Sara Lobkovich | OKR Expert

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Speed, Strategy, and Staying Unblocked: Leadership Lessons from Pro Motorsports & Beyond

Sara Lobkovich

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What can business leaders learn from the high-stakes world of professional motorsports?

Find out, in this conversation between Thinkydoers host Sara Lobkovich (whose "other life" is in professional motorcycle road racing) and organizational change expert Jurriaan Kamer, co-author of "Formula X: How to Reach Extreme Acceleration in Your Organization" and his new release, "Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization."

We cover a lot of ground here -- from how pro racing teams approaches to goal clarity, mistake recovery, and rhythmic learning can transform your leadership practice, to creating blame-free cultures, and mastering the art of strategic alignment.

In this lively and engaging conversation, you'll discover how racing's high-performance, high-stakes principles can accelerate your business performance—whether you're a motorsports fan or not.

Episode Highlights:

  • Three core principles business can learn from racing teams:

    • Crystal-clear goals and their role in driving focus

    • Balanced autonomy and alignment in high-performing teams

    • Rhythmic learning: how racing teams turn every moment into an opportunity for improvement

  • Creating blame-free cultures in high-stakes environments

  • The power of "even over" statements in explicit prioritization

  • Decision-making frameworks: understanding "hats, haircuts, and tattoos"

  • How consent and choice drive organizational ownership

Notable Quotes:

"Failure avoidance is more dangerous than failure recovery." - Jurriaan Kamer

"If you look at Formula 1 teams [...] execution is not 99% of the thing. They understand that everything they do is an opportunity to reflect and improve. These meetings, these rituals, are built into their cadence. It's not something somebody has to plan - it's just part of how they operate." - Jurriaan Kamer

"If you try to convince a group of people, the first thing you need to do is not tell them why you think you're right, but ask them what they think is going to go wrong. And then you can start to build conviction together." - Jurriaan Kamer

"We have to take a systemic perspective when things go wrong... As an outsider, you think 'Oh, this person needs to be fired, because they blew the chances of a victory.' Which is just very short-term focused because [mistakes] will repeat [themselves] if you don't understand all the factors that were at play." - Jurriaan Kamer

Guest Information: 

Jurriaan Kamer is an organizational change expert based in the Netherlands and author of "Formula X: How to Reach Extreme Acceleration in Your Organization" and "Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization." Drawing from his unique access to professional car-racing teams and extensive career experience with a diverse range of organizations (including self-managing organizations), he helps leaders worldwide create high-performing, adaptable organizations.

Jurriaan's Resources Mentioned:

Sara's Links and Resources:

Find full show notes and the episode transcript via https://findrc.co/thinkydoers !

Full Episode Transcript:

Sara: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Thinkydoers podcast. Thinkydoers are those of us drawn to deep work, where thinking is working. But we don't stop there. We're compelled to move the work from insight to idea, and through the messy middle to find courage and confidence to put our thoughts into action. I'm your host, Sara Lobkovich.

I'm a strategy coach, a huge goal setting and attainment nerd, and board certified health and wellness coach, working at the overlap of work life well being. I'm also a Thinkydoer. I'm here to help others find more satisfaction, less frustration, less friction, and more flow in our work.

My mission is to help changemakers like you transform our workplaces and world. So let's get started.

Hello and welcome.

 [00:01:00] I am so excited that we're shifting gears for a bit of a worlds colliding episode for me at the intersection of motorsports and business. You might not know this about me, but I have an other life in professional motorcycle road racing. But this episode isn't just for racing fans.

We're going to uncover how the strategies that drive F1 teams can unblock your own leadership and business performance.

My guest, Jurriaan Kamer, is an organizational change expert with a unique perspective based on both his fandom of F1 and some time behind the scenes of F1, and having worked in self managing organizations over the course of his career.

We'll discuss how clear goals, shame and blame free cultures, rhythmic learning, and other accessible, useful principles from his work can transform your leadership approach and how you lead yourself. So whether you're a [00:02:00] seasoned CEO or an aspiring leader, Give this one a listen.

Sara: Let's start with an introduction: who are you what do you do and where are you based?

Jurrian: Yeah, so I'm Jurriaan, based out of the Netherlands, in a place called Utrecht. some people will probably know Amsterdam—it's not that far from here. I'm an organizational change expert. I help leaders all across the world change how they work, to improve the conditions in their organizations for better results.

Sara: We're going to start with Formula X because that was How this conversation came to be—we crossed paths on PodMatch. And then I asked you a very silly question when I saw that you were a Formula 1 fan, and asked you if you would like to come on and speak with me about what business can learn from Formula 1, and Your answer to that question was very graceful, given my ignorance of your book history. You wrote Formula X, —it's a fable, [00:03:00] is that the right word?

