Your strategy is clear. So why does it feel like the organization is standing still? That question haunts leadership teams everywhere. And the answer is almost never “the plan was wrong.” It’s that the organization keeps doing what it’s always done, regardless of what the strategy says.

At Unblock, we ran a diagnostic across 150 leaders from different organizations and industries. The same five breakdowns showed up everywhere, uncomfortably so. 👇

1. Strategy without choices isn’t strategy

75% of people reported strategic overload as their number one issue.

The problem was consistently the same: a lack of focus. Nearly two-thirds said ‘we do too many things at once’. Half said they lack focus altogether. That’s a choice problem, not an alignment problem. Most strategies are really just a list of ambitions that sound directional but tell nobody what to actually stop doing: grow revenue, drive innovation, become more customer-centric.

A strategy should be a hypothesis about how you plan to win. Specific enough to make some people uncomfortable. A strategy that everyone can agree with is usually too vague to guide any real decisions.

How? Describe your strategy in concrete statements that start with a verb. Something specific enough that it tells people what not to do (in the Unblock book we call this ‘Strategic Intent’)

A hospital we worked with went from vague aspirations about “being the best employer” to a concrete strategic intent: “Hire 500 healthcare professionals and offer every employee housing at below-market rate.” That single statement killed a dozen competing initiatives because they clearly didn’t contribute. That should be the aim.

2. When everything is a priority, nothing moves

44% said their organization doesn’t know how to prioritize. 39% said they never say ‘no’.

Do you recognize this? The new market push, the efficiency program, the culture initiative, the digital transformation are all running at the same time. Leadership teams know they should choose, but choosing means saying no to someone’s budget, someone’s project, someone’s ambition. So instead, teams hedge and spread resources like peanut butter across too many things.

Many employees are exhausted from context-switching between competing goals. They’re permanently in crisis mode, grinding without real progress on what actually matters.

Focus requires courage. It means accepting that saying NO to good things is what makes great things possible

How? Write trade-offs in the format “One good thing even over Another good thing.” If it doesn’t sting, it’s not a real choice. Test by reversing: if the opposite isn’t a valid strategy, you haven’t chosen anything.

When your trade-off says “Speed to market even over Product quality,” everyone knows what to do when the next feature debate comes up. Then test your initiative list against those trade-offs and cut what doesn’t pass. Read more about Even/Over statements.

3. Handed down, not translated

40% reported a disconnect between strategy and their daily work.

Most organizations cascade strategy beautifully, and it still doesn’t land. The slides go out after the town hall, and a week later, nothing has changed at the team level. People heard the strategy, but nobody helped them figure out what it means for their work.

Over a third said executing plans is genuinely difficult. Nearly 30% said they spend too much time planning, only for it to never turn into real priorities on the ground.

Better communication won’t fix this. What works is giving teams the space to shape their own goals within the wider strategy. When people define how they contribute rather than being told what to deliver, strategy turns from something they received, into something they own.

How? Instead of cascading goals down, ask every team: “Given the strategy, what’s your part in it? And what are your trade-offs for the next 90 days?” Let them define how they contribute rather than telling them what to deliver. Read more about self-alignment.

4. New strategy, old playbook

53% said they rarely pause and reflect. 44% said feedback is scarce.

This is the silent killer. Organizations invest heavily in what they want to achieve, but change nothing about how they work. The meeting routines stay the same, the reporting cycles don’t change, and decisions are made the way they’ve always been made. A new strategy gets layered on top of an old operating system, and then everyone wonders why nothing moves.

Assumptions go untested. When reality shifts, the organization can’t keep up. There are no built-in moments to learn and adjust, just a plan that gets more outdated with every passing week.

A new strategy demands a new way of working. A rhythm that includes learning and course-correction, meetings that actually drive progress, and feedback loops that are fast enough to steer by, rather than reports that only explain what happened last quarter.

How? Adopt an Operating Rhythm: a small set of recurring meetings with clear purposes. For example, a quarterly strategy review, a weekly coordination meeting, and a monthly retrospective. Replace the ad-hoc meeting culture with a heartbeat that embeds learning and course correction.

5. Teams that deliver in parallel, not together

50% said their organization doesn’t use its collective knowledge. 41% didn’t know what other teams were doing.

Everyone knows silos are a problem. But the issue goes deeper than just information not flowing between teams. Over a third said they don’t collaborate toward shared outcomes, and 23% said politics actively prevent people from working together.

Teams pursue their own goals, sometimes in ways that conflict with what other departments are doing. A customer insight that could change the product roadmap remains buried within the support team. A failed experiment in one market gets repeated in another. Departments protect their turf instead of solving problems together.

Many organizations try to fix this with restructuring. But only 29% pointed to structure as the issue. Redrawing the org chart doesn’t change how people collaborate. What does work is having shared goals that require teams to actually depend on each other, and a culture where working across boundaries is the norm rather than the exception.

How? Make work visible across teams. Publish each team’s 90-day outcomes where everyone can see them. Run a quarterly marketplace where teams share progress, surface dependencies, and spot overlaps before they become problems.

The pattern underneath

These five challenges rarely show up alone. A vague strategy leads to too many priorities. Too many priorities create overload. Overloaded teams fall back on old habits. Old habits keep silos in place. And silos prevent the cross-team learning that would sharpen the strategy.

The way out is usually subtraction, not addition. Fewer priorities, sharper choices, and a genuine change in how work gets done.

Recognize these patterns? Book a free Strategy Reality Check with our team at Unblock. In one session, we’ll help you see where your strategy is getting stuck and what it’ll take to get it moving.

New website and speaker reel

In other news, I’ve launched a new website focused on my keynote speech ‘Make your business as fast as a Formula 1 team’. It features a fancy new speaker reel:

That’s it. I hope you enjoyed it. If you enjoyed this, grab your copy of one of my books Formula X or Unblock. Or consider booking me as a speaker at your next event. To get in touch, simply hit ‘reply’ or comment. I read every message.

It’s about building a 600-person organization from scratch across three countries in under 3 years, with a fixed deadline that cannot be moved.

With the new F1 season starting this week, there is one story I’m following closely: Cadillac is entering the sport as a brand new team.

The way they built their organization offers lessons for executives competing under pressure.

The world of Formula 1 motorsports often revolves around the superstar drivers. But what most people don’t realize is that to build the car and run a race at the highest level, you need around 1,000 people. That makes it the largest team sport in the world.

Yes, the cars are engineering marvels. But what separates the winners from the back of the grid isn’t just how well they build their cars. It’s how well the organization behind the car functions under extreme pressure.

Building an F1 team from scratch

In 2023, the Cadillac Formula 1 team didn’t exist. No engineers. No factory. No infrastructure. No culture.

By mid-2025, they had posted 595 roles and received 143,265 applications (>240 applicants per role!) They shortlisted 9,051 candidates, conducted 6,500 interviews, and hired over 520 people. Their aerodynamics department alone grew from 6 engineers to more than 100 in just a few months.

They built a $200M, 37,000 sqm headquarters in Indiana. They opened design and aerodynamics facilities across six buildings in Silverstone, UK. And they started construction on a dedicated power unit facility in North Carolina, where they employ 350 specialists.

All of this with a hard deadline: the first pre-season test in January 2026. Miss that, and you miss the season. There’s no “we’ll push the launch to Q2.”

Mission Control instead of Command & Control

But putting a group of people together is only the start. Team principal Graeme Lowdon compares it to putting a man on the moon:

“If you look at the task in hand, we’ve got immovable deadlines. We’ve got a massive necessity for peer-to-peer interaction. We need engineers talking to engineers. And so we’ve looked to have a very, very flat management structure.”

“What you can’t have is an engineer here having to go up and down a particular hierarchy and then hop across, in our instance, not just a different geographic location, but a different country altogether, and then go up and down. So instead, it’s a kind of different structure where it’s mission control instead of command and control.”

“It’s highly modelled on the Apollo project. It’s very similar. OK, we’re not putting a man on the moon, but it feels like it sometimes!”

Rehearse before you race

But what impressed me most about Cadillac isn’t the hiring, the factories, or the org structure. It’s what they’re doing before a single wheel has turned in competition.

During a race, hundreds of people work in parallel: trackside engineers, remote engineers in the factory, strategists, data analysts, and the pit crew. They all need to communicate, coordinate, and make split-second decisions together, every single lap.

Cadillac realized they needed to rehearse this.

So they designed the communication protocols and working agreements to ensure it ran smoothly. Because at 300 km/h, there is no time for confusion.

This is why, throughout the 2025 season, Cadillac had a “ghost team”. They ran full race-weekend command center rehearsals and practiced strategy calls and decision flow for races they’re not even in yet. Engineers simulated entire Grand Prix in real time, including tire degradation modeling, pit-stop timing, weather scenarios, and escalation protocols.

During one of the exercises, the driver radios in that his tires are wearing out faster than expected. The race engineer receives the message and immediately relays it to the strategy team. They analyze the options. Should the driver change a setting on his steering wheel? Come in early for a pit stop? Adjust his driving style to manage the degradation?

Multiple sub-teams discuss, coordinate, and agree on a recommendation. The proposed solution is communicated back to the driver, clearly and fast.

Cadillac isn’t waiting to learn under pressure. They’re building decision muscle memory before the pressure arrives.

When you’re leading a team or organization, consider designing your Operating Rhythm (5 min 🎥). It’s an intentional cadence of meetings that creates the heartbeat of progress. Weekly coordination. Monthly reflection. Quarterly strategy reviews. Together, they form the connective tissue that allows an organization to move fast without falling apart.

It’s not about the fastest car. It’s about the smoothest organization.

Most organizations invest heavily in the what of execution. The plan. The people. The budget. The milestones.

But they skip the how. How will decisions flow when things get messy? What’s the rhythm of coordination between teams? When do we check progress, and how do we steer? What happens when the unexpected hits?

