The Remarkable Leadership Podcast

00:00:09:01 - 00:00:39:03
Kevin Eikenberry
Chances are you haven't thought much or maybe even thought ever about an octopus. By the time we're finished, you might have a new appreciation for them. But this isn't a zoology podcast. It's a leadership podcast. And understanding what our guest means by an octopus organization might be the most powerful new insight you gain in the coming months. Prepare to see some things in new ways and gain insights from what you see.

00:00:39:05 - 00:01:04:00
Kevin Eikenberry
Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast, where we are here to help you become a more effective professional leader, to lead more effectively, to make a bigger difference for your team, your organization and the world. If you are listening to this podcast, you could join us in the future for live episodes on your favorite social media channel or platform.

00:01:04:02 - 00:01:34:16
Kevin Eikenberry
You can find out when those are happening and therefore interact with us and get this information sooner, by joining our Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Just two of the places where these are live streamed. Just go to remarkable podcast.com/facebook or remarkable podcast.com/linkedin to get connected, to learn more and know when you can join us live. If you like what you're hearing here today and want help developing the leaders in your organization, let's talk.

00:01:34:21 - 00:02:03:04
Kevin Eikenberry
Reach out to info at Kevin Eichenberg, SI.com, and we'll schedule time to learn more about your needs and share how we might help. My guest today, let me bring him in. His name is Phil LeBron. Excuse me. Let me introduce Phil and then we will dive in. Phil Lebrun is an executive in residence at Amazon Web Services and a former former corporate VP and international CIO at McDonald's Corporation and McDonald's.

00:02:03:04 - 00:02:33:16
Kevin Eikenberry
He co-led the consolidation and modernization of technology across 38,000 restaurants globally. He is here today as the coauthor of the new book, The Octopus Organization A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation. In his current role, Phil engages with fortune 500 executives in their teams and with the public sector customers to mentor, advise and guide them on their journeys to become more adaptable.

00:02:33:18 - 00:02:41:00
Kevin Eikenberry
Organizations. Phil, welcome joint for joining me. Thanks for being here. And I'm ready to dive into our conversation.

00:02:41:02 - 00:02:42:12
Phil Le-Brun
Great. Thanks for having me, Kevin.

00:02:42:14 - 00:02:56:16
Kevin Eikenberry
It's my pleasure. So, let's just start here. I mentioned the book. I teased the idea of octopus. We'll get there. But before we get there, what's the big idea of the book?

00:02:56:18 - 00:03:18:20
Phil Le-Brun
Transformations don't work in the traditional sense. These big bang, we want to go from A to B, and we're going to go through an 18 month or three year transformation. It just doesn't work with us human beings. So we believe there's a better way. It's a it's a way that Amazon called day one culture. Never being happy with the status quo, always trying to drive complacency out of an organization.

00:03:19:01 - 00:03:34:15
Phil Le-Brun
But in more general terms, it's about thinking big about the opportunity you have as an organization and then lighting a thousand fires across your organization, having everyone participate and drive change to become a better version of yourself every day.

00:03:34:16 - 00:03:49:19
Kevin Eikenberry
It gets to the idea that I often say that there's no such thing as organizational change. There's just individual change. And, because we can't change organizationally until individuals change. And and I don't think you say that exactly, in the book, but you've pretty much just said that right there.

00:03:49:21 - 00:04:09:22
Phil Le-Brun
Pretty much. I mean, we treat to change traditionally like it's complicated, like changing the wheel on a bicycle. Take the old well off, plug a new well in take out an IT department, plug in a new light. You department. We know organizations don't look like that. They're really complex. So if you're a systems thinker lover, if you're a believer in health systems really work.

00:04:10:00 - 00:04:29:04
Phil Le-Brun
It's about you make one change and is probably going to have an effect on another part of your organization you couldn't possibly have considered. So it's that constant evolution of your organization and the willingness to embrace complexity, rather than believe you can put together a project plan which determines a five year transformation program.

