Product Agility

From Fluffy Mission Statements to Actionable Strategies: Lessons from Unblock (with Jurriaan Kamer)

• Ben Maynard & Jurriaan Kamer • Season 2 • Episode 39

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In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, Ben speaks with Jurriaan Kamer, thought leader, consultant, and co-author of Unblock: How to Create Focused and Adaptable Organizations. Jurriaan shares insights from his experience helping organisations overcome bureaucracy, embrace aligned autonomy, and foster true agility at every level.

If you’ve ever wondered how to move beyond vague mission statements and create strategies that work, this episode offers practical advice and actionable frameworks to help you build a more adaptable, focused organization.

Key Takeaways:

  • Aligned Autonomy in Practice: How to balance alignment with autonomy to empower teams while maintaining organisational focus.
  • The Power of Strategic Intent: Replacing vague mission statements with clear, strategic intent to guide decisions and achieve impactful outcomes.
  • Tackling Harmony Addiction: Why avoiding conflict can harm team growth and how to foster constructive disagreement.
  • From Cascading to Integration: Why traditional strategy rollouts fail and how participatory change can improve engagement and results.

Practical Tools & Methods:

  • Even Over Statements: A method to clarify trade-offs and prioritise effectively across teams.
  • Self-Alignment Workshops: Ways to involve teams in co-creating strategies that align with organisational goals.

Quotable Moments:

  • "Strategy isn’t a deck—it’s a cohesive set of choices that enable you to win."
  • "True leadership is about designing systems, not directing traffic."

Links and Resources:

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Strategy is a cohesive set of choices that enables you to win in a certain playing field. So it's a bit technical as a description, but it's really like it's first of all, it's a, it's a set of choices. So it's not some kind of, you know, inspirational goal that nobody knows how to achieve. It's really almost like a plan of what you're going to do in order for you to be successful. It also contains a choice of where do we want to play, the where the where are we best fit to play. So before you can set your strategy, you really need to understand what environment are we in? How do we do we understand our capabilities as an organization? Do we understand what we don't have? Do we understand where the puck is moving toward and you know what, what we might need to do to get there. But the reality is, the moment you start implementing your strategy and you're figuring out the stuff isn't working, you should adjust it. Welcome to the Product Agility podcast, the missing link between agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why, I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Hello and welcome to the Product Agility Podcast. We're in a strange, say strange, interesting, maybe a fun new era of the Product Agility podcast where we are recording episodes literally hours before they are released. So this is no exception. We're keeping on that vein. We're going to keep it nice and fresh because today we have a Urian camera. I said that. OK. You did. Yeah, I did. Hey, Ben. Yeah. Hooray. Welcome. Thank you. Yeah, you're is somebody who I can't think how I found you. Maybe it was through the pod match tool, I can't remember. But you are here and you've written a book and you've been a consultant and you have spent, what, 20 or so years working IT have been hundreds of leaders overcome organizational challenges and helping businesses be successful in various different forms. So it's awesome to have you here. I'm really looking forward to having you share some of the insights from your book Unblock and also your insights from your your fast career to share with our audience. So welcome to the Product Jersey podcast. Thank you, Ben. I'm super excited to be here. So can you tell our listeners what it is that you bring to the party? How come you're in such a good position to talk about helping organisations? Yeah, so like you said, I did start out in in IT was fascinated by how to organise large group of large groups of developers and and IT people to work together and to to build great products. But I increasingly became frustrated and challenged by the rest of the organization. Right. We were we were doing great in IT. We were going fast. We were moving, moving stuff, breaking things. And that that was all fine and, and and fun, but then the annual budgeting cycle hit or the new the new CEO had some new idea and you know, we were pushed down. There was a top down thing pushed through our threats or we were facing the realities of lots of approval processes or governance processes that were just hindering our teams to, to do the right thing. So that point in time, I became really obsessed with how do we, how do we unblock or, you know, create agility in the rest of the organization? How, how can we point this agile toolkit that I had to, to the management layers and the, the, the rest of the organizational bureaucracy. So, yeah, that's what I started trying to do. And I've been experimenting with, with lots of things over the last decade and yeah, and, you know, decided to write another book about it. Would you say your clients have said you've been successful in applying this kind of idea of agility at that management layer? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think like the, the fun thing about working outside of IT is that there's, there's a lot of work to be done outside of IT, right. So I've been working for pharmaceutical companies, logistical companies, basically in every industry there are, there are teams that want to go and move faster and be more adaptive. And obviously a lot of those industries are being digitalized, but a lot of the work is not digital. It's not, it's not software, it's not IT products that are pushed out. It's really about collaboration. Maybe it's a sales team that wants to become better at their work. Sometimes it's a, it's a, it's a, you know, it's, it's a more physical area where, where people are moving products from, from A to B in a physical sense. And so, so these, these agile ideas and agile practices are, are applicable there too. However, you cannot just go and, you know, copy and paste scrum on a sales team. I mean, you can try, but you know, and I have tried definitely, but the, the, the success was limited. So I also, when I, when I started on that journey, I started broadening my horizon of, of other, you know, philosophies and, and modern ways of organising that were out there. And I kind of blended everything in and found a set of things that, that often work. So the question I was going to ask is then what has made you successful where so many others have consistently failed? And I'm saying this to be slightly inflammatory, but I don't think the agile industry. Has really done a good job and I think that it's littered with failures and very few really meaningful successes. So is it what you've just said, you feel that has helped make you the success in this event you are in this particular arena or has it been something else? One of the things that really help is that I've learned over the years to not be, I want to say like condescendant to, to, to for management teams and boardroom teams, like I, I've really tried to, to learn their day-to-day challenges instead instead, next next to them and, and you know, be, be their, be their trusted advisor rather than coming in with a framework and saying, Hey, everybody's doing this. You should be doing this too. And you know, that, that, you know, took some, took a while to overcome some of the frustrations I was having with, with, with groups of leaders. But now, now that I kind of understand their environment and I can actually respond with helpful things that are helpful for a particular problem they're facing, rather than trying to, you know, cut and paste a framework or some kind of methodology onto them that that is just not always the right fit. So I became, I, I think over the years I've become good at identifying common tensions and and figuring out from all the options out there, which is also way beyond agile, what possible possible solutions there are. So about what we're going to go too much into the thing we were going to talk about. I am interested in something in particular, which is you've been on this journey, you've got better over the years and surprisingly you've tried hard at this. What advice would you give to people who can relate to the frustrations and can relate to the senior leadership and organisations not getting on board or being stuck or blocked by management of these processes, but can't get a seat at the table? Like how did you get that those seats at the table? How did you get those introductions to the leadership teams? Because I think that agile coaches, maybe even the some product managers and organisations, if they struggle with moving out from the, the, the weight of the hierarchy above them to have those conversations. So how did you do it? Yeah, two things came to came to mind when you were saying that. The first thing is, is it's quite obvious, but it's very, very useful is spend a lot of time listening to what they're, what they're struggling with, right. Be empathetic to them and stand next to them. Ask if you can join their meetings as an observer. You know, really try to understand their, their reality and their world so you can tune yourself better to, to be that conversational partner. And the other thing, the other thing that came to mind is that if, if they're not, if they're not listening to you and, and, and you know, you have a hard time getting into conversations, make the problem very visible. So one, one example came to mind with one of the, one of the digital accelerators I was, I was working with in, in a financial company where there was so much tech depth and so much stupid process that, you know, every time a development team had a Sprint, they were wasting, you know, dozens of hours on, on, on either waiting for something else or just not being able to do anything useful or productive, or they have to throw away stuff and have to do it again. And one of the team's product owners decided to start capturing and measuring the numbers. And, you know, the hourly rate of everybody was, was known. So every, at every, every quarter, every quarterly meeting where the managers would show up and, and look at the results, they would also present. This is the, you know, from all the waste we had in the last quarter. This was the beautiful car we could have just bought from the store and wreck it into a wall. Because that's the money we wasted just on, you know, just on this stupid stuff. And that, no, people took notice because like, oh really? This is like a £50,000 car. You, you wasted what, what happened? You know, tell us more. And you know, so I think visualizing the visualizing the problem sometimes also help to to to get the attention you need. Brilliant. Well, let's not labour too much from this. Could be has we have a lot to talk about now. Your book unblock has a specific structure to it. Would you mind giving a list? It's just an overview of of the structure of it and then any kind of rationale behind that structure so we can begin to create the a bit of a frame in our mind as to what the book's about. Yeah, so as I said in my introduction, I I'm not a big believer in blueprints and, you know, big frameworks, but I am a believer of, you know, being very modular and, you know, looking at all the possibilities and picking the puzzle pieces that work for you. So that's why the book is is structured into six domains that that that I often seek organizations being blocked at. And then within those six domains, we ioffer 2 organizational practices for each. You want me to go through the domains just to get a sense of what? Yeah, please. Yeah, yeah. So the first one is strategy. You know how to