The fastest teams aren’t the ones with the most brilliant individuals. They’re the ones where information flows freely, decisions are made close to the work, and everyone knows how their contribution connects to the shared goal.

Google discovered the same thing when they studied 200 teams across their organization. The number one factor that differentiated top-performing teams was not who was on the team. It was how they worked together. Psychological safety, dependability, clarity of roles and goals. In other words, the organization is the machine.

Another case is Red Bull Racing’s transformation. When Red Bull bought the underperforming Jaguar Racing team in 2004, the engineers were talented but buried in bureaucracy.

The team had a thick middle management layer that spent most of its time preparing for the monthly board meeting. They focused on reporting causes of failures, finding blame rather than listening and helping engineers set the conditions for the team to thrive.

Under Christian Horner's leadership, he changed one thing: he created an environment where specialists could flourish. Decision rights were moved to the people doing the work. Five years later, they were world champions.

In the end, the quality of the organization determines the quality of the results.

(PS. Both cases are covered extensively in the Unblock book.)

So what, now what?

If you’re leading a major initiative, a transformation, a new venture, or a product launch with a hard deadline, ask yourself:

• Have we designed the operating rhythm for how we want to execute?

• Do the people doing the work have the decision rights they need, or does everything have to be escalated upward?

• Are we rehearsing the hard moments before they arrive, or are we waiting to discover communication gaps under pressure?

Cadillac will hit the track in 2026. Whether they’re fast remains to be seen. But the organization they’ve built is already impressive.

Because in the end, it’s not about the car.

The organization is the machine.

If you enjoyed this, grab your copy of one of my books Formula X or Unblock. Or consider booking me as a speaker at your next event.

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The uncomfortable reality is that, looking back at previous cabinets, we would have intervened if this had been the executive team of an organization: distrust, poor collaboration, and destructive behaviour under pressure.

The new formation is therefore an opportunity to get it right. The challenge is not just to agree on policy, but to build a team capable of alignment under pressure, fast decision-making when trade-offs hurt, and collaboration when trust is tested.

Most executive teams never get the luxury of a formal “formation” phase.

Roles are assigned, strategies are approved, and the team is expected to function immediately, often without ever making explicit how it will operate under pressure.

What you are about to read is an essay that examines cabinet formation through a leadership lens. I’m sharing it here because the lessons apply just as much to boards and executive teams everywhere.

There is also a Dutch version of the article.

Most-read posts of 2025

Before diving in, take a look at the most read articles from last year:

Building a strong leadership team at the top

The cabinet formation is often approached as an ideological and political chess game. Who gets which portfolio? Which positions prevail? Which compromises are acceptable?

These are understandable questions. But they miss a more fundamental point: a substantive coalition agreement is no guarantee that a cabinet will remain cohesive and govern effectively under pressure.

What is required is deliberate attention for teaming at the top. Because if the past years have shown us anything, it is this:

Many cabinets behaved like a weak executive team.

This article is a reflection on how you govern together, based on what I see in well-functioning executive and leadership teams.

1. Make clear choices

If there is one thing the next cabinet must do to improve the country, it is to make real choices.

Election programmes are wish lists. They show what parties care about. But leadership starts where you dare to choose. Not everything is possible.

To improve the country, painful choices are inevitable. Strong leadership teams make those choices explicit. They not only say what they will do, but also what they will not do. And why.

A powerful way to make this concrete is to formulate choices in the form of:

X even over Y

For example:

• Long-term solutions even over Short-term popularity

• More housing even over Better healthcare

• Feasibility even over Political consensus

Even over statements force clarity. They make the underlying principle explicit, while leaving room for later elaboration. In other words: do not lock everything into a detailed coalition agreement, but be crystal clear about the choices you make.

And perhaps most importantly, principles like these help build public trust in politics because it becomes clear what the team is willing to sacrifice to achieve its goals.

2. Agree on how you act under pressure

This raises an obvious question: if leadership is about making choices, why does it so often fail in practice? How is it possible that cabinets fall apart precisely when things get difficult?

During election campaigns, individual positions are sharpened to the maximum. Parties differentiate themselves and position themselves against others. That is logical. But this behaviour is often unconsciously carried into the coalition phase.

Under pressure, a cabinet’s behaviour quickly shifts from collaboration to survival:

• speaking through the media instead of with each other

• individual interests remain visibly dominant

• the national interest becomes subordinate to party interests

To prevent this, coalition agreements are increasingly tightened. They function as a kind of peace agreement until the next election: a document designed primarily to prevent conflict along the way.

That works, until reality changes. And it always does.

Then it turns out that the agreement provided clarity about what was planned, but hardly any guidance on how to behave when there is disagreement.

In organizations, I see exactly the same pattern: teams that do not truly trust each other try to manage uncertainty through rules, procedures, and tightly scripted plans. This creates an illusion of certainty, but makes collaboration fragile.

Strong leadership teams, therefore, do not focus only on content, but also on explicit working agreements. For example:

• How do we make decisions when we disagree?

• How do we communicate externally when tensions arise?

• How do we give each other feedback, even when it is uncomfortable?

• What are the consequences if someone consistently violates these agreements?

These kinds of agreements may sound soft. In practice, they are essential to maintain pace, trust, and stability. Without them, there is free rein for friction; and in a political system, friction is mercilessly amplified.

3. Create a personal user manual

One of the most powerful yet underused interventions in teams is the personal user manual.

Team members articulate their own manual, briefly and concretely:

• What motivates you?

• What triggers you?

• How do you behave under pressure?

• How do you prefer to receive feedback?

• What should others definitely do and not do to work well with you?

Discussing these manuals significantly accelerates team development. It prevents us from telling stories about each other instead of talking with each other.

In a cabinet where ego and media attention play major roles, this is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite. Without this conversation, differences become personal. And once things become personal, they quickly become political.

4. Adopt a rhythm for continuous improvement

What strikes me in many cabinets is that they meet frequently, but rarely reflect in a structured way on the collaboration itself.

Strong teams deliberately build a fixed rhythm for this.

For example:

• Explicitly reflecting on the collaboration on a monthly basis

• Discussing what is working and what is causing friction

• Revisiting working agreements as the context changes

Not as an after-the-fact evaluation, but as ongoing maintenance of the system.

Without this rhythm, tensions accumulate. Then a single incident can quickly escalate into a breaking point.

Conclusion

If a new cabinet only focuses on content and skips teaming, it will repeat the pattern of recent years. By investing in team development, you can increase the likelihood of a stable team, faster, better decision-making, and greater trust.

A note for executive teams

The questions raised here are the same ones every leadership team eventually faces: How do we make real choices? How do we behave when pressure rises? How do we repair trust when it erodes? And how do we keep learning as a team while the organisation depends on us?

Governments make these dynamics visible because the stakes are public. In organisations, the stakes are no less real, only less visible.

If this article resonated, it may be worth asking not whether your strategy is strong enough, but whether your leadership team is.

Below is another article that describes an exercise that can help your team accelerate:

Let us know if you need any help. At Unblock, we facilitate high-impact leadership off-sites and summits.

That’s it. I hope you enjoyed it. Simply hit ‘reply’ or comment. I read every message. Wishing you the best for the upcoming year!

61%.

“Can someone explain this to me?” he asked quietly.

The metric was new. Santa had asked his analytics elf to build it last week, after a supervisor in Wrapping mentioned something troubling in passing.

Wish Match Rate, it was called. The percentage of gifts currently in the pipeline that matched what children had actually asked for. At 61%, nearly four in ten children would receive something they didn’t ask for.

For two hundred years, they had never measured this. They hadn’t needed to. The system worked.

Until it didn’t.

Clara, Head of Customer Research, spoke first. “I can walk you through what happened.”

She pulled up a chart. “In June, our data showed BuzzBots, the programmable robots, as the number one requested toy. Mentions were up 400% from last year. Parent forums, social media, letters: everything pointed in the same direction. We published the insight report on July 15th and delivered it to Procurement.”

Viktor, Head of Procurement, nodded. “And we acted on it. Fast, I might add. I negotiated an exclusive deal with the manufacturer. 2.3 million units at 15% below market rate. The largest single-toy procurement in North Pole history.” He paused. “Santa, you shook my hand in front of the whole team.”

Santa remembered. He had been proud of Viktor’s decisiveness.

Clara continued, her voice tighter now. “Then, in early October, a YouTuber posted a video showing BuzzBots breaking after two weeks. It went viral. By mid-October, children were writing ‘NOT a BuzzBot’ in their letters. The new hot item was GloGo Bracelets, friendship bracelets that glow when your friend is nearby.”

“When did you flag this?” Santa asked.

“October 5th. I emailed Viktor.”

All eyes turned to Viktor. He shifted in his chair. “She did. And I responded. I told her that changing a 2.3-million-unit order would require a revised budget projection, sign-off from the planning committee, and renegotiation with the supplier. I asked for a formal analysis comparing the write-off cost versus the risk of delivering unwanted toys.”

“And?”

“The analysis was delivered on November 15th. We made the decision to pivot on November 22nd. But by then...” Viktor trailed off.

Clara finished his sentence. “By then, the GloGo supplier said the earliest they could deliver was January 3rd.”

Santa did the math. “Seven weeks. It took us seven weeks to make one decision.”

“It was a big decision,” Viktor said, an edge of defensiveness creeping into his voice. “2.3 million units. I couldn’t unilaterally cancel that. I needed alignment.”

Mei, Head of Wrapping, had been quiet until now. She ran the department that sat in the middle of the operation, receiving gifts from Procurement and preparing them for Shipping. She saw everything pass through.

“Can I say something?” she asked.

Santa nodded.

“In late October, one of my supervisors, Tina, asked me why we were wrapping so many BuzzBots. Her daughter and all her friends were asking for GloGo Bracelets. She wondered if something had changed.” Mei paused. “I told her that our job is to wrap what Procurement sends us. She shrugged and went back to work.”