00:04:29:06 - 00:04:46:03
Kevin Eikenberry
We're gonna get to some of that in a second, but I want to come back to what I teased in the open and the and the key word in the title of the book was, which is octopus. Okay. So why all of that? You framed the big idea of the book. What does an octopus have to do with that film?

00:04:46:05 - 00:04:49:04
Phil Le-Brun
We use a metaphor in the book two metaphors. In fact, one.

00:04:49:04 - 00:04:50:14
Kevin Eikenberry
Is for the second, one the second.

00:04:50:14 - 00:05:19:16
Phil Le-Brun
So I won't, I won't, I won't on that one. The, we just think the octopus is the most remarkable, one of the most remarkable creatures, on this planet. It's got this absurdly sophisticated ability to adapt through shapeshifting, change in its texture of its skin. A remarkable ability to learn. It can an octopus can even alter its own RNA to tune their function if they're going from cold water to warmer water, for instance.

00:05:19:18 - 00:05:39:22
Phil Le-Brun
So isn't that what we want organizations to do, this continuous ability to learn and adapt to the environment in which they operate? I think it was Jack Welsh when he was, CEO said, if the rate of change inside your organization is slower than the rate of change on the outside, then the end is near.

00:05:40:00 - 00:05:57:22
Phil Le-Brun
And I believe is the octopus as an animal adapts to that by being able to constantly senses environment and change. That's what we can do in organizations if we really give people the opportunity to participate in that change, rather than being told what the changes.

00:05:58:00 - 00:06:09:23
Kevin Eikenberry
And then there's a second metaphor. So perhaps the, the anti octopus, if you will. And that that metaphor is what. And then dive into that for us.

00:06:10:01 - 00:06:34:01
Phil Le-Brun
So the metaphor we use is the Tin Man. So anyone who's watched Wizard of Oz, which I'm sure there's a bunch of folks who've seen that over Christmas, they know Tin Man is this creaky construct, this metal construct, rusting. No heart, no soul. You can pull off an arm and replace it with another, That's the view of the world when it's complicated, when you can just change out parts.

00:06:34:07 - 00:07:02:17
Phil Le-Brun
It's a very industrial revolution. Metaphor. When people were seeing this, exchangeable components, interchangeable components in an organization, they were measured for quantity and repetitiveness and for compliance. They weren't valued for what they brought to the workplace in terms of their intellect. So, we like that, metaphor of the Tin Man and the octopus is two contrasting ways to talk about how organizations used to work and how we believe they can operate in the future.

00:07:02:19 - 00:07:24:14
Kevin Eikenberry
You said something in almost just a throwaway part, sentence in the book. You might even not even remember that you and Janna wrote it, but it struck me because so often as people are reading something like this or listening to our conversation and they're hearing about this octopus thing, which sounds pretty good, but then they're hearing you describe Tin Man and saying, yeah, but that's us.

00:07:24:16 - 00:07:47:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Somewhere in there you make this statement, you say, the Tin Man way of thinking was not bad. It's just inadequate. So talk about that for a second, because I think it's sometimes people get sort of beat down or defeated or, feel guilty somehow if the way they're doing it doesn't, isn't really most effective. Can you just talk about that line for a second?

00:07:47:12 - 00:07:51:18
Kevin Eikenberry
Because to me, it's a really important piece of helping organizations move forward.

00:07:51:20 - 00:08:14:18
Phil Le-Brun
Absolutely. I mean, there is no such thing as the perfect organization. And that's that's why continual evolution is so important to any, organization. Let's face facts. The Tin Man operating system, this idea of silos and division of labor and measuring tasks and measuring the individual that's stood us in good stead for many, many decades. It was brilliant.

