Strategy → Systems · People · AI · The North

Anyone can buy the same technology. How your people use it is your real advantage.

To deliver your strategy, Pulpo designs the systems, processes and AI around the people who have to make them work.

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What we work on

Your business runs on a human operating system.

Your people adapt to the processes and technology that your organisation runs. Pulpo helps you coordinate all three to optimise your operation.

This is how I help you.

Process

People and processes interact. Processes built to support people doing their best work outperform those designed around the work alone, and the results compound. People are more engaged with the work, and the systems do what they need to quickly and reliably.

Pulpo takes an evidence-led approach to systems design — quantitative analysis alongside talking properly to the people who use the process every day — to make improvements on the dimensions that matter to you and your customers, whether that's quality, speed, cost or dependability. Pulpo also designs the measurement in, so the system keeps learning and improving after the work is finished.

Or Pulpo can get to the bottom of that one annoying process that never works the way it's supposed to, no matter what you do.

Artificial Intelligence

Leaders are wrestling with where to trust human creativity and critical thinking, and where to offload the thinking to a large language model. Where might AI create efficiencies or improve decisions? Where does that end and human brilliance take over? And what is the real cost — financial, human, and in the organisational knowledge that stops being practised once a machine does the work?

Pulpo doesn't build the technology. Pulpo helps you navigate the decisions around it — evaluating risk, weighing the trade-offs, assessing the gap between what a tool promises and what it delivers in a real business, and reducing the friction with your people that stops good tools being used at all.

Or, if what you actually want to know is whether any of this applies to your business yet, that's a good place to start.

People

Aligning what your people are good at with what you need to achieve to be successful is a strategic advantage that any business can build. Give your people the right balance of autonomy and support, remove the invisible blockages that get in their way, and they will exceed your customers' expectations. When the environment is right and people enjoy what they are doing, many of the difficult people problems that eat up management time stop appearing at all.

Pulpo helps you restructure your operation around your people and technology, whilst improving your culture.

Pulpo also builds recruitment and talent strategies that integrate with your technology to deliver what your customers want and allow your people to grow.

Or Pulpo can just help you fix the people problems that keep you awake at 11pm.

Change and Culture

Developing people, improving systems, implementing artificial intelligence — it is all change, and it all lands on your culture.

How change happens, whether there's resistance and how that resistance gets overcome are embedded in the process itself. Deciding what's best for the business is usually the easy half. What happens next is where change fails.

Pulpo designs the change with you and your people from the start, rather than presenting it to them once it's decided — built for your business, so what arrives is something people can work with. Pulpo doesn't just protect your culture. Pulpo helps you improve it.

What comes up most

Three problems that come up in nearly every business.

They look like people problems. They're usually systems problems.

My best people keep leaving

People rarely leave over money, and trying to buy back loyalty tends to create wage inflation rather than commitment. The real reasons sit just out of sight — perceived unfairness, lack of fulfilment, or a recurring source of frustration that prevents them doing their best work — and are rarely said out loud to the person who could fix them.

I can't fix my difficult employee

Sometimes it's simply the wrong person in the wrong place, and they'd thrive with a different role. Just as often the behaviour is a symptom of something going wrong in the system. Until you know which, nothing you try will work — and left alone, it tends to spread.

Nobody here uses their initiative

Most people want the autonomy to do a great job — to use their ability in a way that's testing without being uncomfortable. Automation can diminish critical thinking where you need it most. Systems are best designed to develop human judgement where it is needed, in a way that everyone is comfortable with.

About

Over twenty years running group operations…

Rob Hannah, founder of Pulpo

…for three insurance and legal services companies — complicated, tightly regulated, low-margin work where the pressure never lets up. It was important work, and designed the right way, people found it genuinely rewarding. The sector never stopped changing, and when it did, the businesses and everyone in them had to change with it.

When I ran into people problems of my own, the resources to help were few and far between, so I enrolled on an MBA. Implementing what I learned created its own problems: most management theory assumes businesses behave rationally, and businesses full of people with different beliefs and opinions don't. Through trial and error, and a long detour into human psychology, I started seeing organisations as human systems — not just the processes that push work through, but the predictable ways people behave inside the structures they inhabit. The mystical veil over culture lifted, and meaningful change became possible.

We were competing for staff against companies offering unlimited holidays and total flexibility, and still the right people were easy to find. Voluntary attrition fell to around 4%, organisational knowledge compounded, and we began to achieve outcomes competitors could not match. My favourite part was people telling me, a while after joining, that it had changed their life — that friends and family had noticed they were happier.

Alongside the consultancy work, I'm currently studying AI implementation at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

I believe every business can do this. Pulpo exists to help them.

Not just good with change. An expert at it.

Most consultants fix the process or they fix the people. Pulpo works where the two collide to help you optimise your operation.

Why the octopus

Pulpo (POOL-po) is Spanish for octopus.

The octopus doesn't cope with change — it practises it. It changes colour, shape and behaviour to suit the moment, solves problems no octopus has ever met, and even rewrites its own neural instructions to fit new conditions. The only creature that routinely reprograms its own operating system.

Octopuses have three hearts.
So does your business: your people, your systems, and the technology you hand them. They operate more effectively when designed in unison.

Ready when you are.

Pulpo works out how your business actually runs — the human operating system underneath it, and how your people and your systems connect — and helps you enhance it. The first step is a half-hour conversation. No charge, no obligation and no pitch.

rob@pulpo.works