She looked around the table. “Tina saw it. A floor supervisor with a nine-year-old daughter saw it before any of us acted. But she didn’t feel like it was her place to raise it. And honestly? I didn’t feel like it was mine either. Research provides the insights. Procurement does the buying. I just wrap.”

The room was silent.

Sven, Head of Shipping, leaned back in his chair. He was the most operational of the group: logistics, routes, sleigh maintenance. He had the least patience for what he called leadership theater.

“Can I point something out?” he said. “We meet four times a year. Every quarter, same room, same agenda. Everyone presents their slides. Every quarter this year, we were green across the board.”

He pulled out his tablet and scrolled through the Q3 deck. “Look at this. Clara: ‘Research insights delivered on schedule.’ Viktor: ‘Procurement targets met, BuzzBots secured under budget.’ Mei: ‘Wrapping capacity ready, staffing plan approved.’ Me: ‘Shipping routes optimized, fleet maintenance complete.’”

He looked up. “Every single one of us hit our targets. Every single one of us reported green. And now we’re sitting here on December 23rd with a 61% wish match rate.” He tossed the tablet onto the table. “We had meetings. But did we ever actually meet? When did Clara and Viktor ever sit together and ask: ‘Is what we’re buying still what they want?’ We presented to each other. We didn’t work with each other.”

Santa stood and walked to the window. The snow was falling harder now. Somewhere out there, millions of children were going to sleep tonight, dreaming about what they’d find under the tree. Nearly half of them would wake up to something they didn’t want. Some would open a BuzzBot, the toy that had become a punchline, and wonder if Santa had even read their letter.

He turned back to the room. “We have had the same strategy for two hundred years,” he said slowly.

“It’s painted on the workshop wall. Every elf knows it. Every one of you knows it.”

He sat back down, heavily.

“Every quarter, we read the strategy aloud. We nodded. We felt aligned.” He looked around the table. “’Every child, the right gift, on time.’ It sounds like a strategy. But it isn’t one. It’s an aspiration. A strategy tells you what to do when things get hard. It tells you what to sacrifice and what to protect. Ours told us nothing.”

He paused.

“We never decided. So when the moment came, Viktor protected budget. Clara protected certainty. Mei protected flow. Everyone made the right trade-off for their department. And the wrong one for Christmas.”

Viktor broke the silence. “I want to say something.” His defensiveness was gone now, replaced by something heavier. “Every decision I made this year was defensible. I had the research report. I had the sign-offs. I followed the process. If anyone audited my department, they’d find nothing wrong.” He swallowed. “But somewhere along the way, I stopped asking whether we were delivering Christmas. I just asked whether I was doing my job. Those turned out to be different questions.”

No one argued with him.

Santa looked at his leadership team. Talented people, all of them. People who had dedicated their lives to Christmas. People who had hit every target they’d been given. People who, right now, felt terrible about something that wasn’t any single person’s fault. And was somehow everyone’s fault.

He asked one question.

“If Clara had known, back in October, that she could walk into Viktor’s office and make a decision together that same day, without a committee, without a six-week analysis, without waiting for my blessing, would we be sitting here right now?”

The question hung in the air, unanswered.

Outside, the snow kept falling. Christmas was coming, ready or not.

This post was inspired by an idea of Unblock co-founder Nelia Booden.

If you enjoyed this, grab your copy of Formula X (available in Dutch, English, German or Italian) or Unblock for Christmas!

That’s it. I hope you enjoyed it. Simply hit ‘reply’ or comment—I read every message. Have a great holiday! ❄️

We’ve all seen it happen:

A leader fires off an angry comment, and a team member instantly shrinks: “Okay, I’m sorry, I’ll fix it, I promise.”

An overwhelmed team member looks lost, and without asking, the leader 'rescues’ them like a helicopter parent: “I’ll take over from here and do it.”

A team member raises a valid concern, and someone snaps back with a sarcastic comment… And the discussion dies.

Before anyone notices, the whole team slips into a familiar triangle:

• The one who lost all hope: “Why does this keep happening to me?”

• The one who points fingers: “This should never have happened.”

• The one who solves everything despite not having the time: “Fine, I’ll do it.”

Under pressure, people stop responding from clarity and start responding from emotion. Meetings get political. Decisions get personal. Ownership evaporates. Everyone works harder… but progress stalls.

Transactional Analysis

These aren’t personality flaws; they’re predictable psychological patterns. And that’s exactly what Transactional Analysis (TA) makes visible. TA says every person operates from one of three ego states at any moment:

👆 Parent

• Learned behaviours, rules, judgments.

• Can be Nurturing (“Let me help you”) or Critical (“You should have known better!”).

🧑 Adult

• Calm, pragmatic, here-and-now (“What do we know? What’s next?”)

• This is where good leadership and collaboration happen.

👇 Child

• Reactive, defensive, overwhelmed, or playful and creative.

• Can be Free (creative, spontaneous) or Adapted (people-pleasing, anxious), or Rebellious (pushing back, resisting, eye-rolling).

Leaders who recognise which state they’re in (and which state their team is in) instantly gain more influence and speed.

When someone reacts emotionally, TA encourages leaders to ask:

• Which ego state am I in?

• Which ego state are they in?

• What does the conversation need?

Stay in Adult. Invite others into Adult. Repair quickly when you slip.

Below are five TA-based leadership practices that helps you unblock your team and accelerate results.

1/ Start strategic conversations by pulling everyone into Adult mode.

In high-pressure environments, Adult mode is the first thing to disappear, and the first thing leaders must restore. Here is how to reset the room:

• Name the decision and the outcome you’re trying to achieve.

• Clarify what is known and what is assumed.

• Set shared expectations for how you want to engage: calm, factual, here-and-now.

• Slow down the pace so people stop reacting from emotion.

Why this matters: Adult mode is where alignment and real progress begin.

2/ Interrupt Parent–Child dynamics the moment they appear.

A timeline slips, someone feels exposed, and suddenly what was Adult-to-Adult becomes Parent-to-Child. People fall into shrinking, snapping, apologizing, or rescuing, which derails execution. You can reset by asking:

• “What decision can you make right now?”

• “What support do you actually need?”

• “What is the smallest safe-to-try next step?”

These questions return agency to the team and stop you from becoming the bottleneck.

Why this matters: Execution accelerates when dependency disappears and ownership returns.

3/ Use the Drama Triangle to stop emotional loops before they spiral.

The Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer roles described in the introduction are predictable—and reversible. Shift from the drama triangle to the high-performance alternatives:

• Creator → focuses on what they want to create and takes responsibility (“What do I want here?”).

• Challenger → brings constructive tension (“What problem are we really solving?”).

• Coach → strengthens thinking without taking over (“What options do you see?”).

These three roles shift teams from reacting to creating, from blaming to learning, from rescuing to growing. It prevents learned helplessness and builds genuine ownership.

Why this matters: Strategy moves faster when teams replace drama for responsibility.

4/ Use feedback to restore Adult-to-Adult collaboration.

When people slip into emotion, feedback is how you bring the conversation back:

• Describe what you observed without judgment.

• Ask what the other person intended.

• Agree on one forward action.

• Close the loop.

Why this matters: Without honest conversation, misalignment compounds and execution drifts.

5/ Give clear mandates that prevent both rescuing and rebellion.

When leaders over-help, people collapse into Adapted Child. When leaders under-communicate, people slip into Rebellious Child. Increasing clarity prevents both.

• Define decision rights.

• Make boundaries explicit.

• Share the trade-offs that matter.

• Clarify when you need to be involved.

Why this matters: Strategy execution thrives on distributed judgment, not centralized approval.

Notice the pattern? TA doesn’t fix strategy; it fixes the conditions under which strategy can succeed: clarity, ownership, psychological safety, and high-quality conversations.

If you want faster execution, review how your team communicates when the pressure is highest. Because when conversations elevate, performance elevates.

TA gives you more than a framework. It gives you a way of leading that brings people back to clarity, ownership, and courage. When you stay in Adult—and invite others there—you create teams that think boldly, decide wisely, and move with real momentum.

Better conversations build better organizations. Speak to people as adults, especially when it’s hardest. That’s how strategy finally comes to life.

In other news

A few other fun things that happened last month:

• My newsletter hit 1,000 subscribers, yay! 🥳 Thanks, everyone, for being here.

• We took an executive team inside the Red Bull Racing factory. 🏎️💨

• I reduced my time spent scrolling social media by over 50% Read how.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Simply hit ‘reply’ or comment—I read every message. Have a great day! ❄️

Yet just six years later, Nokia’s handset division was sold to Microsoft, and the company’s dominance collapsed. So how does a company that understands the shift still fail spectacularly?

Because execution broke. And in many ways, the execution failure was ferocious, systemic, and rooted in organizational pathology. Let’s look at the five contributing factors below.

1/ A fractured strategy: diluted bets kill focus

To pivot to software, Nokia tried everything: Symbian, MeeGo, and then Windows Phone, but never fully committed to any one of them. Each platform had its own internal champions, competing budgets, and different roadmaps.

By 2010, executives debated whether to remain loyal to Symbian (its legacy OS), accelerate MeeGo (a joint Intel initiative), or bet the house on Microsoft’s Windows Phone. That strategic indecision fragmented focus and drained resources.

2/ Decision paralysis in a fast-moving world

In the smartphone arena, where iterations occur quarterly, Nokia’s decision cycles moved glacially. Committees debated and stalled, while Apple shipped new hardware and software aggressively.

The culture had become risk-averse and closed. Leaders exerted pressure to deliver results while middle managers, fearful of losing status, avoided speaking up. Coordination froze, and crucial signals never reached the top.

3/ Culture of fear: no one wants to speak up

It wasn’t just slow decisions: it was a culture of silence. Middle managers were intimidated, discouraged from voicing bad news, or fearfully penalized if they dared to challenge leadership. This atmosphere made it almost impossible to detect pivots in time, because no one would admit or highlight vulnerability.