00:08:14:21 - 00:08:37:21
Phil Le-Brun
In the days of producing 10,000 nails or 400 motor cars that looked exactly the same, and in many cases, if you're, running a manufacturing line, a lot of those principles still apply. But when you start thinking about experimentation, ambiguity, complex city, these evolving customer needs, the fact that new technologies are coming at us left, right and center.

00:08:37:21 - 00:09:09:02
Phil Le-Brun
A genetic like generative AI. That model doesn't fit this idea of being able to predefine what good looks like and how to get there. It doesn't fit. So the reality is, most organized actions are going to be a combination. A combination of that predictability of the tinman and the adaptability and learning of the octopus. No organization is going to be, fully octopus and analyze, because as soon as you've declared, you've got to the end state, you stop changing and you start moving backwards.

00:09:09:07 - 00:09:42:14
Kevin Eikenberry
Right? So, so that's a that's another really important point is to say that, there are it's all about context, right. And what you're describing is that the context of the situation dictates the ways in which we will be most effective in leading our organizations. And you're just saying, and I would agree with you, that, we need we are in a more complex context now, that even simply complicated doesn't really meet what we're really living most of the time.

00:09:42:16 - 00:10:03:13
Kevin Eikenberry
And so we're not only trying to move to a new context to meet a new context, but it's harder. Right? So let's you've said we've now both said both of these words complicated and complex. So let's unpack that, because that's part of how we got to understand the difference between Tin Man and Octopus. Right.

00:10:03:15 - 00:10:27:20
Phil Le-Brun
Absolutely. And if you think about complicated and this is how traditionally we've approached organizational change, it's this belief that you can break an organizational problem down into lots of small, manageable parts. You can fix whatever fix means in this context, each of those parts. And then you can use a blueprint to reassemble all of those elements, and you end up with a brand new organization.

00:10:27:22 - 00:10:52:10
Phil Le-Brun
And it doesn't work that way. That way, because there are so many interdependencies, between teams, between even leadership styles. What customers want, the new technology that's come along, the idea of you being able to predict exactly what the consequence of the change in an organization is going to be, we could spend years and years trying to get that answer right, and we'll still get it wrong.

00:10:52:12 - 00:11:18:07
Phil Le-Brun
Rather than embracing complexity, which says we can't possibly predict every outcome, and instead, instead of treating organizations as predictable, predictable and linear, we manage change through learning. So, for instance, you know, one of the things we do at Amazon is we run what we call two pizza teams, these cross-functional teams, typically 8 to 10 people given a business outcome to achieve.

00:11:18:09 - 00:11:41:03
Phil Le-Brun
And in essence, it sounds really simple and sensible. But you think about what it takes to do that. You have to start breaking down silos. Do you reward the individual on the team or do you reward the team? The leader has to take a different style that they're to remove dependencies, keep the team focus on the outcome, not to tell the team everything they need to do, because often the leader doesn't have that information.

00:11:41:07 - 00:12:12:07
Phil Le-Brun
So you start to look at all of the implications from a, an organization or a leadership ship, a recruitment and retention, a training point of view. There are many, many changes. In fact, we identified over 160 changes that need to happen. If you want to run those types of teams at scale. So rather than try and blow up the organization and reconstruct it, which is the optimal way it's, you know, within your organizational context, with your customers, with your problems, learn your way through that problem and figure out what works within your culture.

00:12:12:09 - 00:12:39:03
Kevin Eikenberry
Test, try, adjust, adapt. Come back again because as the dominoes start to fall, then we have to address those dominoes that fell that we didn't even know existed. Right. So, I think it's a really important piece. The the core of the book gets at three big ideas that you say, in order for us to be adaptable, to become more octopus like, if you will, that there are three things that are required.

00:12:39:08 - 00:12:55:07
Kevin Eikenberry
And I'm going to let you just talk about each of them briefly, and then I'm going to ask you some follow up questions about them. Yeah, I've got a couple of observations about them, but I just let you let's let you under under score them or lay that foundation for us, and we'll go from there.

