So what we see in more octopus like organizations in those meeting spaces, including the boardroom, where co-creation happens, you see whiteboards, you see people standing up, expressing genuine curiosity, arguing with passion around topics, but attacking the problem and the opportunity, not each other. Welcome to the Changing Conversations podcast. I'm Katie. I'm Steve. We work with organizational transformation and there's something about conversations in that. Steve, how would you describe it? Yes, we feel strongly about it because when you think about it, any transformation you can think of in an organization actually happens through a changed conversation. So this is close to our heart. Absolutely. And the idea with this podcast is inviting you into the conversations we're having with leading thinkers and researchers about the conversations they're changing. So you can get inspired and use their insights to spark positive change and transformation in your organization. And today we are thrilled to be in conversation with Phil LeBrun, enterprise strategist at Amazon Web Services, former corporate VP and international CIO at McDonald's, also speaker and author. Very welcome, Phil. Thank you for having me. So as to how you ended up in this conversation with us. So we've actually known each other for a few years when your fellow Amazonian and my husband, Philip, thought to introduce us because of our shared passion for understanding how do organizations and individuals really thrive in complexity. And we had this kind of nerd meetup on Zoom. And we sat for an hour and just completely geeked out about what we were both observing in organizations. And then we met face to face in Stockholm a few years later. And I was really inspired by your thinking about what you've described as living transformations. And this really contrasts to the sort of one and done, very linear approach that we're often hearing about and that we often hear doesn't work. So I was personally very excited when your book came out and also really excited on behalf of our listeners and our clients, because we've been having some really interesting conversations lately where we've been hearing these longings for what we might describe as organizations that are more fully alive, where there's more engagement, there's more curiosity, there's more energy. And, Steve, you've been a part of most of these conversations. So curious for you to fill in a little bit there. Yeah, it was actually, I think we went and met with 200 top executives in large organizations and basically asked them a very, very simple question. We asked them, what would you wish you could say about your organization that you can't say today? And we, of course, expected AI to be kind of front and center. And in many organizations, it was mentioned. But I think the one thing that really surprised us was that what they almost all were yearning for was more down the line of how do we create an organization with deep ownership, with deep empowerment, where people are acting upon opportunities and emerging threats, where we're not as top down, where we're more agile, we're more vital, a vital organization that is more faster, more agile, can execute in a different way. They were not rambling must-win battles. They were expressing a yearning for a different type of organization. And also with a little bit of a frustration, why doesn't this happen? Because this is what I express, this is what I speak to, but it doesn't materialize. So I think it plays well into your theme. Yes. And so many people talk about these topics. There are so many sort of gurus and people out there on stages talking about engagement and agility. And what I really love about your work, Phil, is you have amazing tactical, practical guidance on how to actually do this stuff, which is just fantastic. So we're very excited to get into the book and all of the ideas that you have around these different topics. But first, we would really like to get to know you a little bit better. So our first question for you is, what is a conversation that shaped you and made you who you are? Wow. A single conversation. I remember one conversation was actually 2002. I was in Chicago working for McDonald's at the time. It was 4am in the morning. And I was there with my boss for whatever reason. And I remember her saying at the time that only one person is going to invest in your P&L. You know, but how valuable am I? And that really struck me because I've been a lifelong learner, but I hadn't thought about it in terms of one of our innate abilities as humans is to be curious, to look at the world with wonder and ask lots of questions. And yet that's over education, working in typical corporate organizations, that's sort of trained out of us. We're trained to have answers, not questions. And that really stuck with me. 24 years later, the fact I recall that, that really stopped me and made me think about what questions aren't I asking? Which if I did, maybe would provoke a different reaction, a different outcome. Nice. Thank you. And now we have a first question about your work and the conversation that you have intended to change as you have released this book, The Octopus Organization into the Worlds. What is the conversation you're trying to change with this book? Well, both Yana and I have commercial backgrounds. We've been through good