Building Agile Organizations for Today's Complex World

Episode Transcript

You remember that scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy first meets the Tin Man, and he's so rusted that he can't even move? He's just sitting there, waiting for somebody to grab his oil can and help him start moving around again. This is how Janna Warner and Phil LeBrun describe way too many organizations today. They were designed for a world that no longer exists, so now they're stuck and hoping for somebody to come along and apply some kind of magical oil that will unstick them. I'm sorry, spoiler alert, there is no magic oil. Tin Man organizations are largely doomed to rust into obscurity, probably funding transformation initiative after transformation initiative, with an ever-growing sense of panic. What's the alternative? Be an octopus.

Yep, today, we're gonna talk about octopuses, or octopi. I think it's octopi. Anyway, we're gonna talk about what it means to be an organization capable of thriving in the complex, ever-changing world we live in, using some ocean-dwelling, eight-armed creatures as a model. Let's quite literally, this week, dive in.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas, and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week, we unpack the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing, from building high-velocity workflows and slashing waste to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. So lace up those virtual hiking boots, limit your WIP, and let's get going.

Okay, so what the heck do I mean when I say that you need to be an octopus organization? First of all, think about how an octopus moves around the organization. Think about how it moves around the ocean. It's got this head that's pretty stable, that's running the show, but all of its arms are kind of doing their own things. So if we extrapolate from animal to a company or a team, we need this stable center that's gonna provide clarity, and purpose, and coordination. Then we need these autonomous arms that are able to sense and respond to what's going on in their particular area, and then they react really fast and individually. But so that there's not chaos, we need strong connective tissue that keeps everything aligned, even as those arms are moving independently.

And if this kind of description is making your Agile marketing spidey sense start to tingle, that is good, because it should. This is all systems thinking stuff, pretty plain and simple. It's the idea that you don't get speed, resilience, or innovation by tightening your grip or tightening control. If you squeeze an octopus too tight, bad things happen. They're not very good at being squished. You get speed, resilience, innovation by distributing intelligence throughout a team, throughout an organization. You get it by shortening feedback loops. You get it by making work visible across the system, which, by the way, is why so many Agile-in-name-only transformations fall apart. They say they want empowered teams, but they never change leadership behavior, they never upgrade their governance models, and they never speed up their planning cycles. You just can't do that. You cannot become an octopus by stapling arms onto a robot.

So here's why marketing needs this kind of model really more than anybody else, 'cause let's be honest, we're already kind of octopus-shaped. We're heading in this direction already. We just need to make it better and more official. I mean, think about it, we work across channels and geographies, and audiences, technologies, partners, agencies, internal stakeholders. We sit at the intersection of sales, product, brand, data, CX, and now, everybody's best friend, AI. But we keep trying to hold on too tight. We are very octopus-like, but we're trying to squish it, and it's not working, right?

We still have these centralized approvals, our beautiful annual plans that are aging like milk, heroics instead of proper systems, and leaders who feel like they have to be involved in every little thing in order to maintain relevancy. So we get not agility, but organizational anxiety, because we have a pseudo-octopus that's getting squeezed way too tight, like by the Tin Man.

So we've talked about this a lot on the podcast. We've had all these episodes about dependencies, and planning, and scaling, and AI adoption, and leadership, and we keep seeing this pattern show up. Because when marketing organizations get more complex — and people, we are not getting less complex. That is not a direction that we are going in — and if we don't increase our agility, the only other option that feels open to us is to add control, and that is counterproductive.

Because systems theory reminds us that control — things like blueprints and recipes that we can repeatedly follow with confidence — only works in a complicated world. And in a complicated world, things might be big and hard to deal with, but processes are knowable, and they produce predictable results. You do A, and every time you will get B. In those kinds of complicated worlds, Tin Man organizations would kick butt, because they could build strategies with tons of analysis and specialization, and they wouldn't have to worry that some crazy once-in-a-lifetime event was gonna blow it all up. They could march, Tin Man fashion, down their road, confidently knowing that they had done all the things in order to keep going in a straight line down that road, and that they would hit their goal, reach their destination, and there wasn't going to be much need to bob, and weave, and move on the way.

