Great organisations should behave like an octopus

Great organisations should behave like an octopus. That is according to “The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation”. Octopus Organisation are inspired by remarkable adaptability, distributed intelligence, fluid movement, and innate curiosity of this remarkable sea dweller.

Success

Success depends on building genuine trust-based relationships with customers, employees, and broader sets of stakeholders. Work is less transactional. Customers have more choice and so do your employees. They don’t want to be told; they want to be heard. They don’t want to be managed; they want to be inspired.

True change

True change comes from how people see the world and from changing behaviour, not structures. That is what they try to achieve with transformation. However, the litany of failure statistics could fill a book itself. Some examples:

• Less than 12% of transformations create the expected sustainable performance gains thirty-six months into a program.
• Less than a third of organisations realise anticipated revenue benefits.
• Anywhere between 70 and 90% of digital transformation initiatives end in failure.
• 52% of leaders acknowledge that their purpose statement was seen more as a brand and marketing play than something useful to guide behaviour.
• Gallup declared that only about 21% of employees globally are engaged.
• At a macroeconomic level, the resulting low engagement costs 9% of global GDP annually
• One MIT Sloan report highlighted that only 28% of executives and middle managers with execution responsibilities could name three strategic priorities. Even at the C-level, only 51% could.
• The average young child fires off between 27 and 107 questions per hour.
• Fewer than 20% of adults are engaged in lifelong learning.

Introducing the Octopus Organisation

An octopus has an absurdly sophisticated ability to adapt to its ever-changing environment, through camouflage, shape-shifting, and other physical gifts such as the ability to change the texture of its skin (skin that it also uses both to see and to breathe). It is designed to explore and has a remarkable capacity to learn, easily solving puzzles and mazes humans created. Two-thirds of the neurons in the octopus’s body are not in the brain; they are in the eight incredible arms that can think and act for themselves, but also coordinate with the brain to think and act as a team.

Thriving in complexity

An octopus way of thinking offers an approach to building organisations that thrive in complexity and embrace continuous change. And complexity. At the heart of the need for Octopus Organisations is a shift of focus from complicated business environments to complex ones.

Complex systems

Complex systems are like, well, octopuses. They’re governed by emergence—outcomes from interactions that are not linear or predictable through analysis of the system’s components. Octopus Organisations prioritise adaptability, decentralised ownership, interconnectedness, and continuous learning and experimentation.

A continuous dynamic

In an Octopus Organisation, running and changing the business are mutually reinforcing aspects of a single, continuous dynamic. Examples:

• Octopus Organisations make innovation a responsibility and capability of everyone.
• Octopus Organisations are deeply customer-centric.
• In Octopus Organisations, ownership isn’t delegated; it’s ignited.
• Octopus leaders consistently ground initiatives in their purpose, explaining the Why before detailing the How or What.
• They craft a simple, authentic purpose that guides the entire organisation on a mission beyond profit.
• They choose where to play and, crucially, where not.
• They prioritise long-term, durable needs over just short-term wins.
• Successful Octopuses vigorously and continuously debate conscious trade-offs.
• Octopus Organisations make a clear diagnosis to understand the “why” before setting goals.
• Octopus Organisations set specific, understandable, and public goals.
• Octopus Organisations back goals with coherent actions.
• They foster a culture where metrics are used for diagnosis and improvement, not blame.
• Octopus Organisations tend to focus on input metrics over output metrics.
• Octopus Organisations then connect input metrics to outcomes.
• Octopus Organisations develop shared mental models through robust debate.
• Octopus Organisations understand principles as the manifestation of an organisation’s values.
• Octopus Organisations champion ruthless prioritisation.
• Octopus leaders strengthen their organisation’s “no” muscle.
• Octopus Organisations write objective kill criteria and use stage-gates.
• Octopus Organisations cut initiatives, not costs.
• Octopus Organisations immerse themselves in their customers’ worlds to identify and hone their differentiated capabilities.
• Octopus Organisations deeply consider and amplify their unique superpowers that create value.
• Octopus Organisations optimise for the entire value stream, not for departmental performance.
• They default to making information widely and easily accessible through “pull-based” systems.
• Octopus Organisations resist the bureaucracy and bloat.
• Octopus Organisations nurture complex, informal human networks.
• Octopus Organisations construct financial systems that actively foster adaptability and continuous learning.
• Octopus Organisations fund outcomes, not outputs.
• Octopus Organisations know the real definition of leadership.
• Octopus Organisations replace gatekeepers with guardrails.
• Octopus Organisations set dependency thresholds.
• Octopus Organisations centralise inclusively, across functional and geographical boundaries, to prevent one faction from deciding what is common.
• Octopus Organisations think of process in terms of friction.
• Octopus Organisations view decisions as bets and adopt a “probabilistic mindset.”
• Octopus Organisations treat clarity of ownership as a fundamental prerequisite for success.
• Octopus Organisations focus first on a fit between the candidate’s values and potential, rather than on role-specific expertise.
• Octopus Organisations recognise that reward systems must evolve as rapidly as work itself changes.
• Octopus Organisations understand that not all failures are created equally.
• Octopus Organisations invest in minimum-lovable products (MLPs) to generate customer excitement.
• Octopus Organisations understand that disruption isn’t a future threat—it’s woven into the fabric of today’s operations.
• Octopus Organisations are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time, as Amazon puts it, underscoring the company’s commitment to long-term, audacious goals that often challenge conventional wisdom.
• Octopus Organisations tackle the hardest, riskiest part of a project first to learn and validate.
• How Octopus Organisations build teams with cognitive and intellectual diversity
• Octopus Organisations invest in data literacy that emphasises critical thinking about data.
• Octopus Organisations cultivate tech fluency for all.
• Octopus Organisations integrate curiosity and learning into daily work and provide personal paths to grow.