changes and we've been through bad changes. And we know how those bad changes make you feel. That fear, do I still have a job? What's happening? Why is this being done to me? And good changes where it's just exciting. And to your opening comments, it's being in a workplace which is full of wonder and excitement and possibility and the such like. So two and a half years ago, we bumped into each other at one of the big technology shows in Vegas. And as you do, as you walk in the corridors of a casino, you have the conversation, let's write a book. And it started from there. And then we spent a lot of time. I was going to say locked in a conference room. I think it was over a glass or bottle of wine. Talking about what is it that stops organizations being the organizations you described, those vital, alive organizations where employees come in. It's like a hobby. It's exciting. They can make a difference. And we came up with these 300 dysfunctions of change in organizations, which we then bored into these 38 anti-patterns, these sort of habitual conditioned responses we see in organizations. And really, the conversation we want to change is we are taking old organizations designed on 19th and 20th century principles, applying 19th and 20th century principles to try and change those organizations, and then wondering why most transformations fail. And we just believe there's a better way, a more human way of bringing your employees, not just along the journey, but actually an integral path of driving that journey in organizations. And to us, success is an executive walking out of the room after we've had a conversational presentation thinking, maybe I'll try something different. Or even someone fairly junior in an organization saying, actually, I can make a difference. I can see my connection to the purpose of the organization. And why can't I be a leader too in my actions? Such important questions. And I think to set the table for us to go deeper into octopus organizations and how to become more octopus-like and overcome some of these anti-patterns, as you're describing. Let's unfold these metaphors a little bit. So what is an octopus organization? If you could describe that for us a little bit and how it's different from what you describe as a Tin Man organization. Well, if I start with the Tin Man, for anyone who remembers Wizard of Oz, we describe the Tin Man as this heartless, soulless, rusting, creaking being. And that's how most organizations are. We treat them as mechanical organizations where we can unplug one function and plug a new function in, unplug a human, plug a new one in. We treat them as complicated, as if changing one thing doesn't have all of these ripple effects. And we know that's simply not true. And the reality is organizations are complex. For any systems thinkers in your audience, you'll recognize the fact that you make one small change and there's a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth order effect that you could either try and predict, but then you'll be in planning hell forever and still miss 20 things. Or you can make a change and react to what works, what doesn't work. And the metaphor of an octopus just really struck us. It's a beautiful, amazing creature. It grows up with our parents. It learns its way into the world, continually curious, playful. What struck us in particular is two thirds of its neurons are in its arms. So it's also highly decentralized. You've got a central brain setting a sort of vision or direction, but then this independence within the arms to actually go and pursue different ways of fulfilling that vision. And then it's also got this ability to reprogram its own molecular structure. So it can adapt to the environment it finds itself in. The final thing that struck us about an octopus is its resilience doesn't come through having a hard shell. It comes through the fact it's agile, it's adaptable. It can move fast, learn quickly, and figure out ways out of situations. That's what we want in our organizations. For anyone with a five year roadmap, in the majority of cases, most people miss the fact there was going to be a COVID crisis, for instance. You can't predict the future. What you can do, though, is create your own future and adapt to what happens in the external environments rapidly. And this idea of experimenting your way to success rather than trying to plan your way to success. I think you make this distinction between octopus and tin man really clear and tangible with the descriptions of the strategy meeting in one versus the other. Could you paint those pictures for us? I think it really brings it home. I think we've all been there, haven't we? We walk into the boardroom to see the leadership team to present our latest strategy. And what's noticeably absent in boardrooms is co-creation space, whiteboards and the suchlike. You go in, you present a PowerPoint, which by nature is open to interpretation, is high level. Leaders sit around the table and they nod wisely. They contribute opinions. Sometimes I'll ask questions. Often those questions are designed to prove that they know what they're talking about, not from a place of curiosity. And we speak in abstractions. We're going to be a people first organization that leverages our platforms and AI enabled infrastructure to deliver synergies across our organization become truly customer centric. That