So inflexible Tin Man, no problem. They could handle that kind of complicated world pretty easily. But as I'm describing this, if you are in marketing right now, you are probably like, "This is not my life," and this has never been your life, because marketing, especially marketing, has not been complicated in this particular way for a long time. Now, don't get me wrong, it is complicated in that it's got a lot of moving parts, but not complicated in the systems thinking way, in that if you do A, every time you will get B. No, we are in complex, my friends, and I would argue that we have been living in complex ever since we got into digital marketing, which means that we have been here for decades now.

And now complex is where small changes do totally unpredictable things, and this is the point where you need octopus-type teams, departments, and organizations. And the ocean turns out to be a great metaphor for how complexity works, because a change in one place that you might not even see can create totally unpredictable effects miles and miles away. So a change in the current far away in the ocean can bring a totally new type of fish, or change the temperature in a part of the ocean hundreds of miles away, and so creatures that live in the ocean, like our friend the octopus, have to be able to respond and react to those things.

For marketers, perhaps something like ChatGPT comes along, and now people who are buying our goods and services suddenly have a totally new option for research during their buying journey that never existed, and billions of people are now engaging with this completely new thing that was never in our plans and has never been part of our visualizations, or funnels, or any of these things, and it has enormous unseen effects rippling out across every conceivable part of what we do as marketers. Completely unpredictable effects across the entire funnel.

And so this is why we need to be like the octopus, and what's got to be in the octopus's central head, helping to keep everything connected and aligned, is — you're gonna be shocked when I say this — an Agile operating system. Because we have to have some kind of guidance, but we can't have rigid control or perfectly documented systems. We need distributed intelligence, continuous learning, rapid adaptation, and when we've got the right operating system, we can do all of those things. We can have all of those things without losing alignment.

So let's get a little bit more specific, because you know I love me some tactical, practical takeaways, about exactly what an Agile marketing octopus might look like. Now, Warner and LeBrun, who are originating this comparison between Tin Man and octopus, they emphasize that in true octopus fashion, there is no perfect blueprint for becoming an octopus organization. The process is emergent and organic, just like an octopus. However, you can move in that right direction by focusing on the anti-patterns that are calcifying you into a Tin Man.

So think about it as the places you are rusting, right? The things that are preventing your joints from swinging in the nice, fluid way that you would want your octopus arms to swing. You need to go and target those and apply the nice oil to them, so that they will move more fluidly like we want the octopus to move. We gotta go and find those areas and target them specifically. And so those anti-patterns, according to Warner and LeBrun, look like conditioned, formulaic responses to complex challenges that, despite good intentions and surface-level appeal, consistently make things worse.

Now, I wanna come back to the middle part of this, because it's very important. Despite good intentions and surface-level appeal. These are not things that evil people are doing to make things bad. These are well-intentioned humans who are just doing what seems right to them in the moment. That does not mean it's not an anti-pattern. So just because somebody is trying their best and doing what has historically worked or what feels good, does not mean it's not an anti-pattern. This is very important. So anti-patterns are these conditioned, formulaic responses that, even though they're based on good intentions and seem like a good idea, are nonetheless making things worse, getting you stuck in Tin Man patterns that are preventing you from being sufficiently responsive in the crazy world we live in now.

Okay, categories to help you identify said anti-patterns. One, behaviors that compromise clarity. I'm looking at you, senior leaders, who are not communicating priorities clearly to your teams. This is gonna be one that probably has fallen in your lap. So behaviors that are centered in the operating system, in the Agile marketing operating system, in the areas of planning, in strategy, and in visualization. Does the team know what the plan and strategy are? Are they clear on the difference between the strategy and the plan? Are we revisiting both of those things at a reasonable cadence? And then are they clearly documented and visualized? Are we measuring them and sharing the results of those measurements? So behaviors around these components of the operating system may be calcifying you into a Tin Man organization if they are compromising clarity.

