In this clarified episode, Jurriaan Kamer, Co-founder of Unblock, shares how he uses his knowledge and expertise to advise leaders on unlocking their organization’s full potential by fundamentally changing how they work.
You will discover:
– Why you should work on the “fish bowl” more than the “fish”
– How to move from the burden of traffic controller to the freedom of a road designer
– What is blocking your organization from moving forward faster
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I am here with yet another high demand coach from the other side of the pond. Some might argue the better side of the pond. I don’t know. Maybe we’ll have to figure that out at the end of the episode, but we have with us today, Jurriaan Kamer,who is an organizational change expert focused on applying modern methods to unblock organizations and improve their outcomes. Jurriaan helps leaders to eliminate ineffective strategy, pointless meetings, bureaucratic structures and slow decision making. He studied the most radical and adaptive organizations globally, including some with no managers and others with high, high degrees of autonomy over the last decade, jurrien has applied those insights as a speaker, author and as a consultant. He co founded unblock, a consultancy that works with leaders worldwide, and is also releasing his latest book, unblock, clear the way for results and deliver a thriving or develop a thriving organization. He believes that organizations are built on sense and respond, should be built on sense and respond instead of plan and predict to lead us into the future. Well, you’re in so excited to have you here. Had a bunch of fun planning for this episode, and I’ve got some questions lined up for you, but yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit more about this book. It’s actually coming out now in September, yeah? And it seems super exciting. A lot of work’s gone into it. Tell me, the first question that jumped out of my mind soon as I saw the title was, what’s actually what’s blocking us or who is blocking us?
Jurriaan Kamer
Yeah? So thanks for having me. I think this book is for leaders who want to get a lot of better outcomes quickly, right so that could be doubling your growth, your market share, bringing a new, amazing product to life, or reinventing the core business. Could be anything, but it’s for leaders that also have realized that their organization is blocking them. And that could be like, you know, you see not them, people, not not taking ownership. You see a lot of talking, little action. You see a lot of analysis, slow decision making, all those things that you already mentioned. And so, so it’s, it’s as people that we that as groups of people and humans, that we try to organize ourselves. We get in our own way sometimes. And yeah, so, so my book and our work is really focused around, how do we unblock organizations at different levels.
Scott Ritzheimer
As, as you’re saying this, and as I was getting ready for like, there’s this deep pain that I’ve seen, particularly, I work a lot with founders, right? So folks that were there all the way. At the beginning, they had a ton of success. You know, they’ve got folks walking through their halls they don’t even know anymore. You know, it’s such a different world from those early days. And one of the ways it feels so different is, is just the the amount of stuff that has to happen for anything to happen, right? It just feels like the gears start grinding, and a lot, a lot of my left one is, like, is this? Is this what it’s supposed to is this just what being a big business is? What would you say to that?
Jurriaan Kamer
I mean, if you, if you become big, a lot of different things need to happen. So, so, like, there, there’s you could say, like, well, that’s somewhat the consequence of being big. At the same time, there’s lots of companies who’ve been able to scale their startup culture and their startup mentality and keep it while they were growing and didn’t, you know, didn’t fall into the traps of bureaucracy. In my work, I really worked a lot with with the idea of aligned autonomy, so the idea of building an organization that where people can take a lot of action and take a lot of ownership, but in the right direction. And it’s about, it’s about flipping, flipping the organizational culture from a place where people wait before taking action or have to ask for permission, or have to ask for direction from from managers and leaders, to a culture where, you know, people can just do whatever they think is good for business within safeguard drills and toward a common organizational objective. And it may be that may sound like a like a dream come true, but, but that’s that’s actually the pattern I’ve seen across some of these fast, innovative organizations that they’ve all find, found a way to use aligned autonomy at skill, and thus they stay fast and agile, even though they are big.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So I’ve bumped into a couple of challenges, and this one was working with teams, and one is particularly with the founder led organizations, not so much later generations, but when the founder is still involved, it’s like, it might be a very innovative company, but it’s really just a very innovative person, right? They’ve surrounded themselves with a lot of people who who can execute on their ideas, but the vast majority of meaningful innovation happens in in a person, not even a team. How do you start to get that out of a single individual without sacrificing the natural alignment that comes from that? Right? If it’s just the right person, It’s very likely to be aligned. But I think one of the fears is, if I start pushing out everyone to innovate, they’re just gonna go like lighting fireworks inside of the fire right store. That’s not great.
