(upbeat music)
-: Greg, Jon,
thanks for joining us today to talk about Octopus Energy's
highly innovative approach to operations.
I'd like to start by going back to 2015,
when you entered an industry which
I think some would see as quite traditional.
Why did you choose that market to enter?
-: Well, I think the founding team,
we previously had a business that built
platforms for a whole variety of industries.
And I think what we saw was, time and again,
that there were industries that thought
they wouldn't be disrupted by technology,
and they were the ones where the greatest opportunity lay.
And, you know, with energy,
you had this sector where companies were
running on systems that are a couple of decades old,
where customers were experiencing poor service,
and where companies were typically quite bloated
and bureaucratic. So we had the opportunity to not only
kind of build a business where we use technology to
dramatically improve customer service and drive down costs,
but we could also, hopefully,
find ways to use technology
to help change the sector
from one which causes climate change to one which,
potentially, starts to fight climate change.
-: Wow, pretty, big bold ambitions there then.
And so,
Jon, if I can come to you,
you had worked in many other energy retailers beforehand.
What did you take from those that you wanted to
try and do differently this time?
-: Yeah, I mean, I think I spent my whole career
working in electricity and gas businesses and seeing,
you know, time and time again,
the same sort of technology platforms
and the same sort of organizational structures,
which to me looked designed
to give customers a bad experience.
And so, the opportunity to really rewrite the rule book on
how you organize teams
and how you organize and structure a business
to deliver better outcomes for customers-and,
I think, most importantly,
better outcomes for the people
who actually work within them-was
a really exciting challenge.
-: For somebody joining Octopus,
what would that feel like then?
-: Everybody starts with Octopus
understanding the most important job in this business
is looking after customers.
Everyone who starts at Octopus Energy,
whether they're starting in a marketing function
or in a tech function,
they'll go through some training to learn how to
respond to customer emails,
or to learn how and what our energy specialists do.
-: We hired a marketing director,
a few years ago now.
And within a day or two, she came to me and said,
"Where do I get legal sign-off for copy?"
-: Right.
-: And I said, "Well, you're don't."
And she said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "Well, you're the marketing director.
You take responsibility.
You sign off."
Early on, the most senior people
kind of hit this new paradigm
in which they're asked to take responsibility,
rather than to find someone else
who's going to take responsibility.
That's one of the best examples for me
of the differences that people get when they come here.
-: Greg, what are the other,
leadership behaviors that you think are critical
for success in this sort of model that Octopus has?
-: I think the most important one actually
is that we're all one team.
And I know companies say this, right?
We have no bonuses,
and we don't have KPIs or targets
for the functional heads or for our business leaders.
So, I'd much rather we get something wrong
and wrap our arms around each other-
which means we're going to the next thing
as a collaborative support team-
than we end up blaming each other. Because
business is a repeated game and
we're only as good as the next match.
-: I think our freedom is very important in our organization
so that people feel that they can be their full selves,
but also, making sure that's balanced with really honest,
candid, transparent,
feedback when things are going wrong
or when people are doing things that aren't quite aligned to
how we think about the world at Octopus.
-: Thinking about the model: it's something you've built
from scratch with a very clear sense of purpose.
And you've kind of designed everything very carefully,
really clear. It's been fascinating to learn about that.
How could this be relevant to an existing organization?
-: We've had an incredible opportunity
over the last 12 months to help
a very large incumbent energy company in the UK
and a very large incumbent energy company in Australia
try to move to an Octopus Energy operating model
using the Kraken Technology platform
and our operating model blueprint.
And what's really fascinating is,
for frontline teams,
what these businesses are really about-
serving customers
and bringing outrageously good service to customers
and then building a business around that-
they transitioned incredibly well into this model because
they're moving from a constrained, policy-driven
departmental silo to
high degrees of autonomy
and high degrees of freedom and responsibility.
It's like the service Nirvana for them.
-: The big observation for us was that
transforming the existing stuff is difficult.
But starting from scratch,
that's the way that you can
reinvent all your processes,
reinvent the way in which people work, and everything.
I think the real exciting opportunity
is to take everything you know as an existing company,
create that start-up,
but double down on it
as it gets bigger.
Fundamentally, the core of all of this
is something we start the conversation with,
which is actually trust and responsibility.
The vast majority of people that work in most
organizations can be trusted with far more responsibility
than they're typically given.
And if we want to create organizations that are
multifold more efficient,
more capable, more agile,
we need to give people multifold more responsibility.
-: Greg, Jon,
thank you very much for your time and your insights today.
It's been fascinating, thank you.