Second category of anti-pattern that you may want to pay attention to are behaviors that compromise ownership. Now, think about it. We have, in an octopus, eight separate arms that each have to operate completely independently of the other one. You don't have arm number one, who has to run around and approve the fish that every other arm is trying to catch. Like, even saying that out loud is a completely ridiculous vision. Like, imagine the octopus had an approval arm that had to run around and say, like, "No, don't catch that fish. That fish is not on the roadmap for this quarter." That's insane.

So if you have behaviors that are compromising ownership and empowerment, these can be major anti-patterns you wanna focus on. So if you've got things that are veering toward micromanagement, behaviors that are undermining psychological safety — we've got a whole episode on this, psychological safety versus radical candor, this is a great time to go back and listen to that — or if you have behaviors that seem to be undermining people's autonomy and preventing them from acting independently, like, let them go pick the fish to catch. If it's not a big deal, if it's not going to derail the plan, which they should know about because of anti-pattern number one that we have prevented, give them the autonomy to act. So keep an eye out for these behaviors that might be compromising ownership.

All right, third category of anti-patterns that you're gonna wanna watch out for are behaviors that stifle curiosity. I love this one. So glad that this is in here, because you have to have this curiosity in the fast-moving world that we live in. No individual human can possibly keep up with everything that's happening. You just can't. Like, I don't care how good your AI assistant is, who summarizes all your emails or goes out and reads everything that happened the night before and sends it to you in this beautifully formatted summary in your inbox, there's no way to keep up with everything. And so having curiosity socialized amongst your team is the best way to exponentially increase your ability to innovate and grow faster.

So if you have behaviors that are shutting down experimentation, poo-pooing ideas, veering toward the status quo, right? Status quo bias, we do not like, right? It makes us feel like the thing that we've always done is the safest choice. These are not behaviors of an octopus organization.

The other one here that is really critical right now, especially as we are moving into the age of agentic AI, and adoption is really, in my opinion, gonna start accelerating in a lot of teams and organizations, we have to get past information hoarding. So I've been on teams where we had information hoarders, and they felt that this was the way that they added value — that people had to come to them always for some login, or if we needed something brand-related or logo-related, we always had to go through them. And they thought that it made them really helpful, and that they were always valuable and useful. But for those of us who always had to go through them, it was a huge pain when they could have just given us the files or given us the login. So information hoarding is stifling curiosity, it's stifling experimentation. This is an anti-pattern that you need to break in order to move toward being an octopus organization.

And now, chances are, as I was describing all three of these categories, you found examples in maybe two, maybe all of those buckets, and you're wondering now, if you are a good agilist, "How do I prioritize?" Because you cannot attack them all at the same time. This is a great thing to be wondering. I hope that you were.

What Warner and LeBrun recommend is, when you find them, look for the ones that attract the most energy, which I love as, like, a prioritization mechanism. So maybe you've got a cynic or a skeptic in the organization who's already fed up with a particular anti-pattern. They're the one who's like: "Oh, my God, I'm so sick of the information hoarding around this topic." They've got the energy to go and fight this particular anti-pattern. Don't worry about the ROI. Don't worry about whether it's the actual bottleneck or some of the other criteria that we've talked about in terms of how to go and figure out which anti-pattern to tackle. These are not necessarily process-related problems. These are more systemic. They are, to keep our octopus metaphor going, squishier things that we are looking at here, and so just find something that's got energy behind it.