create a strategy that creates focus at scale. Steering all about creating a rhythm of progress and continuously steering, setting, setting outcome driven goals and and following metrics. The third one is about decision making. So how to accelerate decision making and create complex decisions with consent? First one is about ownership. You know, how to create an environment where people are happily willing to, to take ownership and are able to to do the work they think contributes the most #5 is teamwork. It's everything about fostering a team that has more empathy, psychological safety, and habits for reflection and feedback. And the final one is all about meetings. So helpful meeting structures, facilitation techniques and ways to minimize, minimize meeting overload. And so, so the, the reason I'm put that structure into place is that it allows people after very short introduction to figure out which, which domain am I most attracted to. So you can just decide for yourself which, which chapter I'm going to read next and which, which chapters am I going to ignore for now. And over time, you'll, you'll, you'll find ways to, you know, to, to start unblocking and start changing stuff. Thank you for that. I'm wondering, you know, you start with strategy. And I was enjoying reading through the strategy chapter because I think that often strategy is the biggest kind of misunderstood thing. I don't think anyone does a good job at really explaining it succinctly and concisely across any industry, any role. I think people have so many different ideas as to what it could be. And I like the way that you provided some examples of strategies which were maybe a bit fluffy, a bit unclear, not really fit for the purpose of being able to say no to something. And then you came across and I'm not sure if this is your idea or something that you've, you know, borrowed, but the idea of strategic intent. I would love it if you could share with a list of your your views on what strategy is and how you can move from something which is fluffy and vague and not a labeling you to anchor any decisions into something which actually can begin to cure some of the woes that we experience in organisations. Yeah. So strategy is a cohesive set of choices that enables you to win in a certain playing field. So it's a bit technical as a description, but it's really like it's first of all, it's a, it's a set of choices. So it's not some kind of, you know, inspirational goal that nobody knows how to achieve. It's really almost like a plan of what you're going to do in order for you to be successful. It also contains a choice of where do we want to play? The where, the where are we best fit to play. So before you can set your strategy, you really need to understand what environment are we in? How do we do we understand our capabilities as an organization? Do we understand what we don't have? Do we understand where the puck is moving toward and you know what, what we might need to do to get there. So, so it contains a lot of hypotheses. And that's also one of the reasons why a lot of strategy work is bad because people are afraid to be wrong. And if you're, if you're the new CEO and you're announcing your strategy, you want to announce a strategy that you can that, that, that, you know, that that might not fail. And you know, but the reality is the moment you start implementing your strategy and you're figuring out the stuff isn't working, you should adjust it. You know, you shouldn't make a, the strategy exercise is not a once in a five year thing. It's it's really something that happens multiple times a year and readjust if that's that, if, if you're going in the right direction. So, yeah, going back to the definition, it's a set of choices. And one thing that really helps with setting a set of choices that that helps create focus and alignment. Because in the end, that's what you hope a strategy will do is, you know, create a, you know, get more people in the organization to follow you in a certain direction and cut out all of their all of the things that are not helping going toward toward that direction, right. If a strategy isn't able to focus anything, then your strategy isn't effective in, at least not internally. So it should be almost like a one page or half page document that explains. Corporate career, you know, can count the number of strategies we're at which were actually kind of worth their salt on probably on a few digits. And I think it's really, and I'm absolutely been guilty on my learning journey of helping people come up with things which were fluffy and unclear. But I think that when you have a situation where leaders are willing to draw a draw a line of a sand saying that this is our bet, this is how we think we're going to achieve the growth that we need or we're going to penetrate that particular market that we need and not be afraid to adapt that strategy and tweak it as you go through. I mean, it takes a lot of courage and I think it takes a lot of interestingly data. But more than just for data, it needs a lot of analysis to really understand actually like, is this the right thing? How are we going to go about doing it? And if you can put that in, then I said what we're saying in the book. And I think probably something that we are like we both align on is that then with that alignment at that level, that allows a certain degree of autonomy at lower levels, right. That's the whole point. Yeah, that's, that's what my whole book starts by explaining the concept of aligned autonomy, something that I, I think most, most of your listenership probably already grasp. It's a, it's a, a picture that that you've seen. I, I, I asked Henrik Niebach for permission from, from one of his Spotify videos if I could use it. But the book, you know, as the target audience of the book is also leaders that are not so aware of these things. And so everything in the book tries to help you create an organization that has high autonomy but also high alignment, which which is kind of the Holy Grail of building an adaptable