What would your organisation look like if it worked more like an octopus — distributed, adaptive, and capable of sensing and reacting without waiting for instructions from the centre?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Phil Lebrun and Jana Werner, Executives in Residence at Amazon Web Services and authors of The Octopus Organization, to explore why so many transformations fail to stick — and what a more adaptive, human approach to change actually looks like.

Join them as they discuss:

• What the octopus organisation metaphor is, and why it offers a different model to the traditional, hierarchical "Tin Man" organisation
• The three themes — clarity, ownership, and curiosity — that separate organisations that adapt well from those that don't
• Why transformation can no longer be treated as a one-time event
• HR's evolving role in driving and supporting transformation
• How to measure whether change is actually working, beyond vanity metrics
• Real examples of leaders and organisations putting these ideas into practice

This episode is sponsored by Valence.

Nadia, Valence's AI coaching platform, connects talent strategy to the work employees are actually doing — offering coaching from the frontline to the boardroom, and surfacing organisational insights that weren't visible before.

As the most widely deployed coach in the Fortune 500, Nadia is already helping global leaders like Nestlé, Delta, CVS, and Kraft Heinz transform talent at scale.

Learn more at valence.co/insight222

Resources:

• The Octopus Organization by Phil Lebrun and Jana Werner

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Is purpose at work as straightforward as we've made it out to be?

In this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, David Green is joined by Jessica Zwaan, VP People Strategy and Operations at Leapsome and author of Built for People and Purpose and Work, to explore what the research actually tells us about purpose at work — and what that means for how HR shows up for people.

Join them as they discuss:

• Why treating HR like a product function changes the questions you ask
• What the research on purpose at work really reveals, and why the reality is more nuanced than the narrative
• What purpose washing is, how it happens, and what it can look like in practice
• What a more grounded alternative to purpose-led culture could look like
• Why really knowing your people is the foundation of all of it
• How perceptions of HR are evolving, and what's driving that shift

This episode is brought to you by Leapsome - the people-first HR platform that connects performance, engagement, and HR operations in one place, so you get a complete picture, not half the story.

See it in action at leapsome.com/demo.

Resources:

• Built for People by Jessica Zwaan
• Purpose and Work by Jessica Zwaan
• People over Perks, the Leapsome Community

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How do you rebuild a company's entire capability infrastructure — and fund the transformation through the savings it generates?

Zaka Farhat is Global SVP for Talent, Learning, Organisation and Capability Development at GSK, where she leads the company's enterprise-wide skills, learning and capability agenda. In this episode, Zaka shares the full story of how GSK rebuilt its capability infrastructure in 18 months - retiring more than 20 legacy systems, building a single skills and learning ecosystem, and funding the transformation through the savings it generated.

Join them as David and Zaka discuss:

• Why GSK's skills transformation began with a commercial question about capability and cost
• The five conditions for organisational readiness that had to be in place before any platform launched
• How GSK approached skills taxonomy, job architecture and inference, and what they had to redo along the way
• What personalised learning looks like at scale, and how skills data is now shaping workforce planning decisions
• What GSK chose to stop, and why decommissioning is the step most transformations skip
• How Zaka's team is measuring impact across three KPI layers

This episode is sponsored by TechWolf.

The world of work is being rewritten faster than HR systems can keep up. Skills age in months. Roles get redesigned quarter by quarter. CHROs have quietly become AI transformation leads, and the data they need to lead it doesn't exist in any HR system.

That's why the world's most forward-looking enterprises such as HSBC, AMD, T-Mobile, GSK, ServiceNow, Pfizer, have built on TechWolf.

As the data layer for the AI era of work, TechWolf gives enterprises the skills, they need to move faster and lead with confidence. Skills Intelligence, Work Intelligence, and Market Intelligence, in one layer. Visit techwolf.ai.

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