4/ Agile couldn’t save them

One of the greatest ironies is that Nokia actually prided itself on being an agile company long before “Agile” became a management buzzword.

The Finnish giant had reinvented itself enough times throughout its 147-year history to boast about its “Business Agility.” They even outmaneuvered rival Ericsson in the 2000s, leveraging adaptability and speed to dominate global mobile device markets. Nokia became one of the first major companies to fully adopt Agile at scale, emerging as the largest enterprise Agile implementation in the world.

But Agile alone couldn’t save them. Despite having the most crucial competitor insight, and even a product in development to respond to the iPhone, Nokia’s executional dysfunction meant they couldn’t respond in time.

5/ Siloed units: competing agendas, no alignment

Even when the strategic intent was to pivot to software, the organization didn’t act as one. Hardware, software, R&D, UI/UX, and services units each pursued semi-autonomous goals. Internal silos grew thicker.

Engineering ideas were buried under layers of bureaucracy, while departments defended their own status rather than cooperating. Contrast that with Apple: hardware, software, and services all running in one synchronized machine.

Results: how deep the fall was

The collapse was swift and brutal. In 2007, Nokia held a nearly 40% share in mobile devices. By 2011, it had dropped to ~25%. By 2013, Nokia’s market share in smartphones had cratered, and Microsoft bought the handset division. Microsoft itself later wrote off much of the value of that acquisition. The handset business failed to deliver profitability under Windows Phone.

To be fair, Nokia is still around today as a B2B telco company. However, their famous consumer brand is gone.

What you can do

Nokia didn’t fail because of strategy. It failed because it couldn’t execute the strategy it already saw.

And the irony? The world’s most “Agile” company still failed. Agile practices without strategic clarity and aligned execution don’t guarantee survival.

A few lessons if you lead a team, division, or company:

• Demand one clear bet. Don’t fragment effort over 3 “maybe” platforms.

• Drive fast, decisive action, even when imperfect.

• Build psychological safety so people speak truth.

• Break silos: unite your equivalent of hardware, product, software, and services.

• Don’t confuse Agility with execution. Agile is a tool. Strategy and alignment make it work.

Have you seen this in your org? Where brilliant strategies collapsed because execution couldn’t catch up? Reply with an example. I’ll respond.

Strategy reality check
At Unblock, we’re offering a free 1:1 Strategy Reality Check. Send us your strategy deck, talk through your process of execution, and we’ll provide you with hands-on ideas, input, and templates to improve your chances of realizing your strategy successfully.

That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Simply hit ‘reply’ or comment. I read every message. Have a great day! ☀️

In 2006, a Yahoo executive identified this problem and sent an email to the senior staff:

“We want to do everything and be everything, to everyone.” … “I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do, and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.”

Unfortunately, the company’s leaders failed to implement Brad’s ideas. Today, Yahoo still exists, but little remains of its market leadership.

How to prioritize like a pro

In our free organizational scan, the #1 tension leaders mention is simple but devastating: “We don’t know how to prioritize.”

It's the peanut butter problem: chasing dozens of problems, underdelivering on everything, and moving the needle on nothing. Teams are spread thin, leaders are saying yes too often, and everyone is drinking from the firehose.

The antidote is not more discipline, more pressure, or more dashboards. The antidote is a deliberate practice of strategy, trade-offs, alignment, and rhythm.

Here are 5 ways to avoid the peanut butter trap and prioritize like a pro. 👇

1/ Check if your strategy is really a strategy.

Lots of organizations proudly wave a strategy document. But too often, it’s vague, uninspiring, or impossible to act on.

A strategy that says “we want to be #1 in the market” doesn’t give teams focus—it leaves them uninspired.

A strategy that works is:

• Inspiring (it energizes people to contribute).

• Concrete (teams can translate it into action).

• Bold (anchored in a bet or belief).

• 2-3 Year time horizon (because people overestimate what they can do in a year, but underestimate what they can do in 2-3 years).

Without a clear strategic intent, prioritization is impossible.

2/ Make trade-offs explicit.

Yahoo’s mistake was trying to do everything. The remedy is to name what you will NOT do.

If you don’t make trade-offs clear, people will assume everything is equally important. That’s how focus gets lost.

Try using even-over statements:

• Quality even over Affordability.

• B2C even over B2B.

• Beautiful even over Functional.

Trade-offs turn strategy into a decision compass. Without them, people optimize for local wins at the cost of global impact.

3/ Let teams self-align to the strategy.

Leaders often complain: “I told them the priorities, but they still go in all directions.”

That’s because strategy is not a memo. It’s a practice.

First of all, teams need to be involved in shaping the strategy. That’s how you test whether it’s clear, whether it resonates, and whether it can guide daily decisions.

In practice, this means asking teams to self-align by defining their own:

• 90-day outcomes they’ll commit to.

• Trade-offs they’ll embrace.

• Metrics they’ll track.

When teams self-align, they go from merely complying with what is asked to taking ownership and initiative.

4/ Stack rank your priorities.

Even with a clear strategy and trade-offs, you might still have too many priorities.

Here’s a simple discipline: ask, “If we could do only one thing, which one would we do, and why?” Then repeat until the list is truly ordered.

• Only one thing gets to be priority one.

• Everything else follows in sequence.

• The “why” behind each rank matters just as much as the order.

Without stack-ranking, you don’t have clear priorities. You have a wish list.

5/ Build a strategic operating rhythm that limits WIP.

Limiting work-in-progress (WIP) is one of the oldest lessons in productivity: don’t do 10 things at once. Do 1 or 2, finish them, then move on.

But in organizations, this only works if it’s reinforced by rhythm: regular, fit-for-purpose conversations about strategy.

Here’s a pattern you can try:

• Weekly (1 hr): What must we prioritize this week to make progress?

• Monthly (1 hr): What did we learn this month, and how do we adjust focus?

• Quarterly (1 day): Is this still the right strategy? What outcomes do we prioritize in the next 90 days?

Do this at every level: team, department, and board level.

When rhythm meets prioritization, organizations stop drowning in chaos and start moving with focus.

Don’t become the next Yahoo.

Without prioritization, people drown in work that doesn’t matter. They get stuck in decision paralysis, endless meetings, and short-term firefighting. Energy is wasted.

With strong prioritization, people gain clarity. They make faster, better decisions. They say no with confidence. They focus on what will actually move the needle.

Prioritization is not about saying “no” more often. It’s about having clarity about what to say “yes” to with conviction.

Your turn:
When was the last time your leadership team had an honest conversation about what you will NOT do this year?

How to get started

1. Reply to this email for a free 1:1 “strategy reality check”. Send us your strategy deck, talk through your process of execution, and we’ll provide you with hands-on ideas, input, and templates to improve your chances of realizing your strategy successfully.

2. Pick up a copy of the Unblock book for more on our approach to strategy.

3. Book me as a speaker for your next event.

4. Meet me at one of these conferences.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Simply hit ‘reply’ or comment—I read every message. Have a great day! ☀️

Some exciting news. Starting tomorrow, I’m embarking on a book tour to promote the Unblock book. Below is an overview of the conferences where I’ll be speaking in the USA and across Europe in the upcoming months.

July:

Management Summit 2025 webinar (tomorrow!)

• July 17th: 16:00-16:30 CET

• where: LinkedIn Live

• “NHS vs. Microsoft: Progressive people practices for measuring value”

EODF webinar (Monday!)

• July 21st, 12:00 CET

• where: LinkedIn Live

• “What can an organisation learn from F1 when navigating turbulent times?”

Agile 2025

• July 28-30, Denver, CO, USA

• “Unblock the Boardroom: How to get Leaders to Care about Agility”

September:

European Organization Design Forum Conference

• Sep 19 & 20, Budapest, Hungary

• “How Formula 1 teams turn turbulence into performance”

Management Summit

• Sep 23 & 24, Lisbon, Portugal

• “Measuring Value Creation: progressive practices for following progress”

Unblock Leader Roundtables

• Sept 11 & Oct 8, Free Online Sessions

• “Run Your Own Strategy Reality Check”

October:

Agile Slovenia

• Oct 22, Ljubljana, Slovenia

• “How to get leaders to care about agility”

World OKR Summit

• Oct 30 & 31, Online

• “Unblock the Strategy Execution Gap: What OKRs Alone Can’t Fix”

If you’re looking for a speaker for your event, let me know.

I hope to meet you at one of these events! If not, consider picking up a copy of the Unblock book and let me know what you think by simply hitting ‘reply’ or commenting—I read every message. Have a great summer! ☀️

This edition shows how Formula 1 teams keep strategy alive and concludes with seven practical moves you can use to do the same.

🎪 At the end of this newsletter, I will also share which conferences I’ll be speaking at after the summer break. I’d love to meet you there! 🎤

The annual strategy theater

Strategic planning is an opportunity to align the entire company around winning moves, if done well. However, the ‘set-and-forget’ approach that most organizations use is inherently flawed:

• The conversation is a chase for headcount and budget rather than competitive choices.

• Strategy decks are word‑smithed to death; in the end, every initiative is top priority. After revealing the strategy through slide-deck marathons, everybody goes back to day‑to‑day firefighting.

• People consume the plan like passengers read an in‑flight magazine: mildly interesting, rarely actionable.

• Managers execute but rarely shape direction, so they comply rather than commit.

• Business realities shift quickly, so the forecasts become redundant as soon as they are finished. Little time is spent checking whether the plan is working, so course corrections come too late.

How F1 teams plan in real time

Formula 1 is the pinnacle of motorsport, where ten teams, with hundreds of engineers, design and build their cars and race 24 times a year. They roll out roughly 1,000 improvements every week and must react in real time to rule changes, weather conditions, and other on‑track surprises. Winning is often decided by tenths of a second.

