Amazon Web Services strategists Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner contend that an organization needs to function like an octopus—a creature whose intelligence is distributed through its arms, each of which is able to sense, learn, and act independently. In these adaptive organizations, intelligence and decision-making flow to the people closest to the work, and experimentation and learning are built into daily operations.
In their 2025 book The Octopus Organization, the authors lay out their methodology, which is centered on small experiments, continuous learning, and a model of leadership that looks different from the one most leaders were trained in. Keep reading to discover how to become an Octopus Organization.
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How to Become an Octopus Organization
In their book, Le-Brun and Werner describe what an Octopus Organization is and explain that it has three qualities: clarity, ownership, and curiosity. Then they turn to the practical question of how to become an Octopus Organization. Their answer is designed to avoid the trap that dooms most transformation efforts: applying the same rigid, top-down approach to the problem of being too rigid and top-down.
The authors’ method for making change is intended for anyone with influence over how work gets done—not only senior executives, but team leaders, middle managers, and anyone who can surface a problem and propose a small experiment. The scope of the change should match the scope of your influence, and it can grow from there.
| How to Start Change When You’re Not in Charge Le-Brun and Werner make a point of saying the journey to becoming an Octopus Organization doesn’t belong exclusively to executives—that anyone with influence over how work gets done can start. Two bodies of research offer guidance on what that looks like in practice. In Switch, Chip and Dan Heath suggest identifying what they call “bright spots”: places in your organization where the behavior you want is already happening. The team that runs effective meetings and the manager whose people speak freely are experiments that have succeeded, and studying them may be more powerful than proposing something new. That’s because solutions that originate from within tend to be trusted in a way that imported frameworks simply aren’t. The harder work comes when you’re ready to push a change beyond your immediate team, and here Adam Grant’s Originals adds a note of realism: Making change from a nonexecutive position depends on how much credibility you’ve accumulated. People who push for unconventional ideas before they’ve established a track record are often resented; what Grant calls “idiosyncrasy credits” have to be earned before they can be spent. His advice is to resist the urge to project confidence. Acknowledging uncertainty and naming the potential weaknesses in your proposal can lower people’s defenses and make them more receptive to unconventional ideas. |
In their book, Le-Brun and Werner catalogue 36 specific negative patterns that undercut the three qualities of Octopus Organizations (clarity, ownership, and curiosity). Most organizations will recognize themselves in many of them, but the starting point isn’t to make an exhaustive plan to fix them all. It’s enough to identify one that generates the most recognition or frustration and begin there. Counterintuitively, the goal isn’t to complete a transformation and arrive at a finished Octopus Organization. Even the most adaptive companies have to fight against drifting back toward these traditional patterns as they grow. What changes is an organization’s ability to spot them early and act.
| Old Habits Don’t Disappear—They Wait There’s a reason even the most adaptive organizations have to fight against drift: Old patterns don’t disappear; they just go dormant. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg notes that organizational routines accumulate from individual decisions until they become so embedded that people follow them without knowing why. When deliberate effort relaxes—such as under pressure or busyness—familiar defaults reassert themselves. The force driving this at the individual level is the brain’s instinct to conserve energy: Each person defaults to what they already know how to do, and maintaining new routines demands conscious effort. Attempting too many changes at once tends to fail because the cognitive effort required is too much. James Clear’s Atomic Habits identifies when reversion is most likely to occur: during the interval between starting new behaviors and before they’ve produced any visible results. Clear calls this the “plateau of latent potential” and describes it as a gap when change looks like it isn’t working but is quietly building toward a breakthrough. It’s this moment when organizations are most likely to declare an experiment unsuccessful and revert. The plateau is predictable. Knowing it’s coming—and that the curve will turn upward—is one of the most practically useful things to understand before you begin. |
The authors frame the ongoing work of changing how an organization operates around three principles:
- Make changes with people rather than imposing them from above.
- Ensure that every change produces real value and learning, not just activity.
- Do less to achieve more—subtract friction and remove what isn’t working rather than layering new programs on top of old ones.
These principles run through each of the specific approaches that follow—shaping how experiments get designed, how successful practices travel through organizations, and what effective leadership looks like in practice.
