BONUS: Why Your Organization Is Still a Factory — And What an Octopus Can Teach You About Transformation
Phil Le-Brun and Dr. Jana Werner both work inside Amazon, advising Fortune 500 leaders on transformation. But before Amazon, they spent decades in the trenches — Phil as International CIO of McDonald's, Jana leading change in banking and logistics. Together they wrote The Octopus Organization (HBR Press) to explain why most companies are still running on a hundred-year-old factory model, and what the alternative looks like.
"We Want to Help You Make Your Own New Interesting Mistakes"
"We keep saying, as Phil likes to say, can we help you make your own new interesting mistakes and avoid the mistakes that we see again and again."
Jana and Phil are both practitioners who have led large-scale changes — and made mistakes they're now happy to share. Jana describes working with incredible, smart, thoughtful people inside large organizations who weren't trusted, weren't allowed to do the work they could do, and couldn't be their best selves. She managed to turn teams considered underperforming into rock stars simply by listening and giving them space. Phil saw the same pattern at McDonald's — incredible people who knew the answers but weren't allowed to act on them. A disastrous standardization push from 2002 to 2004 taught him that top-down efficiency mandates don't work. The CEO left, and Phil got the opportunity to tap into people lower in the organization, define a common mission, and start building from there.
The Factory Model Nobody Questions
"There was no upside for her people taking ownership because you could have career-limiting effects if you made a mistake, if you were seen to be making a mistake or overstepping."
Jana shared two sides of the same problem. A CEO of a large investment company told her he has to sign off on every small decision — and his people assume he wants to. Neither side wants this, but nobody questions the processes in place. On the other side, a COO told Jana "my people don't want ownership." After half an hour of coaching, the COO realized there was no upside for her people to take ownership — mistakes meant career-limiting consequences. Jana is honest about her own experience too: a team member told her she was micromanaging, and she denied it. They created a secret signal — scratching an ear in meetings whenever she micromanaged. He was scratching a lot. Phil adds that what he calls "yoga babble" — abstractions like "we're going to become an agile platform-based culture" — lets leaders avoid saying what they actually mean. Nobody challenges it because the boss said it, and it sounds sort of right. The result: completely meaningless direction.
The Octopus — Distributed Intelligence in Practice
"It has two thirds of its intelligence, its neurons, in its arms. The arms connect independently — they don't always need a central brain, but they also have one, so they can stay aligned but also work independently."
The octopus has distributed neural clusters in each arm. It can adapt, shape-shift, change the texture of its skin, and even alter its RNA to switch between cold and hot water within hours. For Jana and Phil, this is the organizational metaphor: teams that can think locally and act without waiting for permission from the center, while staying aligned on mission. Phil translates this for team leaders of 8-10 people inside traditional enterprises:
Put together teams with cognitive diversity and encourage constructive conflict — what Linda Hill at Harvard Business School calls "creative abrasion"
Invest in the storming, norming, performing cycle instead of cutting through it
Leave the "how" to the team — the leader's job is the "why" and the "what"
Don't jump to the answer — Einstein said if you have an hour to solve a problem, spend 55 minutes understanding the problem
Start executing quickly through rapid experimentation; you can't plan your way to success in novel situations
Don't Build the Pedestal — The Monkey Comes First
"Get to the most tricky problems first, and try and solve them. If you can't, figure out fast — and if you can't, just stop, because your whole project is useless."
Astro Teller, CEO of Alphabet X's Moonshot Labs, says: "If you want to teach a monkey on a pedestal to recite Shakespeare, don't start by building the pedestal." Jana explains that organizations, once they get a project through the gauntlet of approvals and business cases, start working on the easy, visible things to show progress — the pedestal. But if you can't get the monkey to speak, the pedestal is useless. The counterintuitive move: when passionate people dispassionately tell you the hard problem isn't solvable, give them hugs, put them on a pedestal themselves, give them bonuses — because they just freed up resources for something better. Phil reinforces that this isn't a money problem. At McDonald's, before building a handheld order-taking device, they built a block of wood to test how comfortable it was to hold. Organizations waste far more money trying to plan for things they can't possibly plan for than they would by running quick experiments.
Single-Threaded Leaders — The Pig at Breakfast
"Who's that person waking up every morning saying, are we actually putting the focus on the things that are going to get us to the finish line of delivering value — not within my function, but across the organization?"
Phil tells the classic joke: a pig and chicken are walking down the road. The chicken says "let's open a restaurant." The pig asks what they'll sell. "Ham and eggs, of course," says the chicken. The pig stops: "I need to be far more committed than you." Organizations are full of chickens — people who lay their half-baked decisions, want to sign off, want to say no. What's needed are pigs. Amazon calls them single-threaded leaders. Apple calls them directly responsible individuals. The key: one person owns an initiative end to end, waking up every morning focused on delivering value across the organization, not just within their function.
Mow the Lawn — Bureaucracy Grows While You Sleep
"Your bureaucracy grows while you sleep. Think about your bureaucracy like mowing a lawn. You can't mow a lawn once."
Jana references Parkinson's Law — a senior Royal Navy leader found that even as the fleet shrank, the number of administrators grew by 5-10% annually. This applies to every organization. Middle managers fill their time by adding processes. One person's mistake becomes a process that penalizes 10,000 people. The solution is continuous gardening. At Google, a senior leader added positive friction: if you want more than 5 interviews in the hiring process, you need my approval. At Amazon, the principle "invent and simplify" asks everyone every year: what are we simplifying? The simplification work has to come from those closest to the problems — most leaders don't know half of what people are actually doing.
Innovation Belongs to Everyone — Not a Lab
"Psychological safety — it's not even a prefrontal cortex thing, it's not a conscious thought, it's that fight-or-flight reaction you have in the moment."
Phil makes the case that innovation starts with psychological safety at the team level, not an organization-wide mandate. It's the team leader asking questions, being humble, responding to disagreement with "tell me more" instead of "I don't agree." It means celebrating intelligent failures — someone who tested a hypothesis, found it didn't work, and stopped. At Amazon town halls, executives open by making fun of Amazon's failures, like the Fire Phone. The message: if you're thinking big, you'll also fail. The Fire Phone didn't work, but it informed future hardware investments. The only true failure is not learning from experimentation. Phil and Jana both emphasize that once leaders experience what happens when people are truly freed to do their best work, they get addicted to it.
About Phil Le-Brun and Dr. Jana Werner
Phil Le-Brun is the former International CIO of McDonald's and now leads the AWS Executives in Residence team, advising Fortune 500 leaders on transformation. Dr. Jana Werner is an Executive in Residence at AWS who built their EMEA transformation practice after leading digital change in financial services. Together they wrote The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation (HBR Press).
You can link with Phil Le-Brun on LinkedIn and Jana Werner on LinkedIn.
Book site: theoctopusorganization.com Book on Amazon: The Octopus Organization
New Zealand