The traditional annual planning approach doesn’t cut it. Planning fast and re‑planning faster is the only way for Formula 1 teams to survive. This is why they run a continuous, high‑velocity strategy loop:

• The long game. Before the first race, teams make big‑rock decisions for the season: upgrade the wind tunnel, secure a new supplier, or develop a new power unit.

• Race scenario planning. Practice sessions feed hundreds of models that predict tire wear, weather shifts, and the likelihood of a safety car. Through scenario planning, strategists load the most likely branches into a playbook.

• Short feedback loops. After the Friday practice sessions, the data is fed back to the factory, where engineers analyze it and propose set-up changes for an overnight upgrade. On Saturday morning, the changes are made to the car, tested, and prepared for qualifying and the race on Sunday.

• Distributed decision rights. When rain appears on track, the strategist can call the driver in for wet tyres within ten seconds. This all happens without calling a meeting or seeking permission from higher-ups.

• Reflection rhythm built-in. After the race, the team spends two hours debriefing everything that happened during the race. Lessons learned and data flow back to the factory.

• Dynamic resource allocation. During the Monday-morning all-hands meeting, the factory’s attention turns to the hottest problem of the week. The lessons learned on track inform design tweaks for the next race, sometimes manufactured within forty‑eight hours via 3‑D‑printed parts.

• Balancing short-term and long-term. Throughout the race season, the team shifts time and money to work on more radical changes for next season’s car that can’t be applied to the current season’s car.

Formula 1 strategy is a living hypothesis, updated every lap, not every year.

What you can do

I can hear you thinking, “Sure, but we’re not a Formula 1 team.” And that makes sense. Here are seven F1-inspired things you can try that we have successfully helped ‘real’ businesses adopt:

Strategy formulation

1. Write a one‑page Strategic Intent. Describe the obstacles the team needs to overcome and what you’re going to do about them in the next 2–3 years.

2. Make trade-offs explicit. Instead of vague principles, write choices as even-over statements, such as “Speed and consistency even over Variety.” They spell the trade‑offs you’re willing to make when hard choices appear.

Strategic operating rhythm

1. Adopt a quarterly rhythm. Every three months, determine the 90-day outcomes that ladder up to the Strategic Intent. Translate intent into measurable results you expect this quarter.

2. Run a weekly Unblock meeting. A structured, fit-for-purpose meeting in which you review outcomes, metrics, process a co‑created agenda with potential blockers, and close with clear action items.

Strategy adaptation

1. Review roles and decision rights. Continuously, take action to unblock organizational unclarities that are creating decision-making bottlenecks.

2. Reallocate budget continuously. Maintain a 10–25% flexible fund to allocate talent and resources to emerging priorities.

3. Review and reset quarterly. At the end of your 90-day cycle, hold a ‘retrospective’ meeting to reflect on what went well, what you’ve learned, and what we should do to be more successful next cycle.

Strategic planning isn’t dead, but the 50‑page annual PowerPoint is. It is simply too slow for a world that is moving closer to Formula 1 speeds every year. On your next cycle, pick one practice above and test‑drive it. It is time to put your strategy into action.

Want to learn more?

1. Pick up a copy of the Unblock book for more on our approach to strategy.

2. Try the 5-minute scan to discover what’s blocking your organization.

3. Book me as a speaker for your next event.

4. Join one of our free inspiration sessions in August or September.

5. Partner with us for training, workshops, and leadership offsites.

Meet me here

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at the following conferences. I’d love to meet you there!

• Agile 2025 in Denver (July 28-30)

• EODF: European Organisation Design Forum in Budapest (Sept 19-20)

• Management Summit in Lisbon (Sept 23-24)

• Agile Slovenia in Ljubljana (Oct 22nd)

• World OKR Summit - online (Oct 30-31)

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Simply hit ‘reply’ or comment—I read every message. Have a great summer! ☀️

Over the months that followed, everyone worked hard and was tremendously busy, but somehow it didn’t lead to the results they had hoped for. After trying to make it work for a year, she decided to invite us to coach her leadership team.

The off‑site that changed everything

On the first day, I observed. The setup was that each department would present its results of the last quarter to the others.

But when one leader was speaking, the others were disengaged—sometimes even on their phones and laptops. When the CEO challenged the results, team members were quick to blame another department. They were a working group, not a team.

It reminded me of a quote by Patrick Lencioni:

“Some leadership teams are like the United Nations: a place where people come together to lobby for their constituents.”

That evening, the CEO admitted over dinner: “We’ve hired Ferraris, but they’re driving in different directions.” We agreed I would facilitate their second day.

The next morning I asked the group to pause—to zoom out and reflect on how they worked as a collective rather than as solo performers.

I told them they were operating like a Golf team. Golfers play individually, and their scores are totaled to calculate the team’s score. However, they should think more like a football team, where the players are interdependent and actively work together to achieve a common objective.

Using that metaphor, we co‑created a one‑page manifesto. It laid out a shared definition of success, clarified roles and responsibilities, described acceptable behaviors—such as listening, curiosity over judgment, and zero blame—and established how we would hold each other accountable and give and receive feedback. Every leader signed it before leaving the room.

Over the months that followed, the manifesto became their compass. Guided by it, they overcame the real barrier holding the company back: how the leadership team operated.

Becoming a real team is a strategic choice

To achieve big results, you need ‘high-performing’ teams capable of achieving them—and that includes your leadership team. The reality is that many leadership teams operate like golf teams, and that is not enough to achieve radical results. Becoming a real team is a strategic choice, and it requires work to develop one.

But what does a high-performing team look like? When I ask leaders this question, they often respond with words such as “ trust”, “collaboration”, “communication”, and “commitment”. It’s easy to see that without these things, teams can’t work well, but these traits feel somewhat intangible.

When I ask leaders how to achieve ‘high performance,’ many say through “team building”, “giving feedback”, or ”putting the ‘right’ people on the team”. While those things certainly help, they don’t provide the complete picture.

Five dynamics of great teams

So, how do you build the ‘perfect’ team? That’s what Google wanted to learn when they studied 200 teams across their organization.

The study discovered that five dynamics consistently differentiated top-performing teams from those at the bottom. Together, they act as the behavioural operating system that determines whether a bold strategy ever leaves the slide deck. The five dynamics act like rails carrying strategy from the whiteboard to the day-to-day:

1. Psychological safety: Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of one another. It allows teams to surface risky assumptions before they explode.

2. Dependability: Team members consistently deliver high-quality work on time and take their responsibilities seriously.

3. Structure and clarity: The team has clear roles, goals, and plans—members know what is expected of them, what they are aiming for, and how they will get there. This helps maintain stability amid noise.

4. Meaning: Team members have a sense of purpose in their work or the team’s output. This fuels the discretionary effort that strategy always underestimates.

5. Impact: Team members believe their work matters and makes a difference. A felt sense of impact closes the loop, allowing plans to evolve in real-time.

Notice that these have nothing to do with individual brilliance and everything to do with the social fabric of the group.

How to do it

The Unblock book outlines organizational practices that enable you to enhance the five factors. Pick up your copy on Amazon, Managementboek, or listen to it on Audible or Spotify.

Where would you start?

If you had to improve just one of the five dynamics in the next quarter, which would unlock the greatest impact for your team? Simply hit ‘reply’ or comment—I read every message.

For quite a while, I was in the camp of "let’s see." I used the tools and was impressed by the outputs, but I still saw AI as just another productivity booster, not a fundamental shift in business.

But that has changed. The more I pay attention, the more I believe it isn’t just another tech trend. It’s a profound disruption. The future of work, the shape of organizations, and even the structure of the economy are all being rewritten.

This technology doesn’t just follow instructions, it trains itself. It adapts to new use cases we hadn’t imagined. Soon, it will be like having a new colleague who takes on 80% of your tasks after just one day of observing you at work. It doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t burn out, and it scales without limits.

AI is the fastest-growing technology in human history. We have already seen the first companies with organizational charts of AI agents working together. The implications are real, and we’re just getting started.

Six AI strategies

Let’s take a closer look at how six companies are responding: three born-digital and three established enterprises. Each is facing the same shift but with very different strategies.

1. Shopify made AI use mandatory. It’s part of performance reviews, and non-use must be justified. Teams must prove they’ve used AI before asking for more headcount.

2. Standard Chartered flagged 45,000 of its 83,000 roles as changing due to AI — either "sunset" or "sunrise." This signals a proactive workforce redesign at scale.

3. Johnson & Johnson killed 85% of its AI use cases after learning that only 10–15% delivered most of the value. AI projects now go through strict governance and prioritization.

4. Duolingo is rethinking how work gets done. AI is now a factor in hiring, performance reviews, and headcount approval. Teams must show they’ve automated tasks before hiring. Most roles are being redefined with AI in mind.

5. Procter & Gamble ran a large-scale experiment involving 800 people. They used AI with full access to their documents, calendars, and workflows. Productivity increased, but for leaders, it raised questions around delegation and transparency.

6. Box pushes teams to automate aggressively and reinvest the saved time into strategic work. They’ve adopted shared AI platforms and embedded experimentation into team routines.

Pick your AI strategy

I bet that within a year or two, we will have fully AI-generated colleagues that interact in our meetings and do valuable work. So if you’re not yet thinking about how AI will impact the future of your organization, you’re already behind.

AI Strategy = Business Strategy. It’s not about tools — it’s about how you create value. Identify where AI can accelerate value, unlock efficiencies, or enable new business models. Map the risks. Spot the opportunities.

Consider how your teams make decisions, which roles may become obsolete, and what guardrails you need to adopt AI responsibly. Will AI use be mandatory or optional? Will your approach be centralized or distributed? Will you take a bold public stance or stay under the radar?

Unblock your organization

Real AI adoption isn’t just about plugging in new tools — it requires a fundamental rethink of how your organization operates. The companies in this article aren’t just adding AI. They’re redesigning how work gets done.