Jurrian: Yeah, leadership fable.

Sara: A leadership fable abouta leader learning important lessons from an F1 experience and team. I just have to hear the story of how that book came to be—what was the origin, and how did that book happen?

Jurrian: I was watching Formula 1 as a fan for many years before writing that book. I was just on the couch and sometimes went to races to to see it live, but my whole perspective on the sport changed when I was able to go behind the scenes. I was invited by one of the sponsors of Red Bull Racing to come and speak to a bunch of leaders that they invited to to the factory. I was just asked to do a speech on the evening before the factory visit, just as a warmup. At the time, I was speaking about agile ways of working,organizations with high levels of autonomy, and those kinds of things. I said to them, "I want to come, but there are two conditions." First condition is I go to the factory as [00:04:00] well. And the second condition was I want to try to speak about Formula 1 that evening before we go into the factory, and use that as an opportunity to do a lot of research about how these teams actually function—because I had no idea. Next day, we went into the factory and my mind was blown. Just being there and seeing how huge the operation is completely blew my mind. Then, my co-author, Rini Van Solingen—in Holland , he's a famous management book author, and his publisher actually reached out to him, he said, "You know what, Formula 1 is getting more popular,this guy called Max Verstappen is getting popular. He's getting better. Maybe you should do your next management book about Formula 1 and something around organizational speed." So, he started researching for that topic, he found my work, and we connected and eventually we decided to write that book together.

Sara: That's wild. I was actually talking to my husband last night, because I have to admit, when I saw a business book, learning lessons from racing, as someone who has another life in professional racing. when I saw the book, I was a little skeptical. [00:05:00] I sat down, and started reading, and it was quite quickly I was like, "How does this guy know this stuff?" The view of the teams and how they operate, the behind-the-scenes was so good. I thought, either he's worked with a team as a team member, or you're really good at what you do in terms of observing behavior. Because there are so many little things in that book, just as a fan, you don't get. Like you really have to be in it. And I think the first time I wrote in the margin, "wow", was page 75. When, with the amazement when he walks into the working paddock for the first time. I was really impressed. So that is a way to say, like, for folks who might be considering working with you in your day job capacity, as a fellow practitioner and a motorsports person, I would say you are the real deal, my friend, in terms of being [00:06:00] able to observe behavior and then draw insight from it. if you pick a couple of topics, what are maybe three major themes that you would say business can learn from racing teams and racing operations?

Jurrian: Yeah, so the first thing is the level of clarity of goals. I mean, with Formula 1 teams all the sports out there, it's pretty clear what the goal is. In this case, it's win races and win the championship. That's the only thing that matters.That just translates into a huge amount of focus. , You can cut out all sorts of waste and people know what the objective is.Not only people know it, it's more than that. It's also that everyone else in the world can see how you're doing against that goal every week, after every race. And that is not easily accomplished in business, but I think if you're able to accomplish that, it just drives a lot of focus and, is super helpful to have. So, this clear and inspiring goal that works as a compass is the first part of the thing that we can take away from F1 [00:07:00] racing. The second thing that comes to mind is a combination of both autonomy and alignment. If you look at how team principals operate, there's lots of interviews with them, there's lots of blog posts about how they talk and think about their leadership style. They're pretty clear that they are hiring some of the best talents in the world, and they're not there to tell them exactly how they're going to do their jobs. It's really about hiring great talent and just letting them do their jobs. However, it does need to add up some somehow to the bigger picture, right? You have to create this Formula 1 car with a 1000 to 2000 people, and all the parts need to somehow fit together. All the specifications have to align. So if you make some changes in the gearbox, you need to make those changes in the electronics as well, et cetera. So it all has to fit together. So, as a pattern that you see in Formula 1 teams, also in other fast-moving, innovative companies is this idea of aligned autonomy. They are able to create highly autonomous teams where people don't have to tell them exactly how to do their jobs and what is exactly on the road map. They [00:08:00] know what they own, they know what they can do to make things better. There's also high level of autonomy where there's enough strategic and goal awareness in the teams, so they do the right thing without needing to ask for approval.So that's the second concept that I took away from looking at the sport. Andthe third bit is what I call rhythmic learning. There's a fixed rhythm inside these teams that allow them to constantly reflect and improve on everything they do. For example, the races, they take about 90 minutes to two hours. After the race, they spend over two hours debriefing everything that happened. They go through, detailed checklists, trying to figure out how were the pit stops? How was the fuel efficiency? How were the tires? How was the comfort in the chair? How was the balance? All those things are going to be evaluated and looked at. And it's interesting because in most Western business cultures,execution is 99 percent of the thing, and reflection and improving is just a very small percentage. And these teams, they flip it [00:09:00] around. They have to because they cannot spend50 hours on the track every week. They just understand that everything they do is an opportunity to reflect and improve. They have these ideas, these meetings,these rituals, they are built into their cadence. It's not something that somebody has to plan like, "Oh, maybe now it's a good time to evaluate." No, it's just part of how they operate.

