Octo : A Brief Story Of Enterprise Well-Being
Interview of Ludovic Cinquin, CEO of Octo Technology by Luc Bretones, Organizer of the event “The NextGen Enterprise Summit” and President of the G9+ Institute
This article is the translation of its French version published in Forbes: https://www.forbes.fr/management/octo-petite-histoire-du-bien-etre-en-entreprise/
In the continuity of Frédéric Laloux’s famous “Re-inventing Organizations” and his latest book “#FutureOfWork: privilege of the elite or revival of the social elevator?”, Luc Bretones is finalizing a book and an event entitled “The NextGen Enterprise”. “L’Entreprise de Nouvelle Génération” is based on meetings with leaders from more than 30 countries — from which this interview is inspired — who have implemented new forms of governance, re-engaged their forces around a unifying purpose or experimented with a major managerial innovation.
Being the first IT architecture firm (founded in 1998), Octo pioneered agile delivery in 2004. Several times awarded “Great Place To Work” (N°2 in 2018), the 360+ employee company joined Accenture Digital in 2016.
Ludovic Cinquin, its CEO, shares some of the secrets of employee well-being in this company that claims to be a tribe of tribes: self-organized teams that choose to take up a common challenge.
Instinctive organization? It’s a question of size.
Octo was created by young entrepreneurs some 20 years ago. A company in tune with the times, driven by a desire to work casually, inspired by Anglo-Saxon methods, without a very clear conceptual framework. This framework has been developed over time, as the company has grown.
For example: the 50 employees mark. This is the one where we move from a significantly oral culture to the need to circulate information in writing. This gives a feeling of rigidity settling in.
Octo then reached another decisive milestone by exceeding the 150 headcount, which corresponds to the Dunbar number (the maximum number of stable relationships a human being can have). This was in 2008, when the crisis hit. Combined with an internal crisis with the departure of two leaders, Octo was destabilized. Ludovic Cinquin then took over as general manager: “I came from an industrial background so I spontaneously had a rather mechanical vision of how to organise the company when I took up my position”.
Octo was in the midst of an identity crisis, the impression of treading water prevailed.
Drawing inspiration from specialised literature
Rescue came from books such as “Getting Naked” (Patrick Lencioni), “Start with why” (Simon Sinek), “Tribal leadership” (Dave Logan, John King), which have guided leaders in the midst of their own questioning.
This was followed by a work of “deconstructing a desire to have a rigid organization: 150 is one size for which finally two options are open to us: we either liberate or we tighten up”.
The choice was that of liberating. And as a sign, Octo was awarded the first “Great place to work” prize that year. It wasn’t a consequence, but rather a cause, jokes Ludovic Cinquin: “We had a different model, but one that was which was unthought of, unsuspecting, so it also forced us to be aware of what we were.”
4 pillars of a “free enterprise”
Leaving it up to the individual players to do what they think is good for the company is the recipe, which is based on four fundamental principles according to Ludovic Cinquin: giving meaning to objectives, increasing the transparency of information, promoting autonomy and the right to make mistakes.
Transparency, in concrete terms?
At Octo, everything is based on an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) accessible without authorization, which mentions the missions, their rates, overruns and expense reports. Only salaries are not disclosed. A next step?
Perhaps. By being inspired by what is practiced in Finland, where the CEO has been recently. There, a citizen can know the salary of another, if he makes a visible request for it (possibility to access his fellow citizens’ tax return). The Finns are European champions in terms of confidence in others (80% according to a poll, while only 40% in France). Ludovic Cinquin believes that the models of companies that move towards managerial innovation are those where trust is at the centre of relations.
On the question of salary, is there still some distance to be covered in France? No doubt.
Organization in tribe mode
In addition to the picking of a set of methods, adjusted to Octo’s needs, the great revolution took place in 2014, with the decision to organize itself in “tribe mode”. “We came to the conclusion that people knew better than management what they wanted to work on”. It was proposed to the employees to build the teams as they saw fit. This had an obvious boost effect, even though the managers were not entirely reassured when they launched the movement. What was observed was the discrepancy between the perception of risk and the actual risks observed. Employees are much more reasonable than one might imagine when one allows their creativity to run free, and they are even more inclined to push themselves to explore a little more. When it comes to managing the tribes, they are almost like mini-companies, each with its own profit and loss statement.
Is this to everyone’s taste?
When you’ve left people in a habit for too long, without maintaining the will to learn new things, it’s complicated to “re-format” them. It is infinitely easier to take young people who have just left school and immerse them in a model, a learning organization. Octo has hardly been confronted with this problem of reluctance, things have been put in place and “it’s a self-training mechanism”.
Beware of organizational advice?
“They tend to duplicate artifacts and not the spirit.”
Highlighting the Spotify model and seeking to replicate it, when in the very opinion of founder Henrik Kniberg, it’s not a model but the result of a long learning curve. It’s the same for Octo and so many others: trial and error, creating a dynamic “that makes organization and culture work”. Models are sources of inspiration, but it is dangerous to duplicate them, and Ludovic Cinquin also points out the business that has been created around the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) certification, to label a company’s good practices. A virtuous approach, possible excesses.
In 5 years, where will we be?
New forms of work, digital nomadism, slashing, and the end of full-time employment in a company are likely to develop and further change the organization of work. And it is not only a trend of young people entering the market. At Octo, a number of former employees are already working in this way. A trend that will lead to ever greater independence within companies?
That remains to be seen.
What we need to be wary of is that we are in a society that tends to amplify inequalities, and that flexibility and freelance work will favour the most enterprising, those with interpersonal skills and an agenda, “a sort of accumulation of social capital”.
And the other great revolution to come is simultaneous translation, which will break down the language barrier. Anyone will be able to work with a Chinese person, live, on the other side of the planet.
And we can wonder who is going to impose their time zone and their methods…