00:12:55:09 - 00:13:21:10
Phil Le-Brun
Absolutely. And we what we did is we took our backgrounds. So both Siano and I, practitioners, we've led change in large organizations. So we took what works and what didn't work for us, what we've observed within the company we operate in now within Amazon. And the fact we get this opportunity to talk to hundreds of large customers around the world, and there's a set of what we call anti-patterns to change, which are, almost predictable.

00:13:21:10 - 00:13:46:17
Phil Le-Brun
Not to sound like the Tin Man here, but we see these across every industry, in every geography. We found over 300 anti-patterns to change. We pulled those up into 36 themes, and what came out was three overarching, concepts. One is clarity. Do I, as a leader, understand what my strategy is, what my purpose is? Do my employees understand it?

00:13:46:22 - 00:14:04:15
Phil Le-Brun
Do I understand how I'm being measured? Do understand what good looks like? The second one was ownership. This idea of agency. We are particularly in knowledge work today. We have all of these bright individuals. And then often we put 42 levels of leadership on top of them to tell them how to do the job. We hired them to do in the first place.

00:14:04:16 - 00:14:25:12
Phil Le-Brun
So with ownership, I as an individual, I want to come into work and feel like I'm making a difference. I own something Daniel Pink wrote about this, in his book drive about Mastery, autonomy, and Purpose. I want to feel like I actually own an outcome. I'm adding value. I'm doing more than just a job description. And the third one was curiosity.

00:14:25:14 - 00:14:46:10
Phil Le-Brun
This idea that, I may know, I may think I know what a customer wants, or I may think I know what an end state looks like. But if you believe in complexity and systems theory, you also believe you don't necessarily know how to get there. So this idea we all learned to school of coming up with hypothesis testing.

00:14:46:10 - 00:15:18:19
Phil Le-Brun
The hypothesis. If it's right, great. Proceed. If it isn't, you've learned something and you can pivot and move in a different direction. So by the time you get to the whatever the end state is, you've probably made many, many adjustments. And we find these are actually a virtuous circle. The clearer I am as an employee about what good looks like, the more likely I'm to take ownership because I know what I'm owning, the more agency I feel, the more ownership I feel, the more unlikely to invest my time and intellect in actually running experiments.

00:15:18:21 - 00:15:35:20
Phil Le-Brun
Because I want to make my, outcome better. And the more I am curious, the more I ask questions and run experiments, the clearer I'm going to be about what the customer actually want. So we find this to be a virtuous circle within organizations.

00:15:35:22 - 00:16:04:04
Kevin Eikenberry
So the cynic in me, and I am not naturally cynical, I'm only using this to frame the question. Three things you said. Creating clarity, increasing ownership and inciting curiosity. And maybe if we were replace the word curiosity with innovation, we could say, well, there have been 100 books written each of the last 15 years that talk about one or all three of those things.

00:16:04:06 - 00:16:25:22
Kevin Eikenberry
And yet, I think those are the three things. And so the question is, why are we still not getting it? Organizationally, I'm not talking about an individual. Right. Why why do those three things keep popping to the top of the hit parade all of the time?

00:16:26:00 - 00:16:49:18
Phil Le-Brun
I think there's a few reasons we keep going at this with the same old approach. One was the approach sort of works in the tin mandates. If you're rewiring or reconfiguring a manufacturing line, you could you could actually do this in a very planned, linear, predictable, way. So we're sort of applying old mental models, which is much of what the book's about is how do we change your mental model?

00:16:49:18 - 00:17:17:08
Phil Le-Brun
We're applying old mental models, to a new environment. Secondly, as technology has moved on at such a rate, we used to see technological change every decade, two decades, three decades. Now we're seeing it every year, every two years, potentially even faster. So all of these new tools are coming, which demands that we look at how we, revisit, organizational structures, how we get work done, on a constant basis.

