Of Octopuses and Organizations: Why Top-Down Change Isn’t Enough

Leadership decisions can be pivotal—sometimes inspiring, sometimes destabilising. Yet, cultural change rarely succeeds just through top-down directives. Real transformation is deeper, slower, and often organic. 

Let's explore this through a surprising lens: the octopus.

Yes, that strangest of strange creatures that have nine brains – one mini-brain in each arm and another in the center of their bodies. Each arm can independently taste, touch and perform basic movements, but all arms can work together when prompted by the central brain. 

But that’s not all. 

An octopus has three hearts. Two keep the blood flowing past its gills and one keeps the blood pumping to its organs. What’s even weirder is that their heart stops pumping when the octopus swims, which is why most octopi prefer crawling on the seafloor. Well, swimming is exhausting.

None of an octopus's limbs knows what any of the others are doing: they all have independent control systems.

Octopus is a unique creature and is quite an anomaly of evolution. It’s an organism and yet an organisation in itself, making it a perfect study case. 

The Illusion of Command

Many leaders, especially new ones, assume that cultural change can be mandated. However, cultures aren't created by decree; they emerge from shared behavior, stories, and choices repeated over time. Top-down leadership risks missing this nuance. To put it bluntly, “You can mandate compliance, not commitment.”

The Octopus Paradox

Octopuses have decentralised brains; each of their arms can act independently. Why? Because octopuses don’t raise their young. When a new octopus is born, it has no parents to teach it. Generational wisdom can’t be passed down through learning. Hence nature encoded knowledge genetically. Nature is the largest culture there is. Does the octopus know this, in some primal sense? Unlikely. But evolution ‘decided’ if the parent can't teach, the body must remember.

Organisational Limbs and Memory

In organisations, when leadership changes, it can feel like the ‘brain’ has been replaced. Yet, if the ‘arms’—the teams, rituals, and shared memory—hold knowledge, the organisation survives and adapts. Good organisations codify learning not just in docs, but in people, processes, and culture. Like octopus limbs, each unit must hold intelligence, so when the “central brain” changes, wisdom isn't lost.

The Risk of Starting Over

Too often, new leadership sweeps clean: dismissing old systems, wisdom, or team voices. But if we discard the past, we risk becoming like an octopus again: learning everything from scratch, without mentors. To paraphrase a popular quote in the same vein, progress isn’t made by forgetting the past, it’s made by standing on the shoulders of the giants who shaped our past. 

Design for Distributed Learning

Culture and knowledge shouldn’t live solely in leadership. Build decentralised systems of learning. Make rituals out of retrospectives, culture docs, storytelling, and mentorship. Let the limbs of your organisation think. Let the memory survive leadership transitions.

Closing thoughts

The octopus didn’t choose decentralisation; evolution forced it. We can choose. So the question is, do we want to learn anew every time, or do we want to build an organisation that remembers?