Because when things speed up, AI will amplify existing blockers: unclear strategy, slow decisions, siloed teams. To learn how to become adaptive and remove the systemic obstacles that hold people back, pick up a copy of the Unblock book.

If you take away only one thing, it is to run experiments. This technology can’t be adopted by following a step-by-step plan. Invite everyone in the organization — including leadership — to experiment with real use cases, and actively share what they’re learning. Test fast, learn fast, and make it safe to fail.

Because if your organization learns faster than others, you have a chance of surviving this inevitable wave.

Eating our own dogfood

Last month, we ran a 48 hour AI hackathon with our team at Unblock. We will also host a free leadership roundtable on AI strategy on Wednesday 21st, 16:00 CET — register here. Finally, if you need help with picking your AI strategy, we offer a workshop for leadership teams.

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!

Cascading means going from the top to the bottom — like a waterfall that flows in one direction. Traditionally, this looks like executives sending the finished strategy down to middle management. They are tasked with communicating it and holding teams accountable for execution.

This top-down approach definitely creates alignment. But it promotes compliance rather than commitment, while reducing autonomy, ownership and adaptivity.

In a high alignment, low autonomy culture, you run the risk that people will follow the orders, create the directed output as specified, but don’t use their full thinking power to come up with innovative solutions to emerging challenges.

Some of the world’s fastest, most innovative companies are built on a high alignment, high autonomy culture—aligned autonomy. Leaders clarify the problems to solve, but people and teams have the freedom to self-organize and have the authority to decide what to do, how they work, and how to contribute to the strategy based on their expertise and responsibility.

To foster aligned autonomy, you must first, give people a voice and a role in shaping the strategy, and second, let them decide how they can best contribute to the desired outcomes (through self-alignment). Here’s how.

Improve strategy execution by letting people shape it

When your leadership team has aligned on an initial strategy, invite your teams to provide feedback and shape it further. Doing so drastically increases the odds that the strategy can be realized.

By involving the people who do the work in executing your strategy, you can adjust it to the realities, needs and concerns that only they know about. When people have an opportunity to shape strategy, they will develop a sense of ownership over it, and feel more excited about it than they would with a strategy that is developed behind closed doors. This is especially true when a strategy contains radically new ideas.

Ask them whether your strategy is understandable, and how it influences their day-to-day work and decisions. You’ll quickly discover whether the strategy is misguided, and whether it will actually focus the organization’s energy in the desired direction. Let their feedback shape the next iteration.

Opening up further

When only a small group of leaders is involved in strategy making, you run the risk of groupthink or creating a strategy that’s blind to potentially disruptive market developments. By involving more people, you reduce this risk.

If you’d like to involve thousands of people from across, and even from outside the organization, to help you shape your strategy, take a look at the book Open Strategy, in which they describe various methods for harnessing the wisdom of crowds, including:

• Strategy competitions: open contests to surface and develop new ideas.

• Prediction markets: gain insight by letting crowds bet on the likelihood of future events.

• Nightmare competitor challenges: to develop scenarios of how your business could be disrupted.

Let people align themselves to the strategy

When you are ready to align the objectives of the rest of the organization with the new strategy, invite the teams to align themselves. Yes, you read that right. The only way for a team to be both autonomous and aligned is for people to align themselves.

Here’s how to do it: Ask every team in the organization (including your leadership team) to articulate their Strategic Intent and trade-offs based on the overarching strategy. Ask them: “What is your role in the renewed strategy? Given the strategy and your team’s reason for existence, customer focus, or domain of ownership, what is your Strategic Intent, and how will you prioritize?”

Here’s a way they could answer that question:

The organization’s strategy is X, and our part in that is Y.

To maximize our contribution toward the wider strategy, we are going to… [team’s Strategic Intent].

And to maximize our ability to deliver our part, we apply the following trade-offs for our next quarter… [team’s Even-Over statements].

An example

Let’s put self-alignment into practice using the example of a hospital. One of their Strategic Intent statements is “Hire 500 healthcare professionals to keep up with the influx of new patients”

Example 1: IT
As a result of this intent, the hospital’s IT department may identify that their staff will have trouble keeping up with the hiring speed, and that they need to change their approach to onboarding. So they could self-align by stating:

In the following year, we are going to:

Automate provisioning so that new hires have a working laptop within 24 hours of starting.

In the next 90 days, we apply the following trade-offs:

1. Laptops even over Phones

2. Saying ‘not now’ even over Accepting new priorities

With these trade-offs, the team will focus on laptops first; phone provisioning may still be manual (rather than an automated process). In addition, they stated the desire to stop pleasing everyone by saying “yes” to everything so that they could put the focus on this initiative.

Example 2: Facilities
The hospital’s facilities management team might choose to self-align to another over-arching Strategic Intent statement that the hospital picked: “Offer all new hires and current employees a house at below-market rate.” Here is how they would self-align:

In the next two to three years, we are going to:

Acquire apartments to host 1,000 people from all walks of life.

In the next 90 days, we apply the following trade-offs:

1. Speed even over Cost

2. Volume even over Diversity

The trade-offs imply that they want to go fast and acquire a large number of units in the first quarter. To do so, they accept that they may not get a good deal on these. They also accept that their first set of units will all look the same, even though in the long term, they need a diverse set of houses for people ‘from all walks of life’.

Why self-alignment?

When strategic dialogue happens at every level of the organization, and people can shape and discuss it, they are more likely to take ownership of their part in the strategy, and take the initiative when making decisions to execute it. The greater transparency, the better: let teams publish their Strategic Intent where everyone can access it.

When you see each team’s Strategic Intent, think of these as a ‘network’ of initiatives that feed into one another, and don’t try to make them all fit together perfectly.

If you come across an unexpected diversion, resist the desire to tell them to change their strategy to fit your own ideas of what it should be. Trust that the team knows best and that they’ll adjust if it doesn’t work.

Of course, you can challenge them, but start by being curious about why they see it differently. Ask clarifying questions before reacting, and inspect your own ‘range of tolerance’. By being curious, you may discover a gap in people’s understanding of the overarching strategy, which you can then clarify. It’s the dialogue that matters.

This newsletter contains excerpts from my new book Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization. It’s available on Amazon, Managementboek, Audible and Spotify.

That’s it for now!

What follows is a story about the remarkable power of mindset and its connection to dealing with resistance to organizational change.

For years, my knee injury had prevented me from running further than 5km without intense pain. Despite physiotherapy and exercises to strengthen my muscles, the issue persisted. I eventually stopped therapy and continued running, sticking to 5km to avoid aggravating the injury.

In early 2024, the desire to push beyond that limit led to one more consultation, this time with a physiotherapist specializing in working with athletes.

After some tests, she said, “I see no reason why you wouldn’t be able to run 10km.”

For years, my knee injury had prevented me from running further than 5km without intense pain. Despite physiotherapy and exercises to strengthen my muscles, the issue persisted. I eventually stopped therapy and continued running, sticking to 5km to avoid aggravating the injury.

In early 2024, the desire to push beyond that limit led to one more consultation, this time with a physiotherapist specializing in working with athletes.

After some tests, she said:

“I see no reason why you wouldn’t be able to run 10km.”

At first, I thought the physiotherapist was crazy. “But the pain at the 5km mark is real!” I argued. She calmly responded, “I know, but sometimes the mind tricks you. I suggest you run without your Apple Watch and try a new route. Do this a few times and let me know what happens.”

When I got home, I felt disappointed and disillusioned. That’s it? No special treatment? I had hoped she’d check my joints and muscles and maybe come up with some breakthrough therapy. Instead, she told me to run without a watch. How could that possibly help?!

Why it worked

The next day, I gave it a try. I left my watch at home and ran a new route. To my surprise, when I finished, I felt no pain. Assuming the distance was short, I traced the route and realized I’d run 7.5km without any discomfort. A few days later, I repeated the run — and again, no pain.

How was this possible? The physiotherapist explained what was going on.

My brain had conditioned me to expect pain whenever I neared the 5km mark. It had learned to scrutinize my knee: “Is there any pain yet?” Even the slightest discomfort was translated into, “There it is! We should stop!”

The pain system exists to protect us from injury. But sometimes, it overreacts, sending pain signals long after we’ve healed. My brain had gotten stuck in “high alert” mode, amplifying even minor signs of fatigue. However, by running without my watch and on a new route, my brain no longer had a clear marker of when I was approaching that 5km limit. It didn’t trigger the alarm bells.

This reminded me of a training session before taking an ice bath. The trainer had us place our hands in ice water and notice what happens after a minute. Almost immediately, the pain sets in, as if our body is screaming, “This could cause serious harm!” But rationally, we know that nothing harmful will happen in a short time. If we stay calm and breathe through it, the pain eventually disappears.

Pain signals are valuable — they alert us to potential danger. But the key is to treat pain as information, not an absolute truth. When it strikes, instead of reacting immediately, ask yourself, “What is my body trying to tell me? Is it really dangerous if I continue?”

So, what does this have to do with organizational change?

At Unblock, we work with leaders who are ready to make change. Change is often necessary when an organization becomes stuck in a pattern that hinders progress and threatens its long-term success. The desire to change is driven by a need to escape the vinyl record’s groove — or, in other words, reach the planet’s escape velocity to explore the next frontier.

When boundaries are pushed, it’s common to hear reactions like:

• “That will never work here.”

• “We’ve always done it this way.”

• “We tried that before, and it didn’t work.”

• ”We can’t do that because of x (regulatory, budget, technology, etc.).”

These reactions are not so different from my knee pain. They are the organization’s defense system, urging you to stop because it fears harm.

As a change leader, though, you know you cannot be discouraged by these signals of “resistance.” If you are, the system won’t evolve and adapt. This is why some leaders react by pushing these ‘annoying’ signals aside.

Some may respond by explaining more forcefully, convincing people, and ensuring they “get it.” Others might rely on power, forcing compliance through job reapplications or by adjusting incentives.