00:17:17:10 - 00:17:44:02
Phil Le-Brun
So this idea that we go through a major change every five years or ten years, an organization just doesn't keep up with the rate of change in the way we operate. I think the other thing is it's almost leadership style, too. There's something that sounds really leadership. If I say we're going to go through a massive multi-million dollar transformation to become an agile, platform based, AI enabled organization that leverages our customer synergies, it's meaningless.

00:17:44:02 - 00:17:44:19
Phil Le-Brun
But it's.

00:17:44:21 - 00:17:50:05
Kevin Eikenberry
And you just gave everybody heartburn and and you certainly didn't create clarity, which is part of.

00:17:50:07 - 00:17:57:13
Phil Le-Brun
Your points, I think because as an individual at the frontline of my organization, what does any of that actually mean to my day job?

00:17:57:15 - 00:18:14:12
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, and I would say that even the people who are and you that came off your lips pretty quick there, Phil, but I would say that even the people in the room that came up with that statement wouldn't all be able to describe it as being the same thing, which is which gets us to this, back of the three.

00:18:14:12 - 00:18:38:10
Kevin Eikenberry
If you forced me to say which of the three we needed to focus on the most, it would be the clarity one. And you described it as the first of the three, that that spins the wheel, if you will. One of the things that struck me as I was reading and as I've been thinking about all these things for myself and with our clients, is clarity is more important than ever.

00:18:38:12 - 00:18:51:06
Kevin Eikenberry
And because of the complexity and uncertainty, it may be harder to get to than ever. So talk about that tension a little bit.

00:18:51:08 - 00:19:19:07
Phil Le-Brun
Yeah. Let me touch on something you alluded to, Kevin, firstly, which is it's what we call the team of leaders issue, which is you're absolutely right. Often as leadership teams, we come up with these bold statements full of, yoga Bible, which, you know, great words leverage, ability, synergy and the such like and what we find constantly is that a leadership team level, if you have each leader write down what it means to the organization who's accountable, how are they going to be measured?

00:19:19:09 - 00:19:30:19
Phil Le-Brun
You get multiple different answers. So if you've got a leadership team that isn't even aligned, then how possibly can you have an organization move in the same direction? You got.

00:19:30:19 - 00:19:31:23
Kevin Eikenberry
No shot.

00:19:32:01 - 00:19:57:02
Phil Le-Brun
Exactly. And I saw one stat this in about 50% transformations fail a step number one, which is what are you trying to do? But I think if you get down to what organizations are trying to do, and I've use an Amazon term which is durable needs so often when you look at strategies in organizations today, they often, are trying to address everything they see as a deficit.

00:19:57:07 - 00:20:17:22
Phil Le-Brun
So we're going to be the most people centric, the most sustainable, the most profit stable, the most agile organization. Now, clearly, no organization is going to be the best at every single one of those. If I take an example from Amazon, if you look at the durable needs, what are those needs that you as an organization believe are going to be sustained over the next ten years?

00:20:18:00 - 00:20:40:03
Phil Le-Brun
If you're an Amazon customer, you probably are never going to say, hey, your products are too cheap, you deliver too fast and you have too much range. That's great. So those three are great, sort of principles to anchor your strategy on. How do we drive cost down, how to drive selection up, and how do we continue to optimize, delivery speed to customers.

00:20:40:05 - 00:20:50:21
Phil Le-Brun
And I think often organizations haven't done a great job at identifying what are their durable needs that are going to last over the next decade or even over the next 3 to 5 years.

00:20:50:23 - 00:21:20:00
Kevin Eikenberry
Is a really, really excellent point. Now, you hinted at something earlier. I put it on the screen for those who are watching this idea of anti-patterns, and you said that in the book there are 36 of them. We don't have time to talk about 36. But I want you to go back and for a second describe again what you mean by an anti-pattern, because again, I think it it's helpful for those of us listening, you're going to we're going to talk about these as being things that are already happening.