Keywords for Octopus Organisations

Agency, clarity, curiosity, sincerity, authenticity, coherence, ownership, alignement, trust, essentialism, transparency, self determination, vulnerability, openness, playfulness, laughter, spontaneity, inquisitiveness, humility and ambidexterity.

Examples of levers

• Build a “clarity checklist.”
• Run “the toddler test” for all key messages.
• Write “this over that” statements.
• Test strategy specificity with a “competitor swap” exercise. Try removing your company logo from your strategy document and replacing it with a competitor’s.
• Conduct metric postmortems.
• Lead by example.
• Institute “enterprise impact” decision debriefs.
• Link roles to value.
• Hold “silo-busting” problem-solving sessions.
• Implement peer feedback on “team effectiveness.”
• Codify exemplar behaviours into a principle.
• Connect principles to purpose.
• Integrate principles into business processes.
• Use the “Hell, yes” test. If a proposed initiative doesn’t generate enthusiastic support and clear strategic alignment, don’t commit.
• Invest in “complexity culls”
• Attack root causes, not symptoms. Regularly ask “What needs to be true?”
• Dedicate flow improvement time.
• Decriminalise “bad news” and mistakes.
• Encourage storytelling with data—especially the tough data.
• Conduct “information autopsies” (safely). When a significant problem or failure occurs due to a lack of information flow, conduct blameless postmortems.
• Monitor psychological safety continuously.
• Foster communities of practice.
• Pilot outcome-based funding.
• Implement structured bias-breaking. Establish decision frameworks requiring assumption documentation, external challenge, and regular hypothesis testing.
• Speak last.
• Build a shadow cabinet.
• Transform gatekeepers into coaches.
• Run time-boxed guardrail experiments. Replace one.
• Detect and track dependencies.
• Do a dependency deep dive.
• Use capability maps.
• Use minimum viable centralisation (MVC) charters.
• Offer solution bounties. Release some centralised resources and/or funds to decentralised teams developing promising grassroots solutions to common problems.
• Calculate your Bureaucratic Mass Index (BMI) and relentlessly reduce it.
• Implement minimum viable policies and process expiration dates.
• Accelerate decision speed.
• Practice “disagree and commit.”
• Appoint true STLs.
• Surface and address “chicken” behaviour.
• Write outcome-based job descriptions.
• Screen for learning drive.
• Appoint mini-CEOs per project.
• Stop hiring jerks.
• Implement team formation protocols.
• Institute “peer-to-peer recognition budgets.”
• Create a failure résumé.
• Practice blameless postmortems.
• Make current failures visible.
• Reduce the distance between customers and leadership.
• Pay attention to anecdotes that differ from research and data.
• Visualise future scenarios vividly.
• Think 10x, not 10%.
• Decouple thinking big from feasibility.
• Encourage future-casting communities of practice.
• Practice delayed intuition.
• Cultivate intellectual honesty.
• Reframe conflict as curiosity.
• Institutionalise constructive dissent.
• Actively seek counter-narratives.
• Go beyond averages.
• Establish reverse mentoring.
• Create technology immersion experiences.
• Eat your own dog food. Assign executives ownership of tech products or features.
• Support metacognitive skill development.
• Create “skill swaps” marketplaces.
• Set up a “curiosity budget”.
• Shift focus from ideas to validation.
• Fund the seeds. Allocate flexible “micro-budgets” directly to teams or team leads for testing ideas,
• Replace “commanding” with “questioning,”

Becoming the octopus

To become one, you should be guided by three principles:

1. Do change with people, not to them.
2. Entwine learning and impact.
3. Do less to achieve more.

This is not about designing the perfect team structure from the top down; it’s about enhancing the system’s innate ability to evolve, adapt, and create its own order. You need to do two fundamental things. Clarity of goals.  This can be a fundamental reset of what the organisation optimises for, which drives corresponding changes in incentives and behaviours.

Culture

The application of a shared mental model, the mindset or paradigm from which a system (your octopus) arises. This is the most powerful leverage point of all. It is the shared, often unstated, set of beliefs and assumptions that form the very foundation of the culture.

Spread not scale

Start small, spread, do not scale, let ideas and practices flow organically from team to team and leader to leader based on need and context. A culture of change becomes embedded and harder to derail as it naturally engages many more people than a top-down transformation. A culture of spreading rather than scaling is supported by visibility. Make spreading behaviour visible to all to nudge it along.

Leadership

• Replace “commanding” with “questioning,”
• Focus on facilitating clarity, removing obstacles to ownership, and celebrating curiosity.
• Create the conditions for success, not the success itself.
• Lead with humility.
• Practice voracious curiosity.
• Act as system architects.
• Default to trust.
• Provide stability.
• Be a source of positive energy and belief.

Fluidity

The intelligence and fluidity of an octopus’s behaviour are beautiful and inspiring. Becoming an Octopus Organisation will allow you to look across the business landscape while you nimbly and fluidly adapt to what’s happening right now in your organisation. The octopus and the Octopus Organisation are both built to learn and adapt.

Long list

This blog reads like a long list. That is because of the book’s structure. A long list of themes. It illustrated the richness of the book’s advice and practical tips. If you follow 10% of the book’s suggestions, you are already doing well. Dovetails with many other books I have read. If you want to become BANI resistant, this might be the book to read.