What is important about this book
The themes of “Unblock” are the blocks that prevent, slow down or make it extremely strenuous for any organization to achieve its goals.
The author, Jurriaan Kamer, is a consultant and speaker. With his company Unblock, he has helped unblock hundreds of organizations, worldwide, working with their leaders over the past 20 years.
The book is presented as a practical guide for leaders and managers. It offers concrete insights for transforming business dynamics, both by breaking down barriers that limit people’s potential and by fostering a system in which collaboration, autonomy and growth can flourish unhindered in a natural and sustainable way.
To achieve its goals, an organization needs people to take responsibility and make decisions more quickly. In this direction, a structured consultation process can help overcome barriers between departments and hierarchical levels, enhancing the collective wisdom of the organization and strengthening autonomy and a sense of ownership. To promote autonomy aligned with business goals, it is critical to actively involve people in defining strategy and let them choose how best to contribute to desired outcomes.
A key theme the work focuses on is the role of meetings, which, if poorly managed, can undermine innovation and people engagement. In order to arrive at effective meeting management, the author proposes a specific method aimed at fostering strategic alignment, stimulating collaboration, transparency and decision-making.
Another topic he discusses in depth is the importance of Psychological Safety, highlighting how creating a work environment in which team members feel free to take risks, express ideas and show vulnerability without fear of negative consequences is the only way to build truly agile, innovative and growth-oriented organizations.
Quotes
- “An organization’s approach to decision-making is often an expression of its culture.”
- “To accelerate decision-making, we should become comfortable with making decisions with incomplete information.”
- “Create an environment where people can take ownership on their own terms and support them.”
- “Without understanding the ‘why’ behind the goal, people can’t and won’t use their individual creativity and talents to contribute to achieving the desired outcomes.”
- “Enable people to constantly bring new ideas to life.”
- “Make learning from failure the norm.”
- “Do retrospectives to unlock continuous improvement.”
- “While individual performance reviews don’t work, measuring progress is essential.”
- “Increase empathy with intentions, concerns, boundaries, and dreams.”
- “Improve strategy realization by letting people shape it.”
- “It’s human nature to want to simplify things when encountering complexity; it calms our brains.”
Structure and contents of the book
The book introduces six common elements where organizations are blocked and offers two practices each to overcome them:
- Strategy: craft a strategy that actually creates alignment and focus at scale.
- Steering: set effective goals and find the right things to measure.
- Decisions: improve the speed of decision making at every level, while increasing quality and inclusion. T he author introduces the Integrative Decision Making (IDM), an in-depth process for decision making structured into four steps: the art of making proposals, asking clarifying questions, conducting reaction rounds, and getting to consent. This will make everyone comfortable in making proposals.
- Ownership: develop a workplace where people happily take ownership and can do what is right for the organization.
- Teamwork: develop psychologically safe teams that master reflection, improvement, and feedback.
- Meetings: get rid of useless meetings and replace them with carefully designed ones that create a heartbeat of progress. The Unblock Meeting is designed to promote participation, relevance, strategic focus, transparency, connection and improvement. It has a specific structure: weekly leadership meetings that are well-facilitated, with rotating facilitators to develop these skills.
Every chapter ends with a list of outcomes describing what it looks like when unblocked. Use it to assess your own situation. In the final chapter, Jurrian Kamer covers a modern approach to leading long-lasting cultural change efforts that won’t fail like most others.
This is why, at the end of the book, there are 7 appendices to help us apply the contents to our organizations.
Instructions for reading this book
You don’t need to read this book from start to finish. The chapters are designed to be standalone, so you can jump directly to what feels most relevant to your situation. When you try to shift the organization to the next gear and it seems blocked, pushing harder doesn’t work. If this is your case, take a close look at which of the six elements suggested in this book your organization is most blocked by, or take self-assessment and start there.
“Unblock” is designed for leaders who want to drive significant change – whether doubling market share, reinventing a core business, launching a product, or implementing regulations. The book focuses on action over excessive analysis and bureaucracy, promoting faster decisions, greater initiative, and increased ownership.
Many traditional management methods fail to eliminate inertia. This book provides modern, pragmatic, and practical solutions to break through organizational dysfunctions, execute strategies effectively, and achieve long-term impact. It helps leaders stop what holds their organizations back and unlock hidden potential.
Each practice is introduced through a short fictional case study or story (based on experience) to illustrate what it looks like when blocked.
With your team, decide which practice would be most valuable and safe to try (every organization and team is different) for a certain period, then review it with your team to see if it helped improve your situation. If so, great! If not, appreciate what you’ve learned. Then adapt it or try something else. Before making a ‘big bang’ change, try out the new structure on a smaller scale to learn how it works. Adjust and scale up what works.
The experiment-driven approach contained in this book creates long-lasting change. Over time, you can apply these practices at team, leadership, and organizational level.
To start implementing the book’s ideas, the author recommends beginning with a retrospective to identify the first constraint to unblock. The transformation process follows these principles:
- From imposing to inviting
- From top-down to co-created
- From blueprint-driven to local adaptation
- From big moves first to small moves first
- From resistance leading to ‘push’ to resistance leading to curiosity