Increasing Ownership
Antipattern Cluster
Antipattern #14
Operating On A Culture Of Fear
When honesty is valued and psychological safety is present, ownership blossoms.
The Tin Man's armor is forged in fear—fear of mistakes, fear of looking bad, and a reluctance to embrace the unknown. This creates a brittle, silent organization.
The Octopus, by contrast, is adaptable by design.Its flexibility is what allows it to be resilient and thrive in uncertainty. Creating psychological safety is the act of systematically removing that armor and building the trust needed to adapt.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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TEDTalk: How to turn a group of strangers into a team
Book: The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson
HBR Article: What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety
TED Talk: The Power of Vulnerability
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Antipattern #15
Upholding Poor Leadership
Empathy, humility, and curiosity transform leadership from a
role to a behavior.
The Tin Man often perceives leadership as a role, a position on a chart, or a source of power. Consequently, certain behaviors may be tolerated as long as the "leader" delivers results, sometimes at the expense of ignoring the blast radius of their toxicity.
The Octopus understands that leadership is a behavior—a set of actions that create the conditions for others to thrive. It's about empathy, humility, and curiosity, not command and control.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Why Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek
YouTube Talk: Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe
Video: The story of the undersecretary and the styrofoam cup
Book: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
Book: What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith
Antipattern #16
Gatekeeping Approval
Tenets and guardrails that remove checkpoints speed up teams.
The Tin Man organization can often operate like a labyrinth of tollbooths and checkpoints. Gatekeepers, each optimizing for their own narrow domain, create a system where the default answer may feel like "no" and speed is impossible.
The Octopus replaces these gatekeepers with "guardrails." It understands that the goal is not to control every decision, but to create a safe-to-operate zone where teams can move with speed and autonomy.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
AWS Executive In Residence Blog: Tenets: Supercharging Decision-Making
Article: No Titles, No Problem, MIT Sloan Management Review
Article: Heroic Customer Service: When Ritz-Carlton Saved Thomas The Tank Engine
Article: The Four Guardrails That Enable Agility
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Antipattern #17
Creating Dependencies
Self-sufficient teams that reduce reliance on others increase productivity exponentially.
The Tin Man organization is often structured as a collection of hyper-specialized, "efficient" parts. But this very specialization can unintentionally create a nightmare of dependencies. To get anything done, teams must wait in endless queues for other teams.
The Octopus, with its distributed intelligence and self-sufficient arms, is the ultimate antidote. It organizes itself into cross-functional teams that have everything they need to own a problem from end to end.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
Book: Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow
Article: Microservices
Book: The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald Reinertsen
Antipattern #18
Centralizing - Decentralizing
A “glocal” approach stops the endless tug-of-war between central control and local freedom.
The Tin Man organization often experiences a pendulum, swinging between the extremes of control and perceived chaos. One leader centralizes to drive efficiency, the next decentralizes to foster agility, and the cycle repeats, achieving neither.
The Octopus doesn't see these as opposites, understanding that the right answer is almost always a thoughtful blend of both, but guided by the principle of speed. It builds a strong, central nervous system (platforms, principles) that enables its decentralized arms to act with local intelligence.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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HBR Article: The End of Corporate Imperialism
Book: Platform Revolution
AWS Blog: Centralize or Decentralize?
Antipattern #19
Fetishizing Process
Principles and a focus on outcomes dismantle bureaucracy and
accelerate innovation.
The Tin Man has a natural affinity for process. It offers the illusion of control and predictability. When something goes wrong, his common solution is to add another step, another checklist, another approval. Over time, the organization becomes a bureaucratic golem, shackled by its own rules, unable to think or adapt.
The Octopus uses process as a tool, not a cage. It values principles over procedures, judgment over blind adherence, and relentlessly seeks to simplify, automate, or eliminate any process that doesn't create value.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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HBR Article: The End of Bureaucracy: How a Chinese Appliance Maker is Reinventing Management for the Digital Age by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini
Book: Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini
Book: The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao
Tool: Take the BMI Survey
Antipattern #20
Seeking Perfect Decisions
Good enough, reversible decisions encouragespeed, learning, and growth.
The Tin Man can become paralyzed by the fear of being wrong. This often manifests as a demand for more data, more analysis, more meetings, driven by the belief that with enough information, a "perfect" decision will reveal itself. This waiting for certainty in an uncertain world becomes its own form of failure.