Sara: It makes me think of one of the things that has been a mantra for our team. My husband is our crew chief, I serve as team principal and I'm assistant crew chief. So I crew. And one of his principles is: we are always racing. We are racing when we're on the track, we are racing when we're in the shop prepping the bike, we are racing when we are schlepping tires, we are racing when we're loading the trailer. We are racing in our debriefs, and that doesn't mean when I say we're always racing, that doesn't mean we're always going fast. It means we are always focused on how we make that bike go faster for the rider around the track the next time we go out. Each of the themes that you just [00:10:00] mentioned, as you were talking, I was like, "yep, yep, yep, yep!"  The role that mistakes play and the way that teams work with mistakes and learn from mistakes has been one of the most transformative things for me to see as a business person who also operates in motorsports. And I think actually you mentioned, blame- and shame-free culture in your second book. The consequences of what we do are so astronomically high—the odds of a serious injury are low, given safety, and gear, and safety gear that's now standard —but it is something that's different about my life in motorsports compared to my life in corporate business. A human being's life—and really multiple human beings lives because they're not out there by themselves—depend on every single person in our team and each of us doing what we're there to do at the absolute best of our [00:11:00] ability, given the conditions we're operating in. So, tell me a little more about what you learned about mistakes, in both being a fan and then also in writing this book.

Jurrian: Yeah, another consultant years ago put this image in my head, which is about failure avoidance is more dangerous than failure recovery. Because if you're going to constantly try to avoid failures, you're not going to innovate. You're just going nowhere. And if you're not innovating in this sport, you're basicallycrippling and you're dying. Innovation is the only way to stay alive and to get the results, because everybody else is doing it. It's a rat race.These organizations, they are really good at recovering from failure and making sure that they understand what happened. They put measures into place so it doesn't happen again. The other thing is, because you're going really fast, you should expect failures to happen. Because you're going in all sorts of directions, things can go wrong in a split second. It's not a stable environment that some businesses are in. It's really like very volatile. And that means that we [00:12:00] always have to take a systemic perspective when things go wrong. In the book, I use an example of a pit stop going wrong. So you see a pit stop for Mark Weber out of Grand Prix a couple decades ago, and he stops at the end of the pit lane after a pit stop—with only three wheels attached. So he's super angry and frustrated. The first thing you think is, "Oh, something went wrong at the pit stop, the wheel gun operator must have made a mistake when he reattached the wheel." But the fact is the wheel gun operator did everything right. What happened there was, first, a mechanical failure because the wheel nut that he tried to reattach was broken. That was something that happened in the factory. It's not his fault at all. The second problem was he accidentally hit a button that that gave a green light signal to the lollipop operator that the car was safe to drive. So that was an ergonomical problem— he touched a button that he shouldn't have been able to touch easily in this way. So, they had to change that design. And there was also procedural error. There was not an extra fallback. "Do we need to do a double check before we release the car?" [00:13:00] So, the wheel gun operator did everything right. And still, this accident happened. That's a really well-documented incident. As an outsider, you think, "Oh, this person needs to be fired, because he blew the chances of a victory." And I work with some organizations where making a costly mistake can actually get you fired pretty quickly. Which is just very short-term focused because it will repeat itself if you don't understand all the factors that were at play when something like that happens.

Sara: One of my favorite stories from one of my motorsport mentors, Dave Alexander, before his "retirement", which I put in air quotes because he's been retired for a while and I still see him in the professional paddock every year. Dave Alexander told me a story from his career that when he was working, if he made a mistake, he would call out, "I made a mistake!" in the middle of the garage. And, folks would, if they were new to working with them, it's like, "What's going on?" But his point is we all make mistakes, and it's better to announce them and [00:14:00] catch them. Because You want to catch your mistake before it leaves the garage. Normalizing mistakes, especially when the consequences of an issue could be really high lets everyone recognize that when we make a mistake, we fix it. The supervision is so different in the paddock, and I am only assistant crew chief. I don't know how my crew chief does it because he's executing and he's also observing enough of what's happening with anyone touching the bike that he catches a lot of issues that could happen. I do think executive leaders and corporate leaders could learn from that,non-judgmental observation of what's happening. And remembering that when we are in that non-judgmental observation mode as leaders, we're also coaches. The way that we handle giving our feedback to our team or our crew affects how we operate from [00:15:00] there.