00:21:20:01 - 00:21:32:04
Kevin Eikenberry
And it's not because people are bad people or are stupid, but they they're they're what happens habitually. So what do you mean by an anti-pattern specifically? And then let's talk about a couple of them.

00:21:32:05 - 00:22:09:07
Phil Le-Brun
Yeah. And you used a keyword though, which is habits. We have these instinctive responses to problems. For instance, I want to drive down cost in a multinational company. I'm going to centralize everything, because if we do things once, then it's going to be more efficient. We know that doesn't work. I remember living through that in McDonald's in about 2002, when you operating across 120 countries and you assume that you can do everything centrally without the nuances of, say, operating in Japan or Brazil or the US or the UK, you actually become this massive bottleneck.

00:22:09:12 - 00:22:35:07
Phil Le-Brun
So the anti-patterns are often these instinctive, habitual responses, which on paper sound great but often are much more nuanced. And we're not going to claim that the 36, all of the anti-patterns that exist, and that's that's one of the reasons we're so keen to create this community in conversation, because we know out there there are so many people who've lived through so many changes, who have so many great insights.

00:22:35:09 - 00:23:01:18
Phil Le-Brun
And the beautiful thing about this approach is to change mindsets, to change these, to move from anti-patterns to patterns. Often it's a lot of small changes are made. It doesn't require a multi-year investment. It does require a leadership commitment to figure out what works and what doesn't work, and to continue to experiment with that culture, to figure out in that context how can they move away from these anti-patterns.

00:23:01:20 - 00:23:32:16
Kevin Eikenberry
And so these anti-pattern anti-patterns, which are habits which serve us until they don't. And you're describing these as things that maybe served us in a in a tin man world, but don't serve us now, of the 36, is there one that either is your favorite or just the one that, based on this conversation, you just want I just want you to give us an example of one, that people will probably shake their heads at and say, yeah, I get that Phil.

00:23:32:18 - 00:23:36:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Whichever one pick one to share.

00:23:36:07 - 00:23:58:01
Phil Le-Brun
Well, let me tell you a quick story about the, pigs and chickens. So, a pig and chicken walks down the road. Chicken says to pig, let's open a restaurant. Pig says, great, what should we sell? Chicken says, well, clearly ham and X pig stops, looks at the chicken and says, you know, I have to be far more committed than you do to enter this venture.

00:23:58:03 - 00:24:20:20
Phil Le-Brun
And I mean what that story alludes to. And we tell a lot of stories because at the end of the day, that's how we learn. That's what sticks in people's minds and organizations or as human beings. Within organizations, we often have a lot of chickens, a lot of people who pop into meetings, render an opinion and say no, and then walk away to the next meeting to say no.

00:24:20:22 - 00:24:42:22
Phil Le-Brun
And yet we don't have enough pigs now. Not from a HR perspective. Probably don't recall. And pigs, we call them single threaded leaders in Amazon, but it's those people who are actually focused on driving to an outcome. They're the ones driving through all of the barriers, all of the naysayers and the such, like, how do you get more people in organizations to have that mindset?

00:24:43:01 - 00:24:56:14
Phil Le-Brun
How do we get to this outcome versus these large collections of governance meetings, steering meetings, executive meetings, pre meetings, all which actually hinder our ability to learn quickly.

00:24:56:16 - 00:25:21:09
Kevin Eikenberry
100%. It's funny because as I was preparing this, I was thinking, well, if I ask him for a favorite, then maybe I should share a favorite and the reason I'm giggling is because, we already talked about it, without you knowing and without me guiding us there. The one that I would have commented on was the idea of superficial principles, which we've sort of talked about in a couple of different ways already.

00:25:21:09 - 00:25:28:17
Kevin Eikenberry
And I think it doesn't even require more to description for people who are listening to to giggle.