sounds brilliant. Man, I don't know about you. I don't get out of bed in the morning thinking I'm get to leverage my synergies today. And any time you use words like leverage synergies, it's just like, that sounds like layoffs. So what we see in more octopus like organizations, and to be clear, there is no such thing, ironically, as an octopus organization. As soon as you declare you are an octopus organization, you stop changing and that defeats the object. But in those meeting spaces, including the boardroom, where co-creation happens, you see whiteboards, you see people standing up, expressing genuine curiosity, arguing with passion around topics, but attacking the problem and the opportunity, not each other. Being curious, because most transformations, or a majority of transformations fail at step number one, which is, does everyone actually understand what we're doing? It's easy to say we're going to digitally transform. And we've seen this with our own customers. If you have 15 executives, two years into their digital transformation, write down, what does it mean? How are you going to measure it? Who's accountable? You get 13 different answers. So there's an energy and this desire to co-create rather than this sort of passive recipient, being a passive recipient of someone's PowerPoint. I love it. We have that same notion around, for instance, corporate theater. So this thing that you walk into a meeting and you feel that you're part of a play almost. Like it's, there's been an internal team working for, you know, four weeks to polish a slide deck, to leave everyone with the impression that everything is under control. And there's lots of green watermelons, always one yellow to give the sense that we are very diligent. So, so it's, it's almost like it's part of how we, how we work. And I'm a little bit curious as to, so we work with Gary Hamel way back when he, when he came out with humanocracy book, like meaning how do we create organizations that are as amazing as the people within them? Like, why is it that we get a little less amazing when we walk into an organization? And of course, that's the construct. It's the metaphors. It's, it's the, the outdated models. So, as you said, there are no octopus organizations in its true sense. We, we, we might aspire to, to, towards that, but I'm curious as to, is it so that the so-called Tin Man organization, is it so that you, you, you actually also need to be that? Is it a, really a both end? And I'm, I'm really curious here because I just see most organizations being in love with the octopus idea, however, not being that. And that must be either because we are all super incompetent or because there are some advantages that kind of outweighs the risk of going octopus. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a really nuanced question because I, I think part of the attraction of the Tin Man type organization, which is very process based, is this, use your word, the theater of control. Um, I get status reports. I have governance meetings. What people fail to understand is that slows the organization down so much that they actually increase the risk in many cases. But I, I think there are elements of Tin Man organizations which are still relevant. If you think about the genesis of where much of our organizational structure comes from with folks like Frederick Taylor, it was all about predictability, compliance and control. Which arguably on a manufacturing line makes sense if you're building a thousand widgets. I came out of McDonald's. I, when I was a kid, I worked in the restaurants. You don't want someone cooking a thousand fries and every time thinking I'm going to make a different process up here. There's a predictability there. But what I would say is even in those Tin Man organizations where you've got people religiously following a process, you still want to hear their voices because they are at the front line. They're the ones who could probably say, hey, I follow the process, but it's a bit dumb. Maybe there's a better way I could do it. And how do I get my voice heard? So even in those organizations which are all about predictability, there are elements of the octopus organization which still apply. Otherwise, we miss out on all of this massive intelligence we have at the, at the very front lines of our organization. And instead we cover ourselves with things like best practice. And the problem with best practice is it almost becomes a defense mechanism to change. Yes. How can you have a better practice if you've already implemented a best practice? It's almost down on the individual level. Like the equivalent is your personal to-do list. The problem with the personal to-do list is that it was made by the person you were yesterday. And that's also a very beautiful invitation to, to, to just realize that there is a chance that I wake up today and I'm slightly different than I was the day before. And, and if I rule that out on a personal basis, then I will stay the same. Yes. And I think that is a good transition to sort of the flawed ways that we think about change and that we think about transformation. And you have an interesting perspective on this, Phil. You describe the transformation trap. What is this? What does that mean? Well, we've known for years through, I mean, Gary Hamill wrote about this, a $3 trillion opportunity. We fall into