Unblock - ‘Must-read’

The author identifies six common areas where such blockages occur and offers alternative practices to support aligned autonomy, helping to accelerate results and unlock the organization's hidden potential. Each blockage is thoroughly explained, accompanied by two alternative practices and numerous guiding questions to facilitate improvement.

Strategy

Craft a strategy that actually creates alignment and focus at scale. A strategy significantly increases your chances of success. Practices that are discussed are: create alignment with strategic intent and prioritize with explicit trade-offs. Key questions to ask include: What will outstanding success look like in the next 2–3 years? How will we know when we've succeeded? What trade-offs must we make for our strategy to be successful? What will we choose not to do? What are we not willing to sacrifice? Which trade-offs will help our teams understand the strategy and make high-quality decisions in their daily work?

Steering

Set effective goals and find the right things to measure. Alternative strategies are rhythmic progress with 90-day outcomes and measure with steering metrics. Key questions to ask are: What will change about our team, department, product, or the way we work? How will our relationships with customers and stakeholders be different? What can we accomplish to confirm we're on the right track? Good steering metrics are non-financial predictors of future success, provide insights into progress toward long-term outcomes, can be quantitative or qualitative, and are time-bound (e.g., #/week), allowing for easy comparison.

Decisions

Enhance the speed of decision-making at all levels while improving quality and inclusivity. Explore alternative approaches, such as identifying reversible decisions and using consent-based methods for complex choices. Consider questions like: Is this a decision that can be reversed? If it fails, can we quickly try another approach? Can we manage the impact of a wrong choice, and if so, what can we decide now? Is it worthwhile to spend more time and resources gathering information and delaying the decision? Are we overly focused on finding the perfect solution? What is the worst-case scenario if we make a mistake?

Implement Integrated Decision Making (IDM) to make the process smoother:
- Craft and effectively present proposals.
- Ask clarifying questions before responding.
- Engage in a reaction round, sharing thoughts like "I like," "I wonder," or "I propose."
- Work towards reaching consent.

Ownership

Create a workplace where people are eager to take ownership and act in the organization's best interest. Practices to support this include allowing individuals to choose their contributions and fostering autonomy through clear decision rights. Start by clarifying individual roles and establishing team-wide agreements on decision-making:
- Which decisions require the consent of the whole team?
- What decision process should be used for each type of decision (e.g., hats, haircuts, tattoos)?
- Which decisions do we, as a leadership team, want to delegate? How can we best distribute these responsibilities?
- On which other teams do we depend for certain decisions?

Additionally, leaders should establish agreements with teams that enable people to vote with their feet and choose their work, granting teams true control over their decisions. It's also crucial to determine when leaders should step in and when it's better to let the team take the lead.

Meetings

Eliminate ineffective meetings and replace them with well-designed sessions that drive progress. Instead of simply chairing a meeting, use a facilitator to guide it effectively. Some key practices include using collaborative meetings to promote progress and reducing meeting time by establishing routines. The Unblock meeting is a prime example, designed to ensure active participation (the team owns the meeting), relevance (the agenda is created during the meeting), strategic focus (reviewing updates and metrics), transparency (actions are tracked on a shared board), and opportunities for connection and improvement (with check-ins and closing rounds). Establish an operating rhythm, or organizational heartbeat, with regular touchpoints, such as quarterly strategy sessions, monthly retrospectives and governance meetings, and weekly unblock meetings. Some other cross-team meeting routines are ask me anything (AMA) meetings or lean coffee.

Teamwork

Cultivate psychologically safe teams that excel in reflection, improvement, and feedback. Key practices include fostering psychological safety through empathy and embedding regular reflection and feedback. Consider asking questions like: Why do you want to be part of this team (intentions)? What concerns do you have (worries)? What do you need to perform at your best (boundaries)? What will success look like if this goes exceptionally well (dreams)?

Encourage a culture where learning from failure is the norm. Utilize retrospectives to drive continuous improvement, and incorporate feedback exercises to combat "harmony addiction," using techniques like nonviolent communication (focusing on observation, need, and request). Include closing rounds for regular micro-reflection to keep the team aligned and continuously evolving.

To begin, the author recommends starting with a retrospective to identify the first constraint to unblock and implement one of the strategies. To create a lasting cultural change on a larger scale, you can apply the following principles:
- From imposing to inviting
- From top-down to co-created
- From blueprint-driven to driven by local tensions
- From a detailed project plan to rhythm to steer and adapt
- From big moves first to small moves first
- From resistance leading to ‘push’ to resistance leading to curiosity.

In the appendices you can find more in-depth explanations of even-overs exercise, integrative decision making guide, trade-offs of integrative decision making, personal user manual team exercise, retrospective structure, feedback party exercises, and the unblock meeting structure.

Conclusion

Unblock provides leaders with valuable insights into six common areas (strategy, steering, decisions, meetings, ownership and teamwork) where blockages may arise and offers practical strategies to support aligned autonomy, helping accelerate results and unlock an organization’s hidden potential. The use of numerous examples from diverse industries makes the content easy to digest, and the recommended practices are both practical and pragmatic. A must-read.