I'm gonna borrow some of the stories from Warner and LeBrun to help you see what we mean when we say energy. So one of the things that they shared was stopping something as a way to try and break these anti-patterns. So an example: Netflix stopped their formal vacation policy and tracking system and just replaced it with the policy of "act in Netflix's best interest," because the need to track and approve and manage everybody's vacation requests became this huge time suck, and it was calcifying and becoming this thing that was limiting their ability to innovate and be fast-moving, and so they just made it go away. So they stopped something.

And so another way that you can try to experiment around these ways to break your anti-patterns is to deliberately deviate from an existing process. So Google is another example here. So I know people have interviewed at Google, maybe you do, too, and for a while, it was notoriously long and convoluted. So their interview process at one point had ballooned to, like, a dozen or more interviews and activities and things. And so they changed that process to say that you have to get executive approval now to have more than four interviews. So deliberately deviating from an existing process is a way to try and really break the anti-pattern.

A third way is to pilot a new practice, process, or tool. Coca-Cola is an example here. So they were needing to hit really aggressive and immovable deadlines for things like their sponsorships around the Olympics and the World Cup, but they had internal gatekeepers who were really interested in covering their own butts, and their response was, nine times out of ten, no to requests, and it was really slowing everything down. So their CIO shifted the whole governance, the governance mindset, to something that was more like a guardrail. So it went from, "Can we get this approved?" to, "How will we get this done together?"

So these were things that had energy around them, that were clear anti-patterns, and they could be experimented around, so that they could start to break some of the anti-patterns that were pushing these organizations toward being more Tin Man than octopus.

When you're looking for these things, last thing to consider is try to find small experiments that you can start with. This is a very obvious Agile parallel. We don't wanna try to just jump into the deep end. What's an MVP-style experiment that you could start with here? And another tight connection to the Agile world is to think about double-loop learning when you are running these experiments, and it's double-loop learning because you are learning about what you learned. So you want to not just analyze only your results — so not just how much faster could Coca-Cola get things approved, but what did you learn about the underlying assumptions and mental models that shape the experiments in the first place?

So asking questions like: What happened that you didn't expect? What didn't happen that you expected? And what does this teach us about how our organization really works? And when we do this double-loop learning process quite deliberately, it helps us to uncover more systemic issues, and assumptions, and mental models that are probably showing up in a lot of different places, fueling multiple anti-patterns, and maybe the real barriers to progress, so that we can make bigger steps toward being that octopus team, octopus organization that we want to be.

And then, as you've taken some of those small steps and you're feeling readier to do bigger things, remember the octopus who spreads out really nice and fluid, right? Think about spreading rather than scaling in this instance. We wanna create the conditions for ideas and practices to kind of flow organically. We've talked about scaling Agile, and that's important, but if we're being realistic, scaling is often a shorthand for somebody in the C-suite handing down a mandate to implement certain frameworks or processes across the organization. That's not what we're going for in these particular instances.

And what Warner and LeBrun recommend is, when you are trying to move toward being an octopus organization, if this is something you are spearheading or driving toward, think about yourself as a steward of something bigger than you. And to be honest, I like this for agilists as well, if you are a champion of an Agile transformation, because it helps you make bigger, longer-term decisions that set the organization up for success that's not tied to a single person. But setting that aside, it helps to make sure that everybody is focusing on working on the system and not just in it.

So they put it like this: focus on, quote, "Removing bureaucratic friction, clarifying purpose, cultivating psychological safety, and making sure the ownership for outcomes is clear." Again, I think we could probably verbatim apply that to Agile transformation. Topic for another day.

In closing, let's remember, Tin Men don't win in the modern era of marketing. We need organizational structures and cultures that embody the fluidity of the octopus, so they can shift and spread and adapt to the unknowable fluctuations of the ocean. Marketers are at an advantage because we already work this way by nature. All we have to do is make it official. If you're ready to start installing the operating system in the head of your octopus, that will get you unstuck and help you start swimming smoothly, hit me up at agilesherpas.com/contact-us, and I'm happy to help. In the meantime, remember, the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.