Jurrian: Yeah, I mean, especially if you're very high up in the organization and something big happens, the default response in some organizations is, "I wanna get to the bottom of this. I need to know exactly what happened, and I want to make sure it will never, ever happen again." That makes it pretty unsafeto speak up. It's pretty intimidating if that's the response, and the chances are it will happen again, but you won't know who did it because now you set an environment where people are like, "Ooh, I did something wrong. I better sweep it under the rug." And I use another example in the book of a Dutch web store, one of the biggest here. It's like the Dutch Amazon, Bol.com. They have a ritual at their monthly all-hands meeting where one of the leaders, they go on stage dressed as a priest and asking confessions from the employees. Does anybody here make any mistakes that they want to confess this month? And it's a bit of a silly, hilarious thing. And they often make sure that one of the other leaders go first, and it's like, "Oh yeah, yeah, of course. I messed this up. I completely misjudged this," or something else [00:16:00] happened. It's a way to make it easier and more fun. And it sends a very serious message that, at Bol.com, we ask people to admit their mistakes and to learn from it.

Sara: I'm glad that you mentioned leaders going first because it takes a high degree of psychological safety to create conditions for it to be safe to for people to do that. But it's also really important that leaders model that intellectual humility that it takes to share a mistake and share what we learned from it.

Jurrian: Exactly.

Sara: When you talk about rhythmic learning, that also really stands out to me. Both the cycles of learning, that when teams are operating, and when high-performance teams in any field are operating, we are always learning. It's a constant and steady stream of observation. And what can we learn? Because we do have to get that 1 percent better every time we go out, or multiple percents better every time we go out. We can never maintain our status quo. I also just love the combination of the words, rhythmic learning, because in a little [00:17:00] bit different way, it's really hard for new team members to join a team that's working, even if they know the subject matter of their discipline. Because every team moves a little different. Every team has a little different pace. There's a little different vibe. How you speak in the paddock, whether you're louder or not, is different. So there's also a lot of observational learning, that has to happen in paddocks, and I don't see that as much in the corporate workplace because we're focused on our goal or our job, and that observational learning and figuring out how to team and how to find your place in the team is another area that's element that I was thinking about when I was reading your book.

Jurrian: Yeah. And again, leaders play a really big role to onboard new members. In my second book, I talk about a practice calledICBD: Intentions, Concerns, Boundaries, Dreams. One of my favorite ways to create an empathetic conversation that grows psychological safety [00:18:00] was invented by Bob Gower and Alexandra Jamieson in their book, Radical Alignment.It's a four-part conversation where, for example, when a new team member joins the team, everybody sits down and reflects on, "What's my intention? Why am I part of this team or why am I part of this project? What's in it for me?" You can share your personal ambitions and your personal ideas of why you're here. Then you can share your concerns: "This is what worries me about this; this is what might go wrong." Just putting that on the table transparently really helps. And then we can share boundaries: "What do I need to be at my best? what rules or guardrails do we need to agree on together so that we can actually create this result together?"

And then finally dreams like what in your, in our wildest dreams, if this goes really well, what would be possible? So yeah, this is, it's a four-part conversation. And if you do that, when a team member joins or when the team goes on a new initiative or maybe at the start of the season, it really helps, to accelerate collaboration in a team,

 It grows psychological safety and just creates a lot more understanding because we're at work, everybody does things that are [00:19:00] sometimes irrational, or maybe we think it's irrational. But if you look below the surface, then there might be something driving that person. There might be a concern that we don't know about, or there might be a boundary that they're trying to protect that we don't know about. And,to make those things explicit and to talk about them is a thing that leaders can really do to let a team gel. But not only leaders, everybody in the team can do that.

Sara: Yeah. That, that practice I squirreled away in my group facilitation notebook, like for off-sites and things like that. —but You mentioned the clear and inspiring or defined goal, that when we are racing, there is a championship to be earned. There are races to be won. And in working toward those goals, there are goals for podiums to begin with, or goals with regard to position. And we are all trying to go faster every time we go out. So the goals are so clear in [00:20:00] motorsports. most business leaders Don't operate in an environment where the goals are that clear? what would you say to business leaders that they can learn about goals and goal setting from the motorsports paddock?

Jurrian: It's an art form that could be mastered and that could be very beneficial if you're getting really good at it. I describe the practice of strategic intent which is a way of articulating a goal that is both concrete and inspiring, andthat