organization where the professionals that you've hired are able to make really smart decisions every day based on a framework that you know, adds up to to to something more than the sum of his parts. It sounds lovely and really dishonourable, but people, hey, agile coaches, product professionals, even some leaders are going to be listening to this saying, yeah, absolutely. Who wouldn't want that? But that's also a bit like the fluffy mission statements that we come up with, right. So practically, what tips have you got for people to help foster some of that aligned autonomy? Like what can you what advice can you provide to some of our listeners? Yeah, not so much that you're obviously giving away your book for free and we've only got a few minutes, but what would you what what springs to mind? I mean, one, one thing, if we go back to the strategy example, one example in there is to, to move away from some of the, the top down things that are happening a lot that are actually destroying aligned autonomy and making people disengage with, with what's happening. And people, you know, are like, whatever, you know, these leaders, these leaders, they don't get it. They always send down orders down that, that are not fit for, for what I need. And I'll just do my work. But whatever, you know, that's not what you want. You want high engagement and high align. High align autonomy creates engagement. So for the strategy example, you know, I, I, I have another chapter on it, which is like, don't cascade your strategy, but integrate your strategy. There's this, there's this old, old Adacium of if we have your strategy, the only thing we need to do to implement is to cascade it reading like going to roll it out, you're going to create communications, we're going to give people PowerPoints. We are going to ask our middle management layers to to give it to the teams and they just have to listen to it and follow it. More often than not that that is an exercise that results into nothing because those, you know, those those PowerPoints are, are so far removed from the day-to-day reality that people are like, yeah, whatever. You know, this looks a lot like last year's strategy deck. It's a it's a misunderstanding with some of this. Yeah. Like just bear with me on this, but sometimes people think that the PowerPoint is the strategy, right? Yeah. And that's all it is. It's just this deck. And then, yeah, as we shared the deck, when everyone has the strategy and then our job is done. Yeah. Well, and then what happens in practice, people will go to their To Do List and their pet peeve projects and everything. And they're like, how can we make the link between our agenda and the strategy so we can kind of, you know, kind of prove that we are following the tragedy and basically nothing really changes. The only thing they need to change is the narrative. You know, it's like, you know, we have to have our answer ready for when one of the leaders comes in and asks us like, how is it? How are you aligned to the strategy? You know, we have, you know, we just, you know, let's make up some things. Yeah. Well, I said it's limited by your imagination rather than a practically useful constraint because in that case, we want to do this. So how can we tell the story as to why we're going to do that? And I think that's what a lot of the time I always saw, particularly on some big architectural stiffs, which people really wanted to try and do like it was they would just make up reasons why align to the strategy or make up a really sort of reason as to why it shouldn't align to the strategy. Maybe the strategy is missed something, but just kind of really missing the point on that. So when we talk about integration rather than cascade that practically speaking, what does that mean? What it means is at the moment, you as a, if you, if you're, if you're a leadership team and you're creating a new strategy or you're updating your strategy, you, you really make an effort to integrate people's perspectives all across the organization. So you go and, and, and leverage either digital tools or you have a lot of conversations with people that are doing the work, that are creating the value that are maybe in touch with customers every day. And you, you ask their them for input. Like what are, what is it that we're missing? What is it that we're not doing that we should be doing? What is it? And if you look at their strategy, do you think it will help you create any focus, right? Does it really do something for you? And you integrate all of those ideas and perspectives into the new strategy. And then when you go and then when, when you have, you have your, your, your strategy, you, you invite teams and departments into an exercise of self alignment, meaning like, hey, the organization's strategy is X. Your role in that is why and to maximize your contribution to that strategy. What is your team strategic intent going to be? And what are the trade-offs you are going to make? You make that, that actually you, you make that transparent. You, you, you, you, you go and request that. Every department does that and publishes what that means. And then we have a conversation about where we see deviations or where we see interesting new things that we weren't considering. So it's so it becomes it becomes something that happens at every level basically. And we start maybe we're, you know, maybe you can compare it to your, your Co authoring a book together, you know, with with everyone in your organization and you're creating this strategic map and awareness. So then you can go off and be autonomous of how you're going to achieve it. I think it's one of the big challenges is that often when people make changes. Yeah. And I think that those changes could be from a the market for the product perspective, but also, you know, some strategy results in some level of organizational change and operational change. And there was one bullet point which I just kind of got in front of me here, which I really like because I think it's something that often people forget throughout the organization, unless you're actually in a team, which is what are the biggest challenges that our people face every day? What gets in their way? Because I think there's a reasonably strong argument to say that if your strategy isn't resolving the things that getting people's wave, and then perhaps it isn't actually feasible. And it's the feasibility of the strategy, which I think is often misunder. Yeah, Well, not just missed, just missed, right. We haven't got there. They haven't done the analysis. It isn't feasible. They don't engage customer stakeholders, teams. They don't figure out what needs to happen to kind of overcome the obstacles that are facing them because not even where the obstacles are. They just think that this, this deck will magically solve everything. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's really the the strategy implementation or execution or realization, whatever word you want to use is all about, you know, if this is what we want, are we set up in a way that we're able to achieve that? Like are we what, what other changes do we need to make other rather than, you know, other than just creating a new marketing campaign, It also should be pointed at the organization, like how does the organization, how is the organization in the way for us to achieve this success? So there was a phrase in your book which I liked because I thought it was a nice, a nice take on, I think something that I've been speaking about for a while, but I prefer your language on it, which was harmony addiction. What did you mean by harmony addiction? Yeah, Harmony addiction is when a team so that when a team doesn't, when everybody in the team doesn't want to unsettle the artificial harmony that is happening where it's like, are we? We agree and we disagree, but we don't talk about the elephant in the room. And we don't talk about how maybe one person's behaviour is always disrupting everything. Or we don't talk about how we might talk about it behind each other's backs, maybe at the coffee machine, maybe between one in one-on-one conversations. But as a group, we never really talk about how John's behaviour is really crossing a bordery or border or maybe the leader is so unclear on what they want that everybody's just, you know, chasing their tails. That's what harmony addiction is about, which is a sign of very low psychological safety, where it's where you're afraid to speak up and afraid of the consequences of speaking up. So what are the impacts of harmony addiction to an organization? Yeah. I mean, it means that the things that need to be addressed are not addressed. It means that the team is not growing. The team is not learning together. It means that those blockers that are there stay in place for a long time. It means that some of the top talent might flee because, you know, they don't. They don't want to be in that group. It might mean that the business outcomes are, are, are not being met because, you know, the, the, the, the things that really need to be set at the leadership team level or at another level are just not being said or being addressed. So, yeah, it's, it's harmful in a lot of ways, isn't it? Isn't it straight, nice, easy, kind of simple thing to understand because it's harmony addiction can happen at all different levels of your organization. And then I suppose does then get in the way and stops people achieving their strategic goals. And I say if a team then really care and, and believe in the strategy and what we're trying to achieve, you would hope that that drive with a good dash of psychological safety will allow people to overcome some of that, that harmony addiction, which I've I've often seen has manifested as like a, a no blame culture. But actually it wasn't no blame. It was just blame avoidance. It was avoiding the hard conversations. Yeah. And I think no blame culture is not the right word because it implies that if we are going to address something, we need to blame someone. But I think it's more about the content, not the people, right. So, so it might be, I think my colleague actually, she says everything is in everything. So, so if we avoid to make the tough choice, that probably means there's an organizational thing that is causing that behaviour. So I'm always very empathetic for, you know, if I'm going to give somebody's feedback, if, if I'm going to give somebody some kind of feedback, always have to look behind, you know, what is behind that? What's the behaviour, what's the fear? What's the, what's the competing commitment that is causing it? So, so, so I'll, you know, take a systemic lens and, and definitely no, don't, don't blame because I think in the end, everybody has the right to receive feedback and has the right to at least give, be given a chance to develop themselves. The other thing, the other thing I think what is, what is problematic with harmony addiction is it can happen in, in the whole organization. So if a leadership team is really not, is, is really not doing this, it will perpetuate throughout the organization. And especially I've seen like I've worked with several Swiss companies where, and I think also in Sweden there it's also like even country culture that sometimes causes this at scale where it's like, you know what, we all have to be super nice to each other. We don't want to, we don't want to insult anybody, you know, And that means that we, when we are going to make a decision, we need to do that through consensus. We have to make sure that everybody, everybody's opinion is being integrated into decision, which means you'll get nowhere, right? Consensus can be become becomes really slow and impossible to move forward. So yeah, one of the things that comes to mind that's perfect. It reminds me of ATV program I've been watching recently with my wife called industry and it's about graduates in investment banks, OK. And I watch it and I'm like, wow, that takes me back. I was never a graduate. I was never good enough to be a kind of graduate scheme. My career in banking started. I just got in as