The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation
Phil Lel-Brun and Ana Werner
Harvard Business Review Press (December 2025)

“Everything changes, nothing changes.” Heraclitus (c. 500 BC)

How can both organizations and individuals thrive “in a world of continuous transformation”?

In response to that question,  Phil Lel-Brun and Ana Werner propose a fundamentally different paradigm: their concept of the Octopus Organization, “a rethink of what it means to be a successful organization, a shift from metal suit to living organism, from programmable machine to the adaptable animal. It’s about building organizations designed to thrive in complexity, not futilely manage the complicated. It’s about choosing breakthrough performance over average results, connection over control, and agency over permission. It’s about shedding the Tin Man’s welded body and embracing the gorgeously fluid movement of the octopus.”

See Table 1.1 (Page 8) for six of the most significant differences between Tin Man and Octopus. There are frequent references to other differences throughout Lel-Brun and Werner’s lively narrative.

For purposes of discussion, let’s say that your organization needs to plan, launch, and then sustain an on-going transformation to increase its resilience, productivity, flexibility, and (of course) profitability. Where to begin?

Le-Brun and Werner explain: “This book is about what great organizations do to thrive, which is to behave like an octopus. More on that soon, but first we need to talk about what most organizations actually do, which is to behave like the Tin Man.

“This insight — not the metaphor — came to both of us, separately as we worked with hundreds of companies and witnessed them making mistakes repeatedly. Together we developed the metaphor as we began sharing field stories with each other and we recognized the same frustrations with the behaviors we were witnessing. We began to see these organizations rather like the ‘Tin Man’ in The Wizard of Oz. He was a rigid and clumsy character — slow to move and slow to react, lacking heart and struggling with empathy. He could take instructions but showed little initiative. His tool of choice was a blunt axe. When Dorothy found him, he had completely rusted up and needed her to fetch him some oil.” (Page viii

There are three separate but interdependent — and exceptionally important — objectives that the material in The Octopus Organization can help you and your organization to achieve:

1. Maximize Clarity: “Clarity is the shared understanding of an organization’s purpose, values, priorities, and what success looks like…Creating clarity requires building grounded, shared mental models — which are our internal maps to make sense of complex situations, predict outcomes, and decide how to act.” (Page 15)

2. Increase Ownership: “Ownership isn’t something you can create by fiat (‘everyone take ownership of their work now’), but you can create an environment where people do what needs to be done not through orders but because they self direct. Two things need to be true for this to come to life: someone needs to be willing to cede a degree of control, and someone needs to be willing to accept it. (Page 117)

3. Incite Cuiosity: (Page 215): “Curiosity is the desire to learn, and it’s the same feeling and drive that organizations need to develop to escape the rigid operating system. Tin Man organizations’ need for compliance and predictability actively dissuades curiosity. Octopus organizations move from a collection of individuals acting as passive receivers of information to curious teams on quests to learn.” (Page 215)

With regard to this last objective, I am again reminded of one of Alvin Toffler’s predictions in his classic work, Future Shock (1970): “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

More recently, after parents’  complaints about a substantial tuition increase at Harvard, the university’s president responded, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Phil Lel-Brun and Ana Werner have written what I am certain will be a business classic because the information, insights, and counsel they provide will have wide, deep, and enduring impact for decades to come, both for individuals and for their organizations.