00:25:28:19 - 00:25:43:20
Phil Le-Brun
Oh, I mean, there's some great examples out there. Kevin. One of my favorite, leadership principles in a company was we will not harm our employees. And you have to wonder what happened where someone decided they need to write that down. But I think most.

00:25:43:21 - 00:25:47:02
Kevin Eikenberry
And then we're in a meeting, and we decided that that's what we had to leave with.

00:25:47:04 - 00:25:51:03
Phil Le-Brun
Absolutely. Oh, we're going to act with integrity. Well, I hope so.

00:25:51:05 - 00:25:53:07
Kevin Eikenberry
What can I propose to what? Right.

00:25:53:09 - 00:26:16:16
Phil Le-Brun
Precisely. So I think, you know, to me, the problem with principles are often the website declaration. And even the leadership team can't remember half the principles. I, I work in an organization now, but we have 16 leadership principles. But what makes it really interesting to me is I hear those leadership principles used in everyday speech. Hey, Kevin, thank you for showing a bias for action.

00:26:16:18 - 00:26:44:01
Phil Le-Brun
Kevin, I'm going to disagree and commit here or yeah, yeah, it's just the most customer obsessed thing we could do. Each one of those is an Amazon leadership principle they use for hiring. They use for promotions. They use for running meetings. To me, that's the acid test of a leadership principle is you can come up with all of the principles you want at a leadership level if they're not actually permeating the organization, if they're not useful, if they're not used, then why bother?

00:26:44:03 - 00:27:00:08
Kevin Eikenberry
They're not real. They don't mean anything in our in our situation. So, Phil, before we start to wrap up, I've got 3 or 4 other things I want to ask you quickly, but before we do that, is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I would have?

00:27:00:10 - 00:27:23:09
Phil Le-Brun
I would touch on the way. This change is actually implemented across organizations because we may find an anti-pattern. We may address the anti-pattern. And then, instinct as large organizations is to mandate that solution to everyone. And, Aaron Dignam wrote a brilliant book called Brave New Work. And in there he talks about this idea of spreading, not scaling.

00:27:23:11 - 00:27:43:10
Phil Le-Brun
And it's something we believe in too, which is look, context in different parts of your business are going to be different just because something, fixes an issue in one part, your organization doesn't actually mean it's going to fix the same issue in a different part of your organization. Plus, if you force this change on individuals, you've removed the ownership, you've removed the agency.

00:27:43:15 - 00:28:12:00
Phil Le-Brun
So this idea of enabling people to experiment, sharing ideas, the only bad experiment is one where you don't learn from it. An experiment may yield a result which isn't positive, so you shut it down, but you have to learn from it. Sharing those learnings is critical in organizations. So moving away from this idea that one solution fits all to this idea that there's probably going to be multiple solutions to the same sort of issue across different parts of your business.

00:28:12:02 - 00:28:31:01
Kevin Eikenberry
I talked to people all the time about the idea of piloting and not creating new policy. Right. Which is the same, same idea. A couple of things before we go, Phil, I want to know, it's very clear. And you told me this before we started, that you're passionate about these ideas. It's clear in the book that you are.

00:28:31:04 - 00:28:41:00
Kevin Eikenberry
It's clear in this conversation that you are, but you are more than just a person who writes about octopus organizations. So what do you do for fun?

00:28:41:02 - 00:29:06:02
Phil Le-Brun
What? Did I change? Organizations. Clearly, I've been built. And it's funny. It's, I'm in an organization which calls it's employers, builders. So, for fun, outside of writing, which is subsumed an awful lot of our time, I like building things from wood, metal, 3D printing and the such. Like, I mean, some of, you know, I bring that mentality back to work, because when I start building something, I normally screw it up big time.

00:29:06:06 - 00:29:20:05
Phil Le-Brun
And then you learn from it and you do it again, do it again, do it again. So I, I try and take what I use in the workplace and apply it to my, my personal life. But, you're building your physical things. I find a lot of fun.

