Why companies need to ditch the ‘Tin Man’ model to survive constant change

Innovation and adaptability have become more essential for businesses navigating constant changes than ever before. Yet, many organizations still operate in ways that can ultimately slow decision-making, limit creativity and make it harder for employees to do their best work. 

Joining us on the latest episode of Business Trends Today is Dr. Jana Werner, Executive in Residence at Amazon Web Services and Co-Author of the Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation, which argues that leaders must rethink how they build teams and organizations if they want to thrive in today’s business environment. 

According to Werner, the book grew out of decades spent leading large-scale change across industries, including financial services and startups, alongside co-author Phil Le-Brun, the former international CEO of McDonald’s, who oversaw change across 120 countries. Time and again, she said, the two watched capable employees get boxed in by their own organizations.

“We have these wonderful, innovative, curious, exciting people,” Werner said. “We hire them for their intellect, for their ideas, for their drive, and then we put layers of process, of decisions, of leaders, of silos, of dependencies on top of them, and they just can’t bring their best selves.”

That dynamic, she added, stalls innovation, bogs down decision-making and forces teams to seek permission for nearly everything.

A century-old model that no longer fits 

Werner and her co-author describe this pattern as the “Tin Man” organization, a nod to the character from “The Wizard of Oz.” The metaphor, she said, illustrates companies still built on the century-old factory model pioneered by Frederick Taylor, one rooted in standardization, specialization and control.

“Building a company on a foundation of permission, even permission to innovate or to speak up, doesn't work anymore."

Adapting to that shift is difficult, contends Werner, since most leaders built their careers inside the old model and changing it requires individual courage that isn’t always supported by the rest of the organization. Even so, she points to artificial intelligence as an unexpected catalyst for progress, noting that AI is upending two long-standing assumptions that shaped how companies operate: that change is expensive and that it moves slowly.

The 2% problem 

Werner and her co-author identified 36 anti-patterns that hold companies back, sorting them into three categories: 

• Clarity
• Ownership
• Curiosity

On clarity, she cited that fewer than 2% of employees at most companies know their organization’s purpose, leaving the remaining 98% to show up each day without a clear sense of direction.

Referring to ownership, Werner said companies should borrow from the octopus itself, an animal that carries two-thirds of its intelligence in its arms rather than centralizing it in a single brain. She notes that distributing decision-making that way empowers employees closest to the customer to learn, iterate and adapt in real time.

When discussing curiosity, Werner alludes that children ask as many as 107 questions a day, whereas adults usually ask just two or three. This decline is partly due to the pressure leaders feel to provide all the answers rather than encouraging further inquiry.

Practical steps for leaders 

For leaders looking to build more adaptable teams, Werner recommended starting with a small number of clear priorities rather than overloading employees with competing demands. “Every time you context switch, it’s 30 minutes of your brain gone,” she said.

From there, she said, leaders should give teams the autonomy to determine how to execute a mission rather than dictating the process, and pair that with coaching rather than top-down direction. Werner cited Astro Teller, CEO of X (formerly Google X), Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, who advises testing a project’s hardest assumptions first rather than building out easier groundwork first just to show visible progress.