a temp. I turned up in a corduroy suit and was given an opportunity to work in the call centre. And then rose, you know, came up through the banking and like starting at the bottom. But I did get the opportunity to spend lots of time on trading floors and lots of time around graduates. And me and my wife are watching it. And there's some scenes where people are just arguing, really arguing about like how they're going to make sure that the bank earns money and what hard decisions they're going to have to make and what tactics they're going to use. What's, what's their strategy for making money and how do they deal with this problem? And she might have turned around to me, she's like, what must it be like to be in a meeting room full of really intelligent people arguing for the good of the company, right? You know, what a wonderful situation to be. And there was, you know, it's not like people there disliked each other. They were, they were arguing, there was conflict, but it was for the greater good. And they could all appreciate that and get on board with whatever decision was made. And I think that's such a such a useful. Situation to put yourself in and that's the one thing that I do remember fondly from my early years in banking was that, you know, you just run clever people who are like, we're going to find a way to be successful. And that might mean that we have really hard conversations and we say no to stuff, but we're not going to go for false harmony. If I think it's crap, I'm going to tell you I think it's crap and we're going to work through that. And I think that's such a powerful situation to be in. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's a constructive disagreement. It's it's a state where if somebody disagrees with me, I know that they still care about me and they don't think I'm an asshole. Like, it's. I'm sorry. I don't know if I can say that on your podcast, but they can say anything you fucking want. That's fine. All right. But I say anything you want. Yeah. Well, now you have. Now you get me thinking. Yeah. It depends what you can weave into the conversation, right. Yeah. I'm Dutch, so you never know. You never know what comes out of my mind. You guys are pretty liberal. Yeah, yeah. So it's like, it's like, it's like in in for the interview of my book, there was, I interviewed someone at Coca-Cola and he says, you know, the, the what we're really trying to do is create a team that where people are not afraid to share their ugly babies. And, and that means like these early unformed ideas that, you know, is shit, but you might be on to something. And if teams are able to share those ideas and, you know, people wrestle with it and, and, and, and give feedback and make it better, then that, then those things can grow into, into, into brilliance. And if, if, if nobody's doing that because they're afraid of, of what people might say, then you know, you won't, you won't get the outcomes you want. And I, I agree with that. I absolutely agree with that. And I also think that it's that they, that type of story, which shared in isolation has led to such a awful predicament for many, many agile coaches because they, they hear little statements, they take little statements like that. And they, they work in an environment where it's actually, it's devoid of strategy, which is meaningful, where everyone's saying yes to everything, where the technical landscape is pretty dire and there isn't really possible of having to react quickly. You've got product managers who want to go out and test ideas, but guess what? They can't because everything takes so long to get out and get feedback from and there are no feedback loops, you know, So I, I do absolutely know what you believe. I think I don't. I don't want. I don't want listeners to think is that like these are the individually, these are magic little silver bullets, right? Which will go and solve it. Because actually I think you'd agree that this that sharing of the ugly baby done in the right context where things have shifted and there is a great performance culture and people know what success means and there is alignment and integration with strategy, then they can do that and you're going to move forward. Otherwise, I mean, how many meetings have we been in where people say, you know, share any idea? And the rest of it, it doesn't make any difference because actually that team aren't empowered to make any real decisions. The juggernaut's left station, man. It's going to, it's we're going to be doing this anyway, so you can share what you like. It's not actually going to change anything. And I think this is when then agile coaches lose a lot of credibility going to try and create this lovely warm kind of hugging environment. People can share what they want, but no one ever delivers, Right? Right. Yeah, that's tough. It is tough. Anyway, I, I've had an axe to grind there clearly, but but with all of this, then comes the idea, which is something I borrowed from Peter Senge actually in the book the 5th discipline, which which I was really interested to read, though, was quite a mildly attacked in good strategy, bad strategy, which I thought was a really interesting little insight, which are kind of lovely. I'm going to try and get Richard on the podcast actually and, and drill him a little bit on that as I find that very interesting. One thing that Peter Senge in the systems, the 5th discipline in the book called systems thinking says is that, you know, effective systems are all about making good trade-offs. Yeah. And you advocate with something called the even over technique. Would you mind giving us a little bit of an insight into that? I found that quite interesting. Yeah. So the the practice of even overstatements are actually inspired by by the Agile manifesto, right. And so individuals and interactions over processes and tools. It's, it's, it's just a really great way of expressing a heuristic. So rule of thumb that somebody can take and, and apply to local decision making. And you know, over the years, me, me