00:29:20:07 - 00:29:27:16
Kevin Eikenberry
And you knew I was going to ask you this next question. What is it that you're reading? And you had an immediate answer. So why don't you share what you're reading now?

00:29:27:16 - 00:29:50:22
Phil Le-Brun
I, I did we were so privileged. We talked to some key leaders, when we were interviewing for the book, folks like Astro Teller, it's, alphabet X is Moonshot Labs, and Amy Edmondson, who talks about psychological safety as the mother of psychological safety. We met this wonderful professor, Linda Hill at Harvard Business School. And, she in March is releasing this book called Genius at Scale.

00:29:51:03 - 00:30:08:10
Phil Le-Brun
And he talked about, innovation, earlier. Kevin, she takes a very pragmatic approach to how does create to g how is creative genius actually liberated in organizations? What you know, what are some of the stories that can be told about those organizations that do this?

00:30:08:10 - 00:30:29:05
Kevin Eikenberry
Well, awesome. We will have, both genius at Scale and the octopus organization in the show notes. And you can go get your copy and all those sorts of things. But the Phil, before we go, where do you want where else would you point people? Where can they learn more about you and this work, where you want to point people?

00:30:29:07 - 00:30:51:17
Phil Le-Brun
There's a website. WW the octopus organization.com. Which gives a bit more detail about the book. The book actually points to a number of pages on that website. So we know, we can never describe everything that can be done in an organization. So within each of those anti-patterns as a QR code that takes you to, more material, you can read, experiment so you can run.

00:30:51:19 - 00:31:17:13
Phil Le-Brun
But what we'd ask of people to do is share their ideas. This isn't there's no monopoly around this. We believe that, to use Linda's term, this collective genius here in how we, change organizations. So I'd start there and we we are desperately keen to hear feedback and other ideas, because ultimately, this isn't about writing the book. It's about changing how we change organizations.

00:31:17:15 - 00:31:41:01
Kevin Eikenberry
So this is exactly everybody. Why we bring smart people to you so that you can be exposed to ideas and to have insight, which is what I promised when we started this episode. But insights and ideas aren't enough. The question that I have for all of you that are watching or listening is it? What's the question? I ask you every single episode and it is now what?

00:31:41:03 - 00:32:04:17
Kevin Eikenberry
What will you do now as a result of this? And and maybe that's by a book and Phil would love that. But that's not what I'm talking about. And that's not ultimately what Phil wants either. What we all are urging, both our urging you to do, is to take some action on what you got today, whether that's some idea about, hey, you identified an anti-pattern or we said something, you say that's what we're doing.

00:32:04:22 - 00:32:26:18
Kevin Eikenberry
And so what do we need to do differently? Whether what could I do with this idea of an octopus versus a tin man? What are we doing around complexity versus, something being only complicated or simply complicated? So the idea here is for you to take action. That is our hope from this conversation. So, so thank you for being here.

00:32:26:21 - 00:32:31:20
Kevin Eikenberry
It was a pleasure to be here. Live the first one of the new year.

00:32:31:22 - 00:32:44:20
Phil Le-Brun
Thank you for having me. It's, it's a great opportunity to to reach such an incredible audience. I mean, you're right, Kevin. I mean, take action tomorrow. You don't need to wait weeks to try something. You'll. People know where some of these challenges are.

00:32:44:22 - 00:33:04:11
Kevin Eikenberry
100%. So, everybody, if you enjoyed this, do what you ought to do, which is share it with someone else. In fact, if you found this useful the most, one of the most valuable things you can do is to get someone else to listen to. So then you can talk about it, because then you can clarify your thinking by talking about it with someone else.

00:33:04:11 - 00:33:15:08
Kevin Eikenberry
Invite someone else to listen. Invite someone else to subscribe so you can do that in the future. And make sure you come back next week for another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast. Thanks, everybody!