in another organisation.”
To remedy this, at Amazon, each hiring panel has someone they call a “bar raiser”.
“It shouldn’t be just the hiring manager alone that hires into a position… the bar raiser is making sure we’re actually hiring someone who’s not only going to fit into our culture, but actually going to raise the bar on the culture. They have a veto vote, which I really like.”
- The ‘all-knowing’ leader
Le-Brun says that often the hierarchical distance from the coalface results in a lack of actionable insight.
“Arguably, the further you are from the front line, the less answers you have, particularly in an agentic and generative world where even bringing the top management consultants, they’re still trying to figure out what the answers are,” says Le-Brun.
“The technology is there, but how we organise, how we operate, how we reimagine the organisation, we don’t have all of the answers there. So the role of leaders [needs to change] quite considerably. They need to become more coaches rather than the dictators of how things get done. It’s far more important they explain the why than the how, because they don’t know the how.”
So how can HR retrain leaders to be comfortable in a coaching capacity?
“It can be very uncomfortable. A preschool child asks up to 100 and some questions an hour. An adult asks two to three questions an hour. We train people to stop asking questions. In fact, we make it feel un-leadershipy to ask questions.”
Le-Brun notes that Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, specifically looks for curiosity and the ability to tell a compelling story when hiring.
“So from an HR point of view, how do we give leaders – when we put them through things like accelerated leadership programs – the ability to ask good questions and see that as valuable?”
Read AHRI’s article ‘5 types of strategic questions all leaders should be asking’.
- Misaligned rewards
Traditional incentive structures often drive the very behaviours that undermine long-term success. Le-Brun notes that when we incentivise people solely to hit a target, they will focus on that outcome to the exclusion of all else.
“Often we incentivise people to hit a target. Guess what they do? They hit the target. I think Peter Drucker said something along the lines of: “People will destroy their own business to hit a target.”
“I won’t name them, but [there are examples of organisations in the public domain] that show if you incentivise employees to achieve a target, they’ll do it, even if it causes harm to the organisation or to the environment. So thinking about, how do we reward employees? It’s not even necessarily financial.
“This is about giving people recognition, calling out people showing the right behaviours… [highlighting] genuine team players [and] creating environments of psychological safety, which are foundational if you want to innovate in an organisation.”
Laying the groundwork
Transitioning to an octopus-like model begins with three reinforcing pillars.
“I’d always start with clarity. The reason people often do things which seem to be against what leaders [want] is because those individuals aren’t clear about what their mission is.”
Le-Brun notes a staggering gap: while many managers believe employees understand the company’s mission, the reality is often as low as two per cent.
Le-Brun suggests that the failure of clarity often stems from a ‘one-and-done’ communication style. True clarity, he says, requires constant reinforcement, as employees rarely internalise a mission after hearing it just once or twice.
“People don’t believe what they hear the first time or the second time. And in fact, when you think you’ve reached all of the employees, you probably haven’t anyway. So leaders have an essential responsibility of creating and reinforcing that clarity.”
Other things HR can support organisations to do, he says, include:
- Think about good versus bad friction
Part of becoming a more agile and adaptive organisation is to remove unproductive friction points.
“We were inspired by Gary Hamel [American business management consultant] and took his idea of bureaucratic mass index, and we find that 80 per cent of an employee’s time can be spent waiting for someone to make a decision or working on unproductive work,” says Le-Brun.
Le-Brun suggests that while we usually try to eliminate friction, some constraints are actually “healthy” because they protect the organisation from its own bureaucratic tendencies.
He cites former Google executive Laszlo Bock, who noticed that recruitment had become a bloated, multi-stage ordeal because too many stakeholders wanted a seat at the table.
To fix this, Bock capped the number of interviewers at four. If a manager wanted a fifth person involved, they had to seek Bock’s personal approval. This extra step of “friction” served as a powerful deterrent against over-complicating the process, effectively acting as an anti-bureaucratic break on the system.
- Replacing gatekeepers with guardrails
Le-Brun argues that traditional bureaucratic hurdles do more than just slow down progress; they can actively demoralise the workforce.
“We talk about guardrails, rather than gatekeepers,” he says.
He notes that when every new idea – whether it is a piece of technology or a simple process change – requires a sign-off from a leader, it can rob employees of their sense of agency. By the time a decision finally clears these multiple bureaucratic hurdles, the momentum is lost.
Even if the eventual decision turns out to be wrong, the sheer exhaustion of the approval process often prevents people from attempting to fix it or trying something new again.
The solution is to remove this unhelpful friction and replace it with guardrails. Unlike a gatekeeper who stands in your way, a guardrail provides the boundaries within which an employee is free to experiment and move quickly. It shifts the focus from asking for permission to taking responsibility within a set of clear, safe parameters.
“Within Amazon, anyone can innovate, but we always start off by writing what we call a press release one-page. Who’s the customer? What’s that one problem we’re trying to solve? What will the headline say in six months or a year’s time when we’re successful? And then a bunch of frequently asked questions. It’s a way that it helps us think through if we’re solving a real problem for a real customer.
“We invite people to give feedback with the idea of making the problem and the solution clearer, so it becomes a guardrail.”
- Do less to achieve more
In their HBR article, Le-Brun and Werner suggest that modern leaders must often “do less to achieve more”.
Rather than solving problems by layering on new programs, Octopus Organisations look for what they can strip away – whether it is an unproductive practice, a dependency, or a gatekeeper function.
For example, they point to one organisation that banned PowerPoint presentations in meetings for six months, forcing a shift from obscured data to radical clarity in strategy and clear storytelling.
Treating these shifts as mini-experiments can be an effective way to build momentum and encourage new ways of operating. As Le-Brun and Werner highlight, focusing on smaller changes in shorter increments creates more opportunities for immediate impact. The more frequently people experience this kind of tangible progress, the more likely they are to remain engaged with the broader organisational shift.
As we face the rapid rise of generative AI and the shrinking half-life of professional skills, the context for HR has shifted from the complicated to the truly complex.
Moving toward an octopus-like model is about updating operating rhythms to match this new environment. By evolving from transactional gatekeepers into systemic architects, HR can replace rigid bottlenecks with guardrails that ensure compliance while fostering autonomy.
Learn how to support your leaders and managers to be more effective coaches with AHRI’s Enhancing your coaching mindset short course. Participants will learn how to support and empower leaders and employees in developing their own problem-solving capabilities.