and my team and the teams have worked it at the, we've kind of took that to the next level where it's like at every, at every team or every product or every strategy we can think of these kinds of statements that will help people understand what they won't prioritize, because that's often the, the, the, the problematic thing. You know, like, like you said earlier, we want all the things and it, it's very hard to say no to something. And if you have a really good even overstatement, I don't know, like for example, when I wrote the book, I I depict the the trade of short and practical, even over in depth and comprehensive. And that's just an expression of the design principle I'm using for the book. And that gives me permission to, to skip theory in some areas where it's like maybe other books would now spend a whole chapter explaining how this works and why it works and who invented it. I just don't do it. I, I just, you know, that's a, that's a trade off. I'm, I'm putting in a footnote of where the people can find more. But the book needs to be short and practical to be successful. And if you, if you look at, I don't know, if you look at a simple and maybe maybe a still example, but the example that, that I love to use often, which, which speaks to people's imagination is Patagonia's product strategy, which is sustainability even over profits. You know, it's, it's they're, they're famous for that. You know, people know that if you buy something from, from Patagonia, there have been people making choices along the way to improve sustainability and to be good for the planet. And you know what, if you make a choice like that and if you do that really well and you get famous for that and you're able to to to do that, you get profit. So it's like you often get the second-half of the trade off if you're doing something really good in the first half of the trade off. But if you won't be, if you don't make trade-offs, then the universe around you will decide what the trade off is going to be. And so, so the trade-offs are always made if you if you like them or not. But it's it's the power is, is in choosing them and make being explicit about what it is that you want to trade off. Yeah, I think it's an unavoidable consequence of life is that we have to make trade-offs. And if we like I say, if we don't make the trade off, then something else will make the trade off on our behalf or we just never in a situation where we don't feel comfortable. Would you say that these even over statements are it's like akin to policies within a strategy or would you say they're more, is it like something else? Because I think I've been on, I think the those lovely kind of principle based things where you can say, oh great, that we value this over this and this is where we're going. A really good kind of guiding, guiding principles. Yeah, I mean principles. But would you say they also almost can be manifested as like a policy almost or is that something different? Yeah, policy I think has a similar objective to, to, to, to set some guardrails around something you want to create. They can definitely be used for that absolutely. And but, but, but I use them, I use them in lots of different ways. So another example is after, after me and my I'm I've, you know, we have we are three people consultancy and so really small. But when we after we've done our retrospective, every every six weeks or so, we sit down and spend half an hour crafting even overstatements for the next, for the next couple months. And that those are often behavioural. So one of them is customer validation, even over opinions, because we've we've you know, we've identified that in the last last month, we've been bickering over things and and not testing them. You know some, you know, me, me and one of my Co founders are, are we are really different in terms of our personalities and character. So one of our trade-offs is appreciating difference even over resolving differences, which is a good reminder that every every week when we meet, we look through those even over statements and we're like, ah, yeah, this is what we are reminded of that we this is our intentions and that shifts and drives our behaviour. So it can be behavioural, it can be product related, it can be overarching company strategy, but these these are just very useful little expressions of a choice that I just encourage people to to do a lot more. Excellent. I like that. I like that we are running out of time, but we have not yet run out of time. So I wouldn't mind some quick answers to some questions if that's OK. I'll keep it short. Let's see how many we can squeeze in. OK, so you thinking about leadership and you describe leaders as Rd. designers rather than traffic controllers, is that right? Yeah, yeah. So what's the difference between the two and what mindset shifts are critical for tech tech leaders to make that transition? Yeah, I want, I want leaders to be working on the system rather than in the system a lot more. I want leaders to be organization designers. And I, I, I use this traffic metaphor because, you know somebody who is in the middle of the the intersection directing traffic, going left, going right. That person is really busy and that that work could be outsourced to a system of traffic lights or maybe a roundabout or something where where the the work just flows without them needing to be in the work every day. And they and they can zoom out and they can look at the whole thing and say, oh, interesting. Maybe maybe we should change this, this design somewhere. So, you know, so, so the work moves more, more flow flows were better. So, yeah, that got out of my throat wrong, but you get what I mean. Yeah. It's a it's a nice kind of, it's a nice way of talking about it. I yeah, yeah. Was that sure enough? Yeah. I was pretty short. So OK, if you think of 1, then big critical mindset shift that's needed for leaders to achieve that. What would you say is that the the most critical mindset shift? The mindset shift is that as leader, you don't need to have all the answers. I mean, maybe you've been promoted into that role and, and being promoted because you were successful and maybe you had all the answers over the years and you're obviously smart, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to get there. But you don't need to have all the answers. And if you just let go of that, that notion, you can just go and be vulnerable and ask other people in your organization and especially the teams that are doing the work, if they have an answer. And maybe some things don't have an answer and you just have to try a few things to get a bunch of answers, answers. And that that's that's what continuous steering is all about. Super. OK. Cultural change. How can leaders help to create lasting cultural change when you have a when you have a certain degree of resistance to change in an organization? Yeah, well, two things. First of all, people, watch your feet, not your lips is a quote I discovered when I was writing this book. So it's all about walking the talk and, and modelling the behaviour you want to see. And, and I'm still surprised by, by leaders that are, you know, saying that people should decline our meetings, but they're in meetings all day themselves. You know, those are just examples of, of, of, of things that are incongruent. The other thing is in general, people don't necessarily resist change, but the types of change that they resist if, if it's imposed on them and they don't have a way to participate and shape the organization and, and move forward. So I sometimes explain it like, like, you know, people all the time, they go on holidays, they make trips around the world, they, they buy a new house, you know, they move stuff and people love that change. But it's very different if somebody comes to your house, maybe the mayor of the city and say, you know what, next week you're going on holiday to the desert, good luck. And anyway, of course you get resistance to that. Like people want to choose. People want to be able to choose and want to be involved in those kinds of important things that affect them. So then when you're in a situation where there's a bit of resistance to change, maybe the teams are feeling overworked. And then as a leader, you think, OK, what we need is to maybe to encourage a bit of experimentation and allow people to learn. Is there a different approach you would take other than like walking the walk to help those teams kind of untap so their ability to experiment? Yeah, I think, I think if you have a certain direction in mind for the culture or for the way of working of the organization, I really believe in participatory change. So you sit down with the team and and really spend time understanding what are their issues and what are some of the things that you have around the corner. What, what, what might they, how can they, those things be helpful to the actual tensions that that team is experiencing? So, so you know, those are the, you get people to be aware of their challenges. You give them new tools, tools and ideas that are fit with the new principles of where the organization wants to go. And you help them run experiments themselves. It's a very different type of change than you know, the next, next month you're going through 5 workshops. You get a new training on this methodology and you must use it like like every, you know, all size fits all approach. It's it's really about tailoring and letting letting teams and people choose what they want to adopt when that would really unlock some some culture change over time. Awesome. Thank you very much for those little quick fire questions and thank you very much for spending this time with me. I've really enjoyed it. It's been a great insight into your work and your book and your history. And you've said some brilliant tidbits with the listeners of this little podcast of mine. If you could think of 1 closing statement to leave our listeners with, what is it you want them to take away? There is hope. There's just some, There's just hundreds of examples of organizations that have been able to make the shift into more modern, progressive, more adaptive ways of working in every industry. So if you're in a company that doesn't seem to move into that direction, there are companies out there that are doing it and are very successful at it. So there's definitely hope. Lovely. Thank you very much. If people want to find out more about you, obviously they'll can find you on LinkedIn and we'll include your LinkedIn profile link in the description for this episode. But if they want to look at your book and your consultancy and the type of thing that you do, what is the website they can visit? They can go to www.unblock.works and you can find a book on Amazon as well. Excellent. And it's a very good book. I do recommend that people check it out. I think there's lots of really practical advice. It's structured very well and it's a yeah. It's a joy to joy to breeze, joy to breeze through. That's a strange sentence, isn't it? It's a joy to read. Let's let's put it that way. So thank you very much. Yes, it's been great to have you on. And everyone, thank you very much for listening. As I said, we're recording this episode. The time is now 1039 in the UK. So by the time you're listening to this, it's going to be, I don't know, just a mere hours after we've finished recording. So enjoy the freshness of this episode. Let us know what you've liked by tagging myself or Yurian on LinkedIn. Ask us some questions, give us your feedback. We are all is. Or if you really want to, you can actually send the podcast a text message like we're back in the 1990s. And if you look on your podcast platform of choice, you'll see a little link there saying text for show. Feel free to text for show and let us know what you think. We'd love to get your feedback and to know that you're listening to us. So everyone, thank you very much for listening you and thank you very much for coming along. This has been a Jersey podcast, and we'll be back again next week.

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