the same patterns of behavior time and time again, depending on who you believe somewhere between 70 to 90% of major transformations don't see the results they were intended to achieve. And even the ones that do, they're soul destroying. Leadership come out and announce a big transformation. We're going to grow a return on incremental capital invested by 7%, which I have no idea what that means, what it means to my job. All I'm actually thinking is, does that mean I've still got a job? So you just the very act of announcing a major transformation over the next three years, as if you know what the future holds to you, actually disempowers people in organizations. So we're applying the old mental models, this idea of planning, process, benchmarking, best practices, feed it into a machine, feed all of this information into machines, spans of control, depth of organization, percentage of spend on training, and out pops an organizational chart. And I think that's why are we glad to get to the end of the transformation because it has been soul destroying. So we can stop changing now. And as soon as you stop changing, you go backwards. I think that it's brilliant how you describe that we want to, and often transformations are an attempt to be less Tin Man-ish. And then the transformation process is exactly a Tin Man transformation process with being very linear and rigid and hierarchical. And it reminds me of, I'm not sure if you're familiar with Deborah Rowland's work, but she talks so much about the way we neglect the how of change, that the way that we do change and transformation is just as important as the what we are aiming to become. And it's sort of a fool's errand to believe that we can get to being adaptable and empowered in a very linear, top-down change process. And I also think you bring something else into the equation, Phil, if I may. You bring a higher ambition. You're basically saying, correct me if I'm wrong here, you're basically saying it might be that this transformation is successful. It's between the 70 to, or the 10 to 20 or 30% transformation that is successful. But you're basically saying you have a higher aim. You're also saying that even though that it delivered, if it crushes the soul of the organization, if it somehow by the nature of the way we drive the change, somehow ruins the fabric of what should actually allow us to win in the future. Yes. Because it was too forceful. It was too top-down, you know, whatever. Then it's actually not making your mark. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. It robs people of agency. And going back to Katie's point, we often over-index as leaders on the how and maybe the what. We even forget to explain the why half the time. Why are we actually, not in corporate speak, why are we doing this? And some of that is about transparency and honesty. We're doing this because we're in trouble. We're losing out to competitors. We're losing margin. We're not fast enough to market. Instead, we disguise it in all of this ambiguous yoga babble that no one actually understands. And we know from research that the average manager doesn't understand the majority of the work their individual team members do. They think they do, but it's probably in the region of 40% or less that they actually understand. So we actually then go and change the organization at a level of the organization which doesn't understand how work really gets done. And then we start talking about resistance to change. Well, if you come to me and say, hey, Phil, you've been a great technologist. We're going to make you a Japanese taxi driver. What do you expect me to do? Say, oh, great. I've always wanted to learn Japanese and drive a taxi. Of course, it doesn't work like that. I mean, you haven't told me the why. You've just undermined all of that mastery I've had in skills I've developed over the years. You're doing change to me, not with me. Not with me. Not with me. Not with me. And you've started to sprinkle in a few of what you've sometimes referred to as worst practices. These anti-patterns that you have noticed in your experience in your work with, I believe, over hundreds of organizations at this point that you've been working with on their journeys, their processes to become more adaptable. And you found that they often aren't struggling with these super unique challenges or problems, but they are a little bit predictable. So you call these anti-patterns. Can you say a few words about what are anti-patterns and these three different categories that you sort of bucket them into? So we took the 300 dysfunctions of transformation, and we're not claiming that's a complete list, but they're the most common ones we found very quickly. And we class them into what you describe as the anti-patterns, the 38 anti-patterns. And they are habitual conditioned responses in leadership. And we've all done that. I've seen it in my career. I've made these mistakes in my career. If you work in a multinational company, for instance, it's very easy to say we are going to centralize building products because centralization means we do it once. Doing it once is efficient. Efficient is good because it's going to be more cost effective. That's the lie we tell ourselves. The reality is we create a massive bottleneck in our organization where everything has to go to a central organization who's completely out