Shadowing is a common practice at OCTO: a consultant can learn about projects by following Octos on the field. With the agreement of our clients, the “shadowing” Octo follows Octos on all steps and rituals of the project.

Brown Bag Lunch or how to associate the lunch break with reflecting on a specific (and often recurring) most often professional, sometimes personal topic: travels, impro, a passion you want to share or how to have lucid dreams… There are over thirty BBLs per month at OCTO.

Mothers-in-law’s favorite Sunday lunch. At OCTO though, it’s Return on Time Invested, or how to measure the profitability of time invested at a meeting, a BBL or a training. Everyone votes with a click at the end of the session on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 meaning “I lost my time and never should have turned up” and 5 meaning “I should be here and nowhere else”.

Core protocol borrowed from Jim and Michele McCarthy. It’s a communication practice used to get efficient feedback in a caring setting. It applies to any deliverable: mail, presentation, commercial proposition… 3 steps: grade the deliverable from 0 to 10. First, indicate what you like and then make suggestions starting with “I would have given a 10 if…”. Also known as PG.

Same objective as the PG but without the protocol. Just know that getting something “slapped” means accepting that all brutal feedback has to be accepted with a smile. The Slap is generally used when you’re in a rush.

OCTO week-end away. On a skiing trip, to Lapland, Senegal, Morocco or Biarritz. Just for a bit of time away together. What you need to know is this: everything that happens in WEOs… always ends up coming out of WEOs!!

If you’re on our website, it means that, deep down, you are a geek with all the surrounding culture it implies. Giving you this definition would be a far greater insult than stabbing you in the back with a lightsaber.

A striking, sometimes antagonizing person with strong beliefs who isn’t afraid of shaking things up to ensure their mission is successful. You get it: Octos are damned good mavericks.

What the fuck. At OCTO, this expression is always linked to a topic, an expertise or a new trendy technology. “What the fuck with…” indicates in an elegant manner that Octos are about to tackle a difficult topic, crack it to make their own opinion, come up with a vision and rapidly develop the skills to accompany their clients.

OCTO was one of the first consultancy firms to defend agile methods in France as of 2005. Nowadays, agile methods are obvious and widely used, but at the time, we were perceived as crazy when we talked about methodology, “sprints”, “iterations”, “0 specs” or when we stuck post-it notes on our clients’ walls. Today, every stage of our work is agile: our teams, our governance, our admin and support functions…

A tribe is a self-organized team of at least 4 people who choose to rise up to a common challenge, be it technical, methodological or sector-based. OCTO is a tribe of tribes. Each Octo can choose to create or join one. The Tribal Leadership (a must read) inspired us in redefining this new organization in 2014.

Feedback between Octos, occurring every third Thursday of the month. Initial expression: birds of a Feather!

One on One, a weekly 30mn meeting (different from reviews on ongoing projects). This is a special moment between an Octo and his manager that builds trust. At OCTO, it is a fundamental managerial practice: all managers have O3s with the members of their teams.

Debatable or controversial conversations responsible for the infobesity of our inboxes. When well managed, trolling can be considered an art. At OCTO, the biggest e-mail troll reached over 100 mail exchanges.

An expression generally used at the end of an email by someone who thinks they can be helpful on a specific topic. At OCTO, consultants speak freely and are passionate, so My2cents is pretty much your usual “laters” or “see you later”.

One of the pillars of OCTO’s management together with the O3. It is absolutely necessary that our community constantly strives to improve. At OCTO, feedback is encouraged and valued. It isn’t easy to do it as often as we would like, but we do see it as greatly valuable. So much so that we train all Octos to this practice.