What do you think?
Rate this book
Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization
Need significant outcomes quickly? But does everything feel like swimming through peanut butter? It is time to Unblock your organization.
Perhaps you want to double your company’s market share or reinvent its core business. Or you are bringing a new product to market or need to implement regulations. If so, this book is for you; it’s designed for leaders who want to move the needle.
To achieve your goals, you need people to take ownership. You need less talking, more action, less analysis and faster decisions, less bureaucracy, and more initiative.
Learn to apply modern organizational methods in areas of:
• 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.
• 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 engaging ones that drive work forward.
• Change Management: Lead long-lasting cultural change efforts that won't fail like most others.
Most of the traditional management methods don’t help you get rid of inertia. This book offers new methods that allow you to stop working harder, take a step back, and change the system. There are a lot of great books out there on developing an effective organization. But what is different about this book is that it is pragmatic and practical.
The book is full of leadership advice, such as:
• How to prioritize so you don’t spread your initiatives too thin.
• Why you shouldn’t cascade your strategy and what to do instead.
• How to measure the right things so you know you’re making progress.
• How to move from analysis paralysis to rapid action and learning.
• How to coach others to take more ownership.
• How to reduce meetings across the organization.
• How to develop an organization that creates results through autonomy andalignment.
“Unblock” provides new solutions to your stickiest problems, practical tips to overcome organizational dysfunction, and helps you execute strategy and achieve a lasting impact.
Stop the nonsense that is holding your organization back and unlock the potential that is already there. Develop a high-performing organization that delivers results and is fulfilling for those working there.
What you can expect:
• The chapters can be read standalone (in 15 minutes or less), so jump directly to what's most relevant to your situation and skip everything else.
• Each chapter starts with an entertaining fictional story.
• Every chapter ends with a checklist that you can use to assess your situation.
• The book covers essential theory but is full of step-by-step exercises.
Don’t miss this opportunity to move the needle with effective strategy, faster decisions, strong teams, and more ownership. Get your copy of ‘Unblock’ today and achieve more than you ever thought was possible.
Perhaps you want to double your company’s market share or reinvent its core business. Or you are bringing a new product to market or need to implement regulations. If so, this book is for you; it’s designed for leaders who want to move the needle.
To achieve your goals, you need people to take ownership. You need less talking, more action, less analysis and faster decisions, less bureaucracy, and more initiative.
Learn to apply modern organizational methods in areas of:
• 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.
• 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 engaging ones that drive work forward.
• Change Management: Lead long-lasting cultural change efforts that won't fail like most others.
Most of the traditional management methods don’t help you get rid of inertia. This book offers new methods that allow you to stop working harder, take a step back, and change the system. There are a lot of great books out there on developing an effective organization. But what is different about this book is that it is pragmatic and practical.
The book is full of leadership advice, such as:
• How to prioritize so you don’t spread your initiatives too thin.
• Why you shouldn’t cascade your strategy and what to do instead.
• How to measure the right things so you know you’re making progress.
• How to move from analysis paralysis to rapid action and learning.
• How to coach others to take more ownership.
• How to reduce meetings across the organization.
• How to develop an organization that creates results through autonomy andalignment.
“Unblock” provides new solutions to your stickiest problems, practical tips to overcome organizational dysfunction, and helps you execute strategy and achieve a lasting impact.
Stop the nonsense that is holding your organization back and unlock the potential that is already there. Develop a high-performing organization that delivers results and is fulfilling for those working there.
What you can expect:
• The chapters can be read standalone (in 15 minutes or less), so jump directly to what's most relevant to your situation and skip everything else.
• Each chapter starts with an entertaining fictional story.
• Every chapter ends with a checklist that you can use to assess your situation.
• The book covers essential theory but is full of step-by-step exercises.
Don’t miss this opportunity to move the needle with effective strategy, faster decisions, strong teams, and more ownership. Get your copy of ‘Unblock’ today and achieve more than you ever thought was possible.
304 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 20, 2024
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 14, 2024
Unblock – Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization by Jurriaan Kamer is a practical and easy-to-read book, rich with real-life examples. The title highlights the importance of identifying and removing blockages that hinder an organization’s ability to achieve its goals. These blockages disrupt the flow between different parts of the system, reducing overall effectiveness.
The author identifies six common areas where such blockages occur and offers alternative practices to support aligned autonomy, helping to accelerate results and unlock the organization’s hidden potential. Each blockage is thoroughly explained, accompanied by two alternative practices and numerous guiding questions to facilitate improvement.
Strategy: Craft a strategy that actually creates alignment and focus at scale. A strategy significantly increases your chances of success. Practices that are discussed are: create alignment with strategic intent and prioritize with explicit trade-offs. Key questions to ask include: What will outstanding success look like in the next 2–3 years? How will we know when we’ve succeeded? What trade-offs must we make for our strategy to be successful? What will we choose not to do? What are we not willing to sacrifice? Which trade-offs will help our teams understand the strategy and make high-quality decisions in their daily work?