(Shortform note: What you learn from an experiment depends on how well it was designed. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries notes that many experiments take measurements that aren’t tied to a specific prediction—they tell you that something moved, but not whether your change caused it. A well-designed experiment, on the other hand, specifies what you’d expect to see if the change works, which is why it’s informative regardless of outcome. This sharpens the case for “do less”: If you change five things and performance improves, you don’t know which change made the difference. The case for designing change with people rather than on them works the same way, because the people closest to a problem can design more informative experiments.)
Step 1: Start With the Learning Loop
Once you’ve identified a pervasive negative pattern (one that makes people roll their eyes in meetings, or raises concerns only in the hallway afterward), Le-Brun and Werner recommend a simple approach to help your company become an Octopus Organization:
- Form a hypothesis about what’s causing the problem and what small change might address it.
- Run an experiment to try the change in a limited context, over a short period, with a clear sense of what you’re testing.
- Carefully reflect on the results.
Experiments can take many forms—stopping something that isn’t working, modifying an existing process, or piloting something new entirely. Keep the experiment small enough that failure is survivable and fast enough that learning is timely.
The step most organizations skip is reflecting carefully on the experiment’s results. The most tempting conclusions are also the least useful: “The experiment worked, so let’s roll it out everywhere” or “The experiment failed, so let’s never try that again.” Both miss something more important: Why did the experiment produce the result it did, and what does that reveal about how the organization actually functions? Le-Brun and Werner describe this deeper reflection as the difference between correcting a symptom and beginning to understand the system.
| What the Learning Loop Actually Requires Both steps in Le-Brun and Werner’s learning loop are harder than they look, and each fails in a predictable way. The first failure happens when forming the hypothesis. Most organizational hypotheses are too vague to be informative. Just as Reis notes in The Lean Startup, philosopher of science Karl Popper argues that a hypothesis has to be falsifiable—it can be tested and proven wrong—and must be specific enough that a negative result counts as evidence against it. This means designing tests with the goal of disproving your hypothesis, not confirming it. An experiment meets this standard when it specifies exactly what you’d expect to see if the change worked; only a hypothesis that can be proven wrong will teach you something if it’s proven right. The second failure happens at the reflection stage. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge calls the assumptions encoded in a hypothesis “mental models”—the closely held beliefs about how things work that shape how we interpret any result we see. Organizations tend to protect these models from examination. When an experiment produces a surprising result, the easier move is to attribute it to external circumstances (the timing was off, the sample was too small) rather than to ask whether the underlying assumption was wrong in the first place. That’s why the reflection step Le-Brun and Werner describe isn’t really analysis; it’s self-examination, which is a harder thing to ask of an organization. |
As you design your hypothesis and experiment, it’s also worth thinking about what kind of change you’re trying to make. Drawing on the work of systems thinker Donella Meadows, Le-Brun and Werner identify three levels of intervention:
- The shallowest are quick adjustments to an existing process, which produce immediate results but don’t alter underlying dynamics.
- Deeper changes reshape how information flows; they’re harder to implement but more durable.
- The most powerful interventions shift shared assumptions: what a team believes about how decisions should be made, or what good leadership actually looks like. These changes are often simple to articulate but take time to become habits, and they tend to be the ones that last.
| What Each Level of Change Actually Creates The three levels of intervention differ in how they affect an organization’s capacity to handle disruption. In Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains why. He distinguishes among systems that break under stress (fragile), those that survive it (robust), and those that get stronger from it (antifragile). Le-Brun and Werner’s intervention levels correspond to these outcomes: Fragile—Shallow tweaks optimize an organization for its current conditions, which makes it more fragile; a tightly tuned system lacks the slack to adapt as conditions shift. Robust—Deeper changes (ones that shift how feedback moves, how quickly problems surface, and what patterns trigger responses) build robustness, giving the system a wider operating range. Antifragile—Major shifts in the assumptions built into an organization have the potential to make it genuinely antifragile. The organization doesn’t merely tolerate disruption but learns from it, treating uncertainty as information rather than something to be managed away. Seen this way, the Octopus Organization is structured to get stronger from the same shocks that would break a traditionally managed one. One caveat Taleb notes is that antifragility requires manageable, recoverable doses of stress. An organization asked to absorb too much change too quickly doesn’t become antifragile; it breaks. The prescription to keep experiments small and survivable isn’t just organizational caution; it’s a condition for learning itself. |
Step 2: Spread, Don’t Scale
When an experiment succeeds, the natural impulse is to scale it—to push it across the organization through a top-down mandate. Le-Brun and Werner argue that you should resist this instinct. Scaling strips a solution of its local context, removes ownership from anyone who didn’t participate in developing it, and treats specific insights as universal prescriptions. What works for one team may not translate directly to another, and mandating adoption tends to produce compliance without genuine understanding.
The alternative is what the authors call “spreading”—creating conditions for good practices to travel organically, pulled from team to team because they demonstrably solve real problems.
For example, an early Amazon developer who was frustrated with a cumbersome image-management system built a better one on his own initiative. Other teams noticed and adopted it without any mandate, and eventually someone built an international version. Le-Brun and Werner offer this as a model of spreading in action; the idea traveled because it worked, not because someone told people to use it.
| Why Good Ideas Don’t Necessarily Spread Themselves The concept of spreading originates in Aaron Dignan’s Brave New Work, which explains why mandated changes tend to fail. When people adopt a practice because they were told to, they have no stake in whether it actually works. When they adopt it because it solves a real problem, they own it, and that ownership makes change durable. But what does it actually take for a practice to travel organically? Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point suggests that what matters most is the power of context—whether the environment makes people receptive to change, more so than the quality of the idea or finding the right champion for it. In Le-Brun and Werner’s Amazon example, all the right contextual conditions happened to be present: The old system’s failure was visible, the new solution was immediately observable in practice, and the culture gave developers permission to use it without waiting on permission or a mandate from above. But, in organizations where those conditions are absent (teams are siloed, problems are invisible to potential adopters, or trying something new requires approval), even a genuinely better practice might not spread on its own. Creating that receptivity to change is itself an active part of the Octopus leader’s work. |
Step 3: Shift How You See Leadership
Becoming an Octopus Organization requires a corresponding shift in how leaders understand their own roles. In the Octopus Organization model, the leaders’ primary job isn’t to direct the work but to improve the conditions in which others can do their best work—asking more questions than you answer, making it genuinely safe for people to surface problems, and actively removing the friction that slows teams down. Le-Brun and Werner describe this as working on the system rather than in it.
They explain that Reed Hastings illustrated this distinction as CEO of Netflix by eliminating the company’s formal vacation policy. Instead of handling time-off requests one by one, he changed the environment, replacing a bureaucratic process with a single principle: Act in Netflix’s best interests. Employees still managed their schedules with their teams in mind, but the whole apparatus of tracking, requesting, and approving leave had been removed. The goal of the Octopus leader, Le-Brun and Werner argue, is ultimately to make the organization function so well that it no longer depends on the kind of direction most leaders were trained to provide.
| Why Building an Organization That Doesn’t Need You Is So Hard The leadership shift Le-Brun and Werner describe—from directing work to improving the conditions for it—requires leaders to pursue a goal most of their career incentives punish: building systems and people that will thrive without their direction. (There’s rarely a career reward for making yourself unnecessary.) In Turn the Ship Around!, L. David Marquet explains that, when performance drops after a strong leader departs, most organizations conclude the leader was indispensable rather than that they’d failed to build anything lasting. Replacing a policy with a principle (as Hastings did with Netflix’s vacation tracking) is one mechanism for doing this. But, why does a principle outperform a more comprehensive rulebook? In Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths describe a problem called “overfitting,” when a model is so precisely calibrated to known scenarios that it fails when reality throws something new at it. A rulebook is this kind of model, but a principle works better because it forces people to use their judgment rather than deferring to rules. One caveat, though: As No Rules Rules notes, Hastings abolished Netflix’s vacation policy only after building an unusually high-trust culture. And, even then, managers had to coach people on how to use their new freedom. A principle works only when the organization is already capable of using the judgment it demands. |
Learn More About Becoming an Octopus Organization
To better understand Octopus Organizations and how to become one, read Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner’s book The Octopus Organization and Shortform’s comprehensive guide to it. We provide analysis, connections to ideas from other leading business thinkers, and an exercise to help you apply the book’s principles.