Jurriaan Kamer
I mean, first and foremost, it’s a personal development journey for that leader, that founder. I’ve been in organizations like that, where, where it was all about, how can I trust my people and also enable my people to do that? Sometimes I compare the shift for leadership and those situations going from your your, you know, your traffic controller, right? You’re you’re kind of setting all the directions you tell everything that needs to happen. You’re kind of in front of the traffic, directing the traffic while, while we want to create an organization, create leaders that are like road designers, basically creating the conditions for flow and continuous movement to happen. So, so it’s a different task for the leaders. I think that’s the first thing to realize for leading that like that, I would say like, I’m assuming this person has hired really good people that are able to innovate, but they somehow don’t, I think, like going from that assumption, it’s all about building structures that allow people to take action, to bring ideas, to take action on those ideas, without everything needing to go through that single bottleneck. And that’s a two way dance, like it’s a one hand letting go from the from the leader to do that, but also, as a leader, be super clear about the direction you want to head into. And then, you know, setting, setting, those enabling constraints. So we call them to to to let the thing go and let people move in the right direction, and taking, taking action initiative.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that traffic controller and road designer analogy. I should come back to that in a second. But you touched on what I think is a really big issue, and that is the assumption that they have really good people on their team, right and I don’t know that that’s always an effective assumption. And even if they have the right people, there’s a question, do I have the right people? How do I know if I have the right people? So when it comes to the types of changes that that you’ve discovered, that you’ve laid out in your book, who does the CEO need to have on their team to help affect that change?
Jurriaan Kamer
I think, I think it’s important to to have, well, first and foremost, I would say, like, it’s a bit of black and white frame to say it’s, it’s either a diver, the right person or not the right person. I think, I think if we look at human talent, we also are not really good sometimes in organizations to tap into the wide range of talents that somebody has. So a big, a big thing I would try before dismissing my people, is to to to know, to try things around voting with your feet, for example. So if you, if you go and I talk to people and ask them, like, you know what, you have a certain role, you have a job title, let’s, let’s take that away for now. Like, like, imagine it doesn’t exist. What is it that you’re really good at that you think you can contribute to the to the overarching strategy of this company? And then let you know, be surprised by what people say. And people might say, like, you know what, I’m forced to do this one thing, and I’m not super good at it, but actually what I really want to do, or the idea that we should really pursue, or the thing I’m hearing from customers every day, but, you know, I don’t know how to being here to life is this and this and this. So. So I think, think, though, I on one hand, I would assume that the the great ideas for innovation. Live already in your organization, and the only thing you need to do is figure out ways to tap into them and to use a more broad range of skills of the people in there. And so say, like these traditional, like function, role, job description type thingies that we have is holding us back, because, you know, I’m much better suited to to do this part, but that thought that part of my work, or I just know in my private life, I’m an amazing arts person, but I’m not able to contribute to the design team because I’m holding this role as CFO, right? So those are some of the things you could try, you know, and then ultimately, you have to figure out, of course, do we have enough people that are innovative? Do we have enough people that are operationally process oriented. Do we have enough discipline? There’s all these factors to figure out. But I I’m somebody who focuses more on the on the fish bowl rather than the fish so to give you another metaphor there, it’s like I really believe that, that if we, if we work on the environment that shapes humans behavior, rather than focusing on the individual and trying to make those people better or replacing them, you kind of are able to influence behavior in a good way at scale. So that’s my focus.
Scott Ritzheimer
It’s so true. It’s so true and and so I want to go back to this traffic controller and road would you call road designer, designer, you road architects, yeah, yeah. Here’s the really cool thing about that is, particularly for founders, listening, when you design a road, right? You do some work on the front end. It’s hard. It’s not the easiest thing in the world. There’s some work that goes into it. But then that road can be used and used and used and used when you’re controlling traffic when you’re stuck in that mode, you have to be there anytime there’s traffic. Yeah. And so one of the biggest kind of suffocating factors that that founders that have become CEOs find themselves in is there. Do they always have to be there because they’re stuck in this traffic controlling mode?
Jurriaan Kamer
Right? Right?
Scott Ritzheimer
And what you can do is actually start to look ahead. How do you start to design these roads in advance, right? So that people can use them, they can do it on an ongoing basis, and then you have the freedom that you want. What would you say you’re in is is kind of a first step in that direction, because it kind of feels hard to design a road while you’re traffic controlling at the same time.