Steering: Set effective goals and find the right things to measure. Alternative strategies are rhythmic progress with 90-day outcomes and measure with steering metrics. Key questions to ask are: What will change about our team, department, product, or the way we work? How will our relationships with customers and stakeholders be different? What can we accomplish to confirm we’re on the right track? Good steering metrics are non-financial predictors of future success, provide insights into progress toward long-term outcomes, can be quantitative or qualitative, and are time-bound (e.g., #/week), allowing for easy comparison.
Decisions: Enhance the speed of decision-making at all levels while improving quality and inclusivity. Explore alternative approaches, such as identifying reversible decisions and using consent-based methods for complex choices. Consider questions like: Is this a decision that can be reversed? If it fails, can we quickly try another approach? Can we manage the impact of a wrong choice, and if so, what can we decide now? Is it worthwhile to spend more time and resources gathering information and delaying the decision? Are we overly focused on finding the perfect solution? What is the worst-case scenario if we make a mistake?
Implement Integrated Decision Making (IDM) to make the process smoother:
- Craft and effectively present proposals.
- Ask clarifying questions before responding.
- Engage in a reaction round, sharing thoughts like “I like,” “I wonder,” or “I propose.”
- Work towards reaching consent.
Ownership: Create a workplace where people are eager to take ownership and act in the organization’s best interest. Practices to support this include allowing individuals to choose their contributions and fostering autonomy through clear decision rights. Start by clarifying individual roles and establishing team-wide agreements on decision-making:
- Which decisions require the consent of the whole team?
- What decision process should be used for each type of decision (e.g., “hats, haircuts, tattoos”)?
- Which decisions do we, as a leadership team, want to delegate? How can we best distribute these responsibilities?
- On which other teams do we depend for certain decisions?
Additionally, leaders should establish agreements with teams that enable people to “vote with their feet” and choose their work, granting teams true control over their decisions. It’s also crucial to determine when leaders should step in and when it’s better to let the team take the lead.
Meetings: Eliminate ineffective meetings and replace them with well-designed sessions that drive progress. Instead of simply chairing a meeting, use a facilitator to guide it effectively. Some key practices include using collaborative meetings to promote progress and reducing meeting time by establishing routines. The “Unblock” meeting is a prime example, designed to ensure active participation (the team owns the meeting), relevance (the agenda is created during the meeting), strategic focus (reviewing updates and metrics), transparency (actions are tracked on a shared board), and opportunities for connection and improvement (with check-ins and closing rounds). Establish an operating rhythm, or “organizational heartbeat,” with regular touchpoints, such as quarterly strategy sessions, monthly retrospectives and governance meetings, and weekly unblock meetings. Some other cross-team meeting routines are ask me anything (AMA) meetings or lean coffee.
Teamwork: Cultivate psychologically safe teams that excel in reflection, improvement, and feedback. Key practices include fostering psychological safety through empathy and embedding regular reflection and feedback. Consider asking questions like: Why do you want to be part of this team (intentions)? What concerns do you have (worries)? What do you need to perform at your best (boundaries)? What will success look like if this goes exceptionally well (dreams)?
Encourage a culture where learning from failure is the norm. Utilize retrospectives to drive continuous improvement, and incorporate feedback exercises to combat “harmony addiction,” using techniques like nonviolent communication (focusing on observation, need, and request). Include closing rounds for regular micro-reflection to keep the team aligned and continuously evolving.
To begin, the author recommends starting with a retrospective to identify the first constraint to unblock and implement one of the strategies. To create a lasting cultural change on a larger scale, you can apply the following principles:
- From imposing to inviting
- From top-down to co-created
- From blueprint-driven to driven by local tensions
- From a detailed project plan to rhythm to steer and adapt
- From big moves first to small moves first
- From resistance leading to ‘push’ to resistance leading to curiosity.
In the appendices you can find more in-depth explanations of even-overs exercise, integrative decision making guide, trade-offs of integrative decision making, personal user manual team exercise, retrospective structure, feedback party exercises, and the unblock meeting structure.
You can find bonus material and a self-assessment on www.unblock.works
Conclusion: “Unblock” provides leaders with valuable insights into six common areas (strategy, steering, decisions, meetings, ownership and teamwork) where blockages may arise and offers practical strategies to support aligned autonomy, helping accelerate results and unlock an organization’s hidden potential. The use of numerous examples from diverse industries makes the content easy to digest, and the recommended practices are both practical and pragmatic. A must-read.