of touch through no fault of their own with what's happening on the front line. There's an assumption an organization is standard across every country or every business unit, which is far from the truth. And even if all of that was untrue, you come up with this product and then you foist it on your business units. They had no say in it. You're doing change to them again. So that's what an anti-pattern is. And ironically, both Jana and I, while we have all change practitioner backgrounds, we work in technology predominantly. And we thought there'd be a lot more technology themes that came out and there weren't. And the themes that did come out was the first one's clarity. Do I understand what good looks like? Do I understand my purpose, my mission, my strategy, my priorities? Do I understand as a human being how I'm performing? The second one was ownership. This idea of agency. The idea that we all, as Daniel Pink described in Drive, we all want mastery, autonomy and purpose. I want the skills. I want to know why my job's important and connected to purpose. But I want the space then to practice my craft and not be micromanaged. And then the third one was that uniquely human characteristic of curiosity. I love that some of the research that's been done here is fantastic. It's one piece of research says the average five or six year old asks 107 questions, up to 107 questions an hour. And you know this as parents, it's just like, why is the sky blue? Why, why, why? Where's the sun? Who's stolen the moon? Every time you get into the workplace, it's two to three. And in a world that's unpredictable, we're training people to have answers. So curiosity is that idea of being able to explore your way, experiment your way to success. What you're saying, it kind of gives me heartbreak because it is really about how there are these innate gifts that we all have in us. We're navigating and even thriving in the complex changing world that we live in. And then we can maybe get stuck in patterns of behaving when we start to organize together. Exactly. Stee, are there particular anti-patterns that you are most curious to dig into from this library of 36? I think your curiosity one is, I think there is a, there is a paradox here. I think that the older you get, the less, you tend to, unless you really, really, really go against it, you get less curious over time. And most people do. And I don't know if it's facing death and you feel, damn it, I don't have long to go. So I really, really need to, to share my insights with the rest of the world before it's over. So I can't afford, you know, wasting time with questions. And by the way, I don't know where the conversation goes if I ask questions. So I think there's a lot of things that are, that when I talk to, to, to executives, it's, it's, you're absolutely right that when we sit in, in, in most conversations, and I'd say probably nine out of 10, there is no question. And the question equals curiosity. So I think at the very base level, this thing about actually bringing a question to, to a conversation and leading a conversation with a question. We, and, and that was actually what we did not long ago, where we, we, we, we came with this one question. What would you wish you could say about your organizations? You can't say today. And it was almost like magical how an open, beautiful question kind of almost at a physical level changes the whole dynamic. And there was a coming to ground and the answers you got came more from the heart than if we had just rambled. So, so, so I think there's something about our level of invitation, like as humans, how invitational are we? Um, I think there's something for, for, for all of us to work on. How can I just the way I carry myself? How, how can I be more invitational? Yes. Yeah. It's, it's interesting. Thank God you pivoted away from death. I wonder where that was going. Maybe there's an existential point there. But we actually, we did, um, you know, I worked for AWS, the man, we did a survey a couple of years ago across Europe, Middle East and Africa. And there's this perception that the, um, older generations want to learn less than the younger generations. And what we found with AI was, and digital technology is there was actually an equal appetite to learn. So I think sometimes this is in our mind. And we hear this question from leaders about, well, no, it's not even a question. It's a statement. My people don't want to learn. They don't have the skills. And it's just like, really, these are the same people who leave your workplace at five o'clock in the afternoon, five o'clock in the evening, go home and invest their time and energy in a hobby, which brings no extrinsic reward with it. Why can't you have that in the workplace? And we had the privilege of talking to Indra Nooyi, the former CEO and chairperson for PepsiCo and Amazon board member. And I found her insight fascinating. When I asked the question, what do you look for in leaders? She had two answers or two things. One is the ability to storytell, the ability to bring to life the conversation. Where are we going? Why is it important? Yeah, that, that very human way of communicating. The second one was curiosity, because in her words, as soon as you stop being curious, you lose the ability to lead because you assume you have the answers. And any leader who thinks they have all of the answers in this world are just kidding themselves. If they do, if any of your listeners do have all of the answers, I've got a lot of questions. I have a one, a close person to me. He's a rock musician and he has this beautiful one line. I think you'd love Phil. And he says, and he's improvising on stage always. He never has a set list. And, and, you know, I went to see them live in Copenhagen and my friend Morten asked, what, which song are you going to play first? And he looked at him and say, I don't know. I just walk on stage. And, and then I figured out. And, um, he has this one line and he says, a detailed plan is an insult to the future. Yes. And I think that, that day is the moment you think you can plan your way through it. You kind of, it's over. Yes. Yeah. It's, it's, I, I'm not a great fan of futurists. I mean, it's just like, you know, Hey, um, can you go find a futurist with a crystal ball to tell me what's happening in 10 years time? It's just nuts. I mean, we do it. And I think some of this comes down to the fact giving answers feels quicker. I mean, if we just ask questions all the time and we explore and experiment, it's just like, when are we going to get into action? And our organizations are wired for action as opposed to curiosity. Although I'd argue, you know, properly curious companies, organizations that are more sort of octopus-like, they intertwine running the organization and changing the organization. And within that DNA is that curiosity. And Phil, I just have to say that your naming of these anti-patterns is just, it deserves a moment of appreciation for how funny these titles are. And just for the listener, I would like to explain a little bit what this book is, because I think it's a really unique way of writing a book that I find is super helpful. So instead of chapters, you call them entries. And there's an entry dedicated to each of these 36 anti-patterns that you mentioned, with the clarity, the ownership and the curiosity sections. And each one has the description of what is the tin man behavior, the consequences, what do octopus organizations do instead? And what are the levers or what Steve might call acupuncture points for becoming more octopus-like? And some of these names are just so good. The fetishizing process, very poetic and whiffing on purpose statements is also, I think, a personal favorite. So we won't go through all of them, but maybe we can take one of them. We talked a lot at the beginning about how a lot of our clients are longing for more ownership, more empowerment. And this is maybe not a completely unique wish. And a lot of well-meaning organizations do try to create more empowerment. And as you've written, they maybe don't go all the way or maybe they get a little bit misled. So one of the anti-patterns is granting artificial ownership. What does that mean? This is so calm. I mean, this has been going on for years and years. It's one study we read said that something like 67% of CEOs give their direct reports autonomy. Obviously, there's always limits to autonomy, but they give their direct reports autonomy. So first question, what the hell do the other 33% do? Micromanage their organization every day. And if they are, who's setting strategy and direction and culture and such like? But what was interesting was of those 67%, when the direct reports were interviewed, only about 50% of them felt they actually had autonomy. And what we found is ownership needs to be both given and it needs to be accepted. And there's something comfortable as an employee when my boss, as much as I would hate it, tells me what to do. Because if he or she got the decision wrong, it's not my fault. I was just doing what I was told. And if I do stick my head above the parapet and take ownership, someone may chop it off. So in many organizations, they lack the psychological safety to actually take ownership and people avoid it. And then leaders need to be willing to give ownership. And typically, we've avoided words like empowerment because it always feels like I'm giving you some temporary power, which I may take back at some point. And we prefer the word agency, this idea that we hire people who I assume have some special skills and knowledge and they're intelligent and they're smart and they're motivated. And then we stick 47 levels of management on top of them to tell them how to do the job we brought them into doing in the first place. So it's nuts. And what that then leads to is the simplest decision being taken by someone in the organization goes through 20 governance meetings. And there's so many downsides of that in terms of speed, inability to change your mind, inability to think big because it's just too painful. But again, it robs people of agency. Why should I try? And yet we know that within every organization we've dealt with in any depth, the answers to most of the problems are in the organization. We're just not letting people do anything with that information. Hmm. And what is one example lever that you might pull to break this anti-pattern? I think it starts with a degree of willingness for the leader to be more introspective, to actually ask for feedback. A lot of this traces back to things like psychological safety. And we had the pleasure of talking to Amy Edmerson at Harvard about this, and she talked about all the myths of psychological safety. But some of it is you as a leader asking people for feedback. Just simply, you know, do you understand what ownership you have? What am I doing that's actually robbing you of it? That's hard to do because you have to have an environment where the employee feels safe and given the feedback. And you as a leader are willing to put your ego to one side and receive that feedback. It goes back to clarity. Do you actually understand? Do you understand what the ownership is that you have received? Are you willing to take it? What stands in my way? What do I do as a leader that makes you feel like you can't take ownership? So what I find interesting is all of this ties together clarity, ownership, curiosity. They're actually a virtuous circle, which they become self-reinforcing. The clearer I am about the mission, the problems to solve the context of the problems, the more likely I am to take ownership. The more I take ownership, the more likely I'm to be curious because it's mine. I can do something with it. And the more curious I am and the more experiments I run, the clearer I become about the real challenges to tackle. And I think that's a beautiful transition into wrapping up the conversation with how listeners might go forward with becoming a little bit more octopus-like. And I know that you actually get this question all the time, Phil. So why don't you kick us off with your reflections on when you're speaking with leaders and organizations who are like, great, I'm bought into it. I want to become an octopus organization. How do I do it? You buy the book. Brilliant pitch. Seriously. All of the answers are in there. I mean, the book's designed to be a bit of a choose your own adventure rather than a linear read. I think some of it starts with, again, it's reflecting on the fact and internalizing that you don't have all of the answers as a leader. And what we suggest doing is sit down with your team, just a small team, flick through the book or a list of the anti-patterns, read them out and watch your people. Watch where their shoulders grow heavy, their eyes roll, they start laughing. They know where these issues are. Let them, give them the agency to develop a hypothesis. If I do X, then I believe Y will happen, which sort of abstracts your ego from the problem. You're testing a hypothesis. You're not putting your ego on the line. Give them the agency to go and test the hypothesis. Celebrate even the fact they're willing to do this, because the only true failure from experimentation is not learning. And, you know, share what's been learned. Hopefully they'll find something that's going to advance your organization. They will certainly learn something which will inform the next iteration. And then secondly, avoid that habit we've got in organizations, which is when one team finds a solution, you declare it as best practice and foist it on the rest of the organization. Which, I mean, one, pretends the whole organization is uniform. And secondly, robs 99% of the organization of its own agency. It's just like, well, we're going to be told what to do. And it's ironic. It's very countercultural. And we have a formula for it in Amazon, which starts off that two is greater than zero, which is it's better that two teams go and pursue improvements than no teams do because they're waiting for permission to do something. And over time, someone will come up with something that is so seductive in terms of its efficacy in organization. I may say, hey, my idea is good, but I really like your idea. I'm going to take it, which is going to free me up to go and do something even more incredible. So, be careful you don't revert back to Tin Man habits, which is that idea that everything has to scale uniformly. Yes. And then maybe you get several really interesting ways for breaking the anti-pattern instead of just one. So, I think that's a beautiful invitation for more than one reason. Well, a chief transformation officer of a mining company shared this beautiful little perspective with us. And he said his job isn't to transform the organization. It's to light a thousand fires. It's to get a thousand people, 10,000 people coming into work saying, I can make a difference. You can't put those transformations out as opposed to the top down transformation, which we know what happens. CEO comes in, announces a five-year transformation. Year one and year two is analysis. Year three, experiments. Year four is what we call psychologically as the oh shit moment. We haven't done anything. And then year five is new CEO comes in. I mean, those transformations are so fragile. If you get your entire organization participating, that's incredible. It goes back to what you opened with. That energy, the vitality, the fact that as a human being, I can truly make a difference. You feel it when you walk into a building. I think we have to stop it right there. Mic drop. Thank you so much, Phil. This has been a really fantastic conversation and really fun too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us in this conversation. We hope it sparked something for you. To continue the conversation with us, you're welcome to send us your reflections and questions through the link in the show notes. We would love to hear from you. We also invite you to use this episode as a conversation starter by sharing it with your colleagues and friends. Take care and see you next time.