Treat resistance as information

While these tactics can sometimes be necessary as a last resort, they should not be your first approach if you want to create meaningful, lasting change. Instead, I encourage you to treat resistance as valuable information. See it as data that reveals what the system is trying to communicate. Here’s how to do that:

• Shift your mindset to ask: “What might we be missing? Is something unclear? Have we overlooked a concern? Did we fail to bring someone along on this journey?”

• Engage in a conversation as equal adults, rather than adopting a “parent” role demanding compliance. Understand what’s behind the reaction. Invite people to share their perspectives. Ask questions and truly listen.

• Acknowledge their concerns, but gently challenge the idea that the danger they perceive is real. Reassure them that you care, and they don’t need to be afraid.

• Ask: “What would make it feel safe to try? What do you need to get on board?”

You can do it

While I still occasionally feel knee pain when running, especially as I near home, I no longer let these warning signals stop me.

If you’re pushing boundaries, don’t let discomfort hold you back in old patterns. But also, don’t ignore it or dismiss it. Instead, acknowledge it, give it attention, and allow it to dissolve over time.

Tell those around you: “I believe you can do this. Others have done it before. The danger isn’t real. Yes, there’s risk, but we can mitigate that. Take the first step. And then the next. Breathe through the discomfort. The world won’t end — at least not today. You’ll be fine.”

By doing this, you may achieve far more than you thought possible.

In other news

My latest book Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization is now also available on Audible and Spotify.

Also, will you join me on February 20th at the Agile Strategy Meetup?

That’s it for now!

Here’s what happens in most teams: After some mandatory small talk about everyone’s holidays, we get back to work as if nothing had happened. In the end, we all know what we need to do, don’t we? We review the goals and priorities that we’ve set in December and get going.

However, if you’re doing that, you’re missing the opportunity for radical alignment. To set your team up for success in this new year, I suggest skipping the small talk and going for big talk instead.

Four powerful questions

Take the opportunity to let each team member reflect on these four simple yet powerful questions below.

Looking at the work that lies ahead for us in 202X…

1. 🔥 Intentions: Why do you want to be part of it? How would you like to contribute?

2. 🤔 Concerns: What might go wrong? What worries you?

3. 🤝 Boundaries: What do you need to be at your best? What agreements should we put in place to work well together?

4. 🌟 Dreams: What will be true if this goes incredibly well? What might be possible?

Here’s a short video where I talk through these sections (abbreviated to ICBD).

How to do it

• Start with 10 minutes in silence, where every member writes their answers individually.** Then, let everyone place their answers on a board for everyone else to see.

• After some time to read, take 5 minutes for each of the four sections, let people ask clarifying questions about each other’s post-its, and listen empathetically without responding or discussing.

• After going through each section, ask: “What did you notice? Did anything surprise you?” Finally, to put the insights into practice, ask, “What working agreements should we make?”

** Download a 1-page ICBD template as part of the bonus materials of my new book.

Why it works

ICBD was invented by Alexandra Jamieson and Bob Gower. In their book Radical Alignment, they share that they developed these questions to increase clarity, reduce miscommunication, and build a shared sense of trust and respect.

A meaningful conversation about people’s aspirations and worries increases empathy among team members, accelerating team development and performance.

When Google studied 200 teams across their organization, they discovered five factors that consistently differentiate top-performing teams:

1. Psychological Safety: Team members feel safe taking risks and being vulnerable in front of each other. Psychologically safe teams accelerate learning and innovation because their members feel confident admitting mistakes and offering new ideas.

2. Dependability: Team members reliably complete quality work on time and take their responsibilities seriously.

3. Structure and Clarity: The team has clear roles, goals, and plans — members know what is expected of them, what they are aiming for, and how they will get there.

4. Meaning: Team members have a sense of purpose in their work or the team’s output.

5. Impact: Team members believe their work matters and makes a difference.

The conversation that ICBD encourages grows psychological safety, dependability, clarity, and meaning.

NOTE: Of all the dynamics in this top five, psychological safety had 𝘣𝘺 𝘧𝘢𝘳 the most impact on performance. One surprising result was that who is on a team matters much less than how team members interact. The number of top performers on a team, or the team’s average intelligence, wasn’t a good indicator of a team’s effectiveness.

ICBD is only one practice that helps build an effective team. I’ve included many others in my new book, Unblock.

Conclusion

Taking time to answer the four questions at the start of the year can save you a lot of time later. Having everybody’s ICBD on the table drastically increases the chance of everybody getting what they need to give the new year their best shot.

I wish you the best for the upcoming year!

Haier is the world’s largest and fastest-growing kitchen and home appliance manufacturer; it makes refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and many similar products.

For decades, Haier was a relatively traditional hierarchical company. However, as the company grew, it introduced more layers and management structures. CEO Zhang Ruimin felt they were losing competitiveness, and their conventional management practices were unfit to respond to the complexity of the rapidly changing digital age. He said:

“Bureaucracy was ruling, and no one took real responsibility”

In 2005, Zhang introduced a new model to minimize the distance between employees and customers and enable everyone to become entrepreneurs. He deconstructed the hierarchical pyramid and asked the company’s 12,000 middle managers to take on a (non-managerial) role in an ME or leave.

Haier restructured into more than 4,000 self-managing ‘micro-enterprises’ (MEs) — autonomous, customer-focused units comprising an average of 10–15 people. The MEs own their P&L (profit and loss), set their (product) strategy, and decide who to hire and fire. The ME teams use an election to determine who will be their leader. The ME member’s pay depends on the success of their ME — everyone is directly accountable to the customer and has skin in the game. To scale their services, MEs form collaborative networks.

At Haier, everyone (both inside and outside the company) can post a business idea and invite people to help. If they can secure seed funding and attract initial team members, they become the owners of their newly formed ME. They can secure more funding after running a successful pilot. If a ME is unsuccessful, it gets disbanded, and its members can apply to join other ME’s.

Their radical organizational model contributed to Haier becoming the number one global brand in major appliances for ten consecutive years.

Should you follow Haier’s example?

Several organizations have already started to adopt the model. Should you transform your organization to replicate Haier’s model of networks of self-managing teams like Bayer is doing? If you can, you totally should. But, likely, you don’t have the appetite or authority to overhaul the whole organization’s structure, and you don’t need to.

You can reap some benefits by starting a marketplace of Mission Based Teams, within the existing structure. Read the full article to learn how to do it.

Read the full article

Join me to learn about Roche

It is exactly what pharmaceutical company Roche did. Over the years, they have launched over 1,100 self-managed Mission Based Teams in 89 countries. They work alongside the formal organizational structure and bring faster, better solutions to patients. By facilitating collaboration across the organization, Roche enables people to apply their talents where they make the most impact, beyond their formal roles and departmental and geographic boundaries.

Join me next week in a conversation with Hemerson Paes (Senior Global Network Catalyst) on 📆 December 4th, 16:00-17:00 CET. Register here to attend or watch the video after the event.

Unblock book launch

Those who follow me on LinkedIn see that it was a busy couple of weeks with our book launch party, online launch, and many podcast appearances. I’ve also had many interesting conversations with leaders about embracing new ways of working at Rabobank, leadership at Bol, and pioneering AI at RTL.

The reception has been great. I especially loved this comment by Christian Barnhausen:

If you haven’t done so already:

• Read more about the book

• Order a copy at Managementboek or Amazon

• Claim your free extra copy

That’s it for now!
Cheers, Jurriaan

It captures the frustration many leaders feel: the ambitions are clear, but making it happen often feels like swimming through peanut butter.

To bring your goals to life, you need people to take ownership. You need less talking, more action, less analysis, faster decisions, less bureaucracy, and more initiative. My new book, Unblock, is a practical guide for leaders ready to break through organizational barriers and finally move the needle. Here is a sneak preview.

NOTE: At the end of this newsletter, I have included a link to the book’s bonus materials.

1. Strategy

If there is a gap between your strategy and day-to-day action in the organization, look at the strategy itself. Chances are, it is either a document with carefully crafted lofty visionary statements or a detailed list of everything that needs to be done. In both cases, it won’t create the necessary strategic awareness for teams to execute it.

Try this: Use even-over statements to articulate strategic choices. For example, the clothing brand Patagonia is famous for having the trade-off “Sustainability even over Profit.” Everyone in the organization is aware of this strategy, and articulating a simple heuristic like this permits people to favor the sustainable approach over a profitable one when facing an everyday decision. Furthermore, even-over statements force you to articulate what you are willing to trade off. What is it that you will NOT prioritize to achieve your ambitions?

2. Steering

Have you ever felt that your meticulously crafted annual plans quickly become obsolete? Many organizations invest heavily in up-front planning, only to realize later that adapting to change demands a more flexible approach.

Try this: Facebook is known for planning long-term and very short-term, but nothing in between. To put this into practice, use 90-day Outcomes. Based on the longer-term strategy, define what outcomes your team or department will focus on in the next 90 days. Write them as outcomes, not outputs. So don’t write “Launch new mobile app” but “Over 100 people use the app daily and have left a positive review.”

3. Decisions

You’ve probably been in situations where decisions drag on for weeks from meeting to meeting, as leaders try to get everyone to agree or to request more information before any action is taken. The accumulating cost of indecision is often invisible.

Try this: Help teams differentiate between reversible and irreversible decisions. When a decision is similar to picking which hat to buy, you don’t need to overthink it. You can act quickly, learn from the outcome, and move forward. To create momentum, stop asking, “Do we all agree?” but ask, “Is it safe to try?”

4. Ownership

When people are not taking ownership, don’t blame them for it. Instead, look at the organizational system to see how it encourages or discourages them from taking initiative. One common problem is that it is unclear within which boundaries people are free to act. Without that clarity, people will continue to ask for permission or wait for instructions.

Try this: Define the “waterline” — a concept invented by W.L. Gore (the makers of gore-tex). Imagine your teams are on a ship. If you make an unfavorable decision, and it results in something puncturing the ship above the waterline, it’s annoying. However, you can get to shore and repair it. But if something below the waterline blows up, the ship might sink, resulting in irreversible harm. Consider what types of decisions people are hesitant to make that you’d like more of without them needing to ask for permission.

5. Teamwork

Have you noticed that conversations lack openness or that feedback is scarce? Psychological safety—feeling secure to share ideas and take risks—is essential to effective collaboration and high performance, yet many (leadership) teams struggle to foster it.

Try this: Build trust and empathy in the team by asking members to draft their “personal user manual.” It is a document outlining ‘how to work with me,’ including answers to questions like “What are some things people may misunderstand about you?”, “What do you struggle with, and how can your colleagues help you?” and “How do you prefer to receive feedback?”

6. Meetings

We have too many meetings, many of which are of poor quality. Research confirms dysfunctional meetings are associated with reduced market share, innovation, and employee engagement. Every minute someone spends in a wasteful meeting can’t be spent on meaningful work. At the same time, meetings are crucial for coordination, collaboration, and sense-making. You need a meeting culture that makes it easier, not harder, for teams to reach their goals. 

Try this: Stop all recurring meetings and establish an “operating rhythm”—a structured, predictable cadence of fit-for-purpose meetings designed to move work forward. Start by asking: which conversations must we have and how often?

For example:

1. A weekly meeting with a flexible agenda, focused on getting everyone what they need to progress in the upcoming week

2. A monthly retrospective meeting, to reflect on how things are going and what can be improved

3. A quarterly strategy meeting to review the long-term strategy, and review and update 90-day outcomes.

Unblock is filled with real-world examples, step-by-step exercises, and checklists to help you put concepts into action right away. My goal is to help leaders achieve their ambitions and develop an organization that is both successful and amazing for the people who work in it.

PS. Did you know you can claim a free extra copy of one of my books?

Order now

Videos

Below is a 20-minute keynote I gave at the book launch. Here are the slides, and a Q&A session with my colleague Nelia Booden.

Bonus materials

Follow this link to access helpful templates and worksheets from the book:

• Strategic Intent Worksheet

• Decision Proposal Template

• Role & Decision Rights Charter

• Personal User Manual Template

• Intentions, Concerns, Boundaries, Dreams

• Experiment charter

• Sheet with all Chapter Outcomes

• Videos for each chapter

Bonus materials

Enjoy!

Jurriaan

Order now

Available formats:

• Hardcover (my favorite!)

• Paperback

• Kindle

• Audiobook recording is in progress 🎙️

Limited offer: a free extra copy of my book to give away

It would be awesome if you could help me spread the word. Here’s how you can help:

• Buy a copy of the book.

• Post a photo of the book on LinkedIn with your thoughts.

• Write an honest review on Goodreads or Amazon*

* Amazon reviews are very helpful, but it is against their policy to offer book reviewers a free gift.

After you’ve done this, please contact me with the links to your reviews and a shipping address. In return, you can choose between:

• Option 1: a free extra copy of “Unblock” to give away to someone

• Option 2: a free copy of my first book, Formula X

Will you join me at the online book launch?

I’d be delighted if you would join me and the Unblock team in celebrating the launch online on October 10th, 16:00-17:00 CET.

What will be covered:

• Insights & inspiration about the contents of the book + live Q&A

• Learn about the innovative way the book was developed

• Special offer and giveaway for attendees

Over 280 people have already signed up!

Register now

Endorsement

"This book is highly relevant. I enjoyed its no-nonsense style, recognizable real-life cases (that often made me ‘cringe'), and practical tips that elegantly bring the solutions home.” - Barbara Arnst, VP Agility & Transformation, Telenet

Next week I will release the book’s bonus materials, templates and worksheets.

Enjoy!

Jurriaan

Business books should be enjoyable. That’s why I use fictional stories and cartoons that are not only fun to read but introduce the theory in a relatable way. I’m sharing six of them in this newsletter.

Is your strategy a strategy?

I’m using this cartoon to point out that many strategies are not strategies and fail to create any alignment or provide a competitive advantage.

Be careful with incentives

This comic is a beautiful explanation of Goodhart’s Law — when people are incentivized or penalized for achieving certain goals, they will try very hard to achieve them and will find ‘creative’ and irrational ways to do so.

Are people saying yes, but doing no?

In the book, I offer various methods to improve the quality and speed of decision-making while tapping into the sometimes unspoken wisdom of the group.

Is bureaucracy killing great ideas?

This cartoon illustrates the fact that many organizations make it difficult to turn a great idea into action.

Does your meeting culture help you achieve your goals?

Dysfunctional meetings are associated with reduced market share, innovation and employee engagement. I love this classic cartoon and couldn’t resist including it.

How good are your hybrid meetings?

Most hybrid meetings are terribly ineffective, particularly for remote attendees who struggle to follow conversations. In the book, I provide a few tips on how to turn them into awesome gatherings.

Peek inside

“Most books you read contain the theory, but few link it with practical, actionable examples. This one does, and is impactful and authentic, easy to digest. It will be the book for the team.” — Anders Ohrling, CIO Europe, Electrolux

If you’re curious, take a look at the complete Table of Contents. Stay tuned for when it drops on Amazon!

That’s it for now. Have a great week.

Reduce analysis paralysis with reversible decisions

When should we act fast and take informed risks, and when should we act more slowly and deliberately? It helps to distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions.

To put this idea into practice, James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, suggests categorizing decisions as: hats, haircuts or tattoos. He argues that most decisions are like hats. You can try one, and if you don’t like it, you put it back and try another. Since the cost of a mistake is low, you can decide quickly and try many of them.

Some decisions are more like haircuts. If you get a bad one, you can’t fix it immediately, and you might feel embarrassed for a while. But after a few months, it grows out, and nobody will notice it anymore. You won’t be stuck for long with your choice, so there’s no point in spending hours or even days searching for the best option.

However, a few decisions are like tattoos. Once you make them, you have to live with them. Even years later, you’ll be reminded of the choice you made. When facing an irreversible decision, move slowly and think carefully. (Of course, strictly speaking, tattoos can be removed, but it won’t be easy or come cheap.)

A proportionate amount of effort

Few decisions are ever fully reversible or irreversible; it’s a spectrum. If a decision is cheap and easy to undo, spend minimal time and resources deciding whether to do it. If it’s costly and difficult to undo, be more careful.

If the cost of doing the wrong thing is high, and the time spent on deciding is worthwhile, then put in the effort to try to make the best choice. Slow down the decision-making process, conducting the necessary research to explore possible scenarios, quantify risks, and reduce uncertainty. Then, think deeply and decide carefully.

But even if a decision is irreversible, consider the negative consequences of doing it wrong. If those are acceptable, you can still make the decision quickly.

After making a decision, set a reminder to check the outcome at a future date. Use any learnings from this to correct your course. 

To accelerate decision-making, we should become comfortable with making decisions with incomplete information. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said:

Unboxing the first book

After following track & trace all day, the moment was finally there to see the first print proof copies of my new book. I like ebooks, but seeing it with ink on paper is something different. Here’s the video from the moment (by co-founder Nelia Booden).

Will you join us at the book launch?

My new book will be available starting in October. Please join us to celebrate it live on October 10th, 16:00-17:00 CET.

What will be covered:

• Insights & inspiration about the contents of the book

• Learn about the innovative way the book was developed

• Live Q&A

• Special offer and giveaway for attendees

Register here

“Brilliant… the book provides leaders with a practical tool kit to help Unblock the challenges that hold most teams back.”
— Nick Andrews, Senior Director of Organizational Development, Expedia

When Wanda presented, only a few people paid attention. The others were on their laptops, seemingly waiting for it to end. Claire thanked Wanda and said: “Now, let’s discuss.” One of the managers asked a detailed question. Even though Wanda had previously provided the answer during her presentation (while he was not listening attentively), she graciously answered.

Two other managers started debating the performance of one of our suppliers — a topic that was only loosely related to Wanda’s project update. They went down a ‘rabbit hole’ for about 10 minutes.

What happens in Claire’s team is not uncommon. Lots of creativity, motivation, and energy are wasted in meetings every single day. Most people hate them, but accept this as a fact of life, saying, “Meetings are just awful, you know?” But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Research confirms dysfunctional meetings are associated with reduced market share, innovation, and employee engagement. Every minute someone spends in a wasteful meeting can’t be spent on meaningful work. Remember, talking about work isn’t the same as doing work.

However, meetings are crucial for coordination, collaboration, and sense-making. But you need a meeting culture that makes it easier, not harder, for teams to reach their goals.

At Unblock, we have helped hundreds of leaders become better at cooperating by improving their meeting rhythm and the structure of their recurring meetings. The meeting structure that we’ve consistently found incredibly effective is the structure we named the “Unblock Meeting.”

The meeting’s purpose is to coordinate and unblock the team’s work: get everyone in the team what they need to make progress until the next team meeting. At the end of the meeting, everyone should know the status of the team’s projects and any actions that they and their colleagues will take.

Read the full article

Book launch countdown

Here is some exciting news about my upcoming book:

1. There is a new and final cover design (see below).

2. Editing and interior layout are complete.

3. The book’s website is extended and includes the full Table of Contents.

4. Dozens of leaders have provided their endorsement.

5. We have picked a launch date: October 1st. 🥳

"'Unblock' is the ultimate manual for leaders needing to achieve drastically better outcomes quickly. It explains the theory, provides practical examples, and guides you step by step. This is no ordinary business book! ‘Unblock’ is a reference guide, operating manual, and checklist all rolled into one. It’s the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Business Galaxy.”
— Barry Doran, CFO, Sub-Saharan & South Africa, B/S/H/

Stay tuned!

Jurriaan