The author identifies six common areas where such blockages occur and offers alternative practices to support aligned autonomy, helping to accelerate results and unlock the organization’s hidden potential. Each blockage is thoroughly explained, accompanied by two alternative practices and numerous guiding questions to facilitate improvement.
Strategy: Craft a strategy that actually creates alignment and focus at scale. A strategy significantly increases your chances of success. Practices that are discussed are: create alignment with strategic intent and prioritize with explicit trade-offs. Key questions to ask include: What will outstanding success look like in the next 2–3 years? How will we know when we’ve succeeded? What trade-offs must we make for our strategy to be successful? What will we choose not to do? What are we not willing to sacrifice? Which trade-offs will help our teams understand the strategy and make high-quality decisions in their daily work?
Steering: Set effective goals and find the right things to measure. Alternative strategies are rhythmic progress with 90-day outcomes and measure with steering metrics. Key questions to ask are: What will change about our team, department, product, or the way we work? How will our relationships with customers and stakeholders be different? What can we accomplish to confirm we’re on the right track? Good steering metrics are non-financial predictors of future success, provide insights into progress toward long-term outcomes, can be quantitative or qualitative, and are time-bound (e.g., #/week), allowing for easy comparison.
Decisions: Enhance the speed of decision-making at all levels while improving quality and inclusivity. Explore alternative approaches, such as identifying reversible decisions and using consent-based methods for complex choices. Consider questions like: Is this a decision that can be reversed? If it fails, can we quickly try another approach? Can we manage the impact of a wrong choice, and if so, what can we decide now? Is it worthwhile to spend more time and resources gathering information and delaying the decision? Are we overly focused on finding the perfect solution? What is the worst-case scenario if we make a mistake?
Implement Integrated Decision Making (IDM) to make the process smoother:
- Craft and effectively present proposals.
- Ask clarifying questions before responding.
- Engage in a reaction round, sharing thoughts like “I like,” “I wonder,” or “I propose.”
- Work towards reaching consent.
Ownership: Create a workplace where people are eager to take ownership and act in the organization’s best interest. Practices to support this include allowing individuals to choose their contributions and fostering autonomy through clear decision rights. Start by clarifying individual roles and establishing team-wide agreements on decision-making:
- Which decisions require the consent of the whole team?
- What decision process should be used for each type of decision (e.g., “hats, haircuts, tattoos”)?
- Which decisions do we, as a leadership team, want to delegate? How can we best distribute these responsibilities?
- On which other teams do we depend for certain decisions?
Additionally, leaders should establish agreements with teams that enable people to “vote with their feet” and choose their work, granting teams true control over their decisions. It’s also crucial to determine when leaders should step in and when it’s better to let the team take the lead.
Meetings: Eliminate ineffective meetings and replace them with well-designed sessions that drive progress. Instead of simply chairing a meeting, use a facilitator to guide it effectively. Some key practices include using collaborative meetings to promote progress and reducing meeting time by establishing routines. The “Unblock” meeting is a prime example, designed to ensure active participation (the team owns the meeting), relevance (the agenda is created during the meeting), strategic focus (reviewing updates and metrics), transparency (actions are tracked on a shared board), and opportunities for connection and improvement (with check-ins and closing rounds). Establish an operating rhythm, or “organizational heartbeat,” with regular touchpoints, such as quarterly strategy sessions, monthly retrospectives and governance meetings, and weekly unblock meetings. Some other cross-team meeting routines are ask me anything (AMA) meetings or lean coffee.
Teamwork: Cultivate psychologically safe teams that excel in reflection, improvement, and feedback. Key practices include fostering psychological safety through empathy and embedding regular reflection and feedback. Consider asking questions like: Why do you want to be part of this team (intentions)? What concerns do you have (worries)? What do you need to perform at your best (boundaries)? What will success look like if this goes exceptionally well (dreams)?
Encourage a culture where learning from failure is the norm. Utilize retrospectives to drive continuous improvement, and incorporate feedback exercises to combat “harmony addiction,” using techniques like nonviolent communication (focusing on observation, need, and request). Include closing rounds for regular micro-reflection to keep the team aligned and continuously evolving.
To begin, the author recommends starting with a retrospective to identify the first constraint to unblock and implement one of the strategies. To create a lasting cultural change on a larger scale, you can apply the following principles:
- From imposing to inviting
- From top-down to co-created
- From blueprint-driven to driven by local tensions
- From a detailed project plan to rhythm to steer and adapt
- From big moves first to small moves first
- From resistance leading to ‘push’ to resistance leading to curiosity.
In the appendices you can find more in-depth explanations of even-overs exercise, integrative decision making guide, trade-offs of integrative decision making, personal user manual team exercise, retrospective structure, feedback party exercises, and the unblock meeting structure.