Jurriaan Kamer
That does seem hard, and that makes sense at the same time, I think if you are in the work, you also know how to work is happening, so you have an opportunity to, well, if you’re it’s a skill, but to be able to observe what you do every day and take and unpack that into different buckets, I would say one of the things you can really start with is to figure out the the operating rhythm of the organization, so So the set of meeting routines that feed into each other that will, you know, make sure the right conversations happen at the right time, so that could look like, you know, every quarter, we have a day where we talk about strategy and prioritization. Every week, we we sit down and review the progress towards our goals. Every month we sit together and reflect on what’s happening and what has happened and how we can be better at that and you and it could be cross functional across different departments. The meeting rhythm is provides the heartbeat for the conversations to happen is and the moment you have that you things can calm down. You see less meeting overload happening because people always have a place to go with their thing. So that’s one way to start building a road.
Scott Ritzheimer
So good, so good. All right, you’re in. There is a question that I like to ask all my guests, and it is this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Jurriaan Kamer
Yeah, I think the one thing that that always sticks as a virus, I would say, in a positive way whenever we work, is this phrase of, is it safe to try so often, when we make decisions, we get hung up in details in analysis. We want to get it right. We want to get everybody’s opinion heard and involved. And along the way, while you’re in analysis paralysis, nothing happens. So you’re you’re learning nothing, and everything is just stalled. And the thing that the magic word, the magic phrase that we use consistently with our clients, is try instead of asking, Is it perfect or is it the right decision? You ask? Is it safe to try? And that completely shifts the narrative in the conversation and allows more action to happen and more learning to happen.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so good. We had a version, a less eloquent and slightly riskier version of this at a company that that I ran earlier in my career, and but it was going at the same thing. We would say you could try anything for 30 days, right? Right? And there were one things you mentioned several times, there were wide guardrails on that right? So you couldn’t, you couldn’t, like, cuss out customers. You know you’re like, you couldn’t violate our values. You had to have a legitimate reason for why you do it. But within the those guard like, why not? Why not try it for 30 days? And one of the things that this will that I’ve found, I’d love to see, if you’ve had this experience, is there are some folks who are just kind of prone to innovation. There are others that are more prone to kind of risk scares them a little bit more, but this language around trying seems to unlock the innovative qualities in those people as well. Would you?
Jurriaan Kamer
Right? Yeah, completely agree, and it’s very valuable to have a conversation about, why is it not safe to try it like, what makes it unsafe? You can still, indeed, you can make the experiment shorter, like 30 days. Like you said, you can make the impact shorter. You can. There’s all sorts of way, ways to lower the risk profile if there is any risk involved, but at least you have a way to create forward movement. And now it’s not about should we do it? The question is, what would make it safe to try which, which kind of start is biased towards action?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that. I absolutely love that. All right, so the book is coming out. It’s actually right in the process of coming out now as we speak. So it’s called Unblock, clear the way for results and develop a thriving organization. Where can folks find it?
Jurriaan Kamer
They can find it at Amazon or at www.unblock.works/book
Scott Ritzheimer
Beautiful, beautiful and Jurriaan. Anyone wants to find out more about the work that you and your partners do, how can they find more about you as well?
Jurriaan Kamer
So they can follow me on LinkedIn, or they can go to the same website, www.unblock.works or my first name and last name .com and they’ll have everything.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. We’ll get those in the show notes for you guys. Jurriaan, thanks so much for being here. Just a privilege having you. What a fascinating conversation for those of you watching and listening. Know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I. Cannot wait to see you next time take care.
Contact Jurriaan Kamer
Jurriaan Kamer is an organizational change expert focused on applying modern methods to unblock organizations and improve their outcomes. Jurriaan helps leaders eliminate ineffective strategy, pointless meetings, bureaucratic structures, and slow decision-making. He has studied the most radical and adaptive organizations globally, including ones without managers and high levels of autonomy. Over the last decade, Jurriaan has applied those insights as a speaker, author, and consultant. He co-founded Unblock, a consultancy that works with leaders worldwide. He believes that organizations built on ‘sense and respond’ instead of ‘plan and predict’ are the future.
Want to learn more about Jurriaan Kamer’s work at Unblock and/or get a copy of his book? Check out his website at https://www.unblock.works/
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