The Octopus is a master of the "good enough" fast decision. It knows that speed and learning are often more valuable than certainty. It treats decisions as bets, not judgments, and distinguishes between those that are one-way doors and those that are two-way, reversible doors.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke
Video: Animated Summary of Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets
TEDTalk: Annie Duke on Risk Schmisk
Video: Jeff Bezos explains one-way door decisions and two-way door decisions
Article: 'Disagree and commit': The famous Jeff Bezos phrase that's making a comeback by Ana Altchek and Tim Paradis
Whitepaper: Fermi Estimates: from Harry Potter to ET by David Wakeham
Antipattern #21
Diluting Accountability
For breakfast, chickens contribute, but pigs commit; they foster action and engaged teams.
In the Tin Man's world, it can be common to have a lot of "chicken" around —they contribute opinions and attend meetings, but no one is the "pig," truly committed to the outcome. Accountability is diffused across committees and matrices, creating a "black hole" where work goes in but results never come out.
The Octopus creates clear, focused ownership. It gives ownership to "single-threaded leaders" who have the authority and the accountability to drive an outcome from start to finish.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Story: There are many versions of the chicken and pig story we tell in the book. Ronald Reagan’s can be heard here.
Blog Post: Accountability and Empowerment Are Key to High-Performing Agile Organizations
Article: How Well Does Apple's Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) Model Work In Practice?
Book: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Book: Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
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Antipattern #22
Hiring Poorly
A focus on learning agility and values over credentials increases long-term value.
The Tin Man tends to hire for a resume. This approach emphasizes specific skills and years of experience to fit a person into a pre-defined slot in his machine. The process is transactional, rigid, and often riddled with bias.
The Octopus hires for a mindset. It looks for learning agility, curiosity, and values alignment. It knows it's not hiring a cog for today's machine, but a co-creator of tomorrow's organization.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Article: What is a 'Bar Raiser' at Amazon? by Amazon
Guide: Hiring - Use Structured Interviewing by Google
HBR Article: Onboarding New Employees - Without Overwhelming Them by Julia Phelan
Book: Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock
Book: The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues by Patrick Lencioni
Antipattern #23
Prizing Individuals Over Teams
​A high-performing cross-functional team of “average talent” outperforms brilliant jerks, every time.
The Tin Man can be drawn to "super chickens." This is often based on the belief that individual talent simply adds up, leading him to assemble a team of brilliant but often disruptive individuals. And so he ends up with a coop of pecked-to-death colleagues.
The Octopus knows that the team is the fundamental unit of performance. It cultivates "no-stats all-stars"—individuals whose greatest talent is making everyone around them better. It understands that a team of humble, hungry, and smart "average" players will outperform a collection of brilliant jerks every time.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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TEDTalk: Forget the Pecking Order at Work by Margaret Heffernan
Book: The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate the Three Essential Virtues by Patrick Lencioni
Article: The No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis (NYT)
HBR Article: The Myth of the Brilliant Charismatic Leader by Raffaella Sadun
HBR Working paper: Hazard Warning: The Unacceptable Cost of Toxic Workers by Roberta Holland
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Antipattern #24
Mismanaging Incentives
Opportunities for ownership and mastery drive the most powerful incentive:
intrinsic motivation.
The Tin Man organization often defaults to a flawed, outdated system of extrinsic rewards—carrots and sticks—to motivate its workforce. This focus on external “bribes” is not only ineffective for 21st-century work but actively destroys the genuine engagement and intrinsic motivation leaders should be fostering.
The Octopus, by contrast, operates on intrinsic motivation, understanding that true, sustainable performance is driven by deeply human desires for autonomy, growth, and purpose.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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HBR Article: One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees? by Frederick Herzberg
Book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink
Video: Animated summary of Daniel Pink's Drive, by the RSA
Book: Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes​ by Alfie Kohn
Antipattern #25
Granting Artificial Ownership
Creating organization-wide conditions for trust and agency to solve problems ignites innovation.
The Tin Man organization practices artificial ownership—a pretense of delegation where leaders “assign responsibility” but withhold context, are drawn to micromanage the execution, and reserve the right to overrule the final decision and leave people in fear of career consequences if they get the new found freedom wrong. This lack of genuine trust drains morale and ensures the team remains dependent.
The Octopus, by contrast, pushing control down to the people with the information and understanding that real ownership is built on explicit trust and the complete authority to act.
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Our Recommended Reading List
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Book: Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet
Video: Animated summary of the core concept, by MindSpring
Book: The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier
Worksheet: The Coaching Habit by the Leadership Foundation
Interview: Tobi Lütke: The Trust Battery [The Knowledge Project Ep. #41]
Worksheet: The Trust Battery by Session Lab