You can find bonus material and a self-assessment on www.unblock.works
Conclusion: “Unblock” provides leaders with valuable insights into six common areas (strategy, steering, decisions, meetings, ownership and teamwork) where blockages may arise and offers practical strategies to support aligned autonomy, helping accelerate results and unlock an organization’s hidden potential. The use of numerous examples from diverse industries makes the content easy to digest, and the recommended practices are both practical and pragmatic. A must-read.
February 28, 2025
A fantastic toolset for the modern organization!
May 5, 2025
What I really appreciate about Unblock is that it doesn’t get stuck in abstract models or big transformation talk. Jurriaan Kamer goes all-in on practicality. No heavy theory—just: how do you actually get things moving in your organization? What can you do differently tomorrow?
What got me genuinely excited: it includes a lot of practical material. Not just ideas or frameworks, but actual step-by-step guides. For example, how to facilitate a strategy workshop—with a structure, suggested steps, even example prompts for what to say. Super concrete, super usable.
It’s an easy read, and you can tell it’s written by someone with real hands-on experience. It feels tested, lived, and meant to help you unblock stuck dynamics in your organization.
What got me genuinely excited: it includes a lot of practical material. Not just ideas or frameworks, but actual step-by-step guides. For example, how to facilitate a strategy workshop—with a structure, suggested steps, even example prompts for what to say. Super concrete, super usable.
It’s an easy read, and you can tell it’s written by someone with real hands-on experience. It feels tested, lived, and meant to help you unblock stuck dynamics in your organization.
October 14, 2024
This is a book for people who want to do organizing differently. Those who want to work (together) in a practical way and want to remove all the unnecessary. Back to the essence and courage to choose.
May 14, 2025
Good Format with Retread Content
I enjoyed the format and approach for this book, but generally had encountered many of the ideas, in similar forms. Kamer does a great job making ideas accessible and actionable, with a framework to run a business/manage a team. This is certainly written from a leadership perspective.
1. I liked his “even-over” approach to prioritization. So often we get focused on so many objectives, this is a simple exercise to help teams prioritize and discuss a path forward.
2. Finding “psychological safety” when discussing tough topics is so necessary, and often we run into situations where people do not speak up because they are afraid of conflicting. The need for empathy and boundary setting is so important.
3. Hat vs Hair Cut vs Tattoo is a fun way to categorize decision making! I’ve used a similar phrase “if we make this decision, will the outcome really matter in 5 years?” to help frame these kind of discussions before (a “Tattoo”), but this is a much more tangible way to put things in buckets. Changing the discussion from “do you agree” to “Is this safe to try” is pretty powerful as well.
4. Giving people boundaries helps them make decisions! This was a great reminder on pushing decision making to the edge of the organization, and making people feel safe in making decisions and take ownership.
5. Some great overall points for running a better leadership team meeting (or meeting in general). We often find ourselves on tangents, and facilitating a productive discussion that stays on task is one of the most productive things we can do. Some structural take aways I’m planning to work into Faith Group. “What do you need, and who do you need it from”
We do already use OKRs internally, so some of the “steering metrics” section didn’t so much apply. I’ve also read Humanocracy, Measure What Matters, Turning the Ship Around and Playing to Win, all of which were referenced in the book, so certain parts where a modified re-hash. Good reminder for keeping focus.
I enjoyed the format and approach for this book, but generally had encountered many of the ideas, in similar forms. Kamer does a great job making ideas accessible and actionable, with a framework to run a business/manage a team. This is certainly written from a leadership perspective.
1. I liked his “even-over” approach to prioritization. So often we get focused on so many objectives, this is a simple exercise to help teams prioritize and discuss a path forward.
2. Finding “psychological safety” when discussing tough topics is so necessary, and often we run into situations where people do not speak up because they are afraid of conflicting. The need for empathy and boundary setting is so important.
3. Hat vs Hair Cut vs Tattoo is a fun way to categorize decision making! I’ve used a similar phrase “if we make this decision, will the outcome really matter in 5 years?” to help frame these kind of discussions before (a “Tattoo”), but this is a much more tangible way to put things in buckets. Changing the discussion from “do you agree” to “Is this safe to try” is pretty powerful as well.
4. Giving people boundaries helps them make decisions! This was a great reminder on pushing decision making to the edge of the organization, and making people feel safe in making decisions and take ownership.
5. Some great overall points for running a better leadership team meeting (or meeting in general). We often find ourselves on tangents, and facilitating a productive discussion that stays on task is one of the most productive things we can do. Some structural take aways I’m planning to work into Faith Group. “What do you need, and who do you need it from”
We do already use OKRs internally, so some of the “steering metrics” section didn’t so much apply. I’ve also read Humanocracy, Measure What Matters, Turning the Ship Around and Playing to Win, all of which were referenced in the book, so certain parts where a modified re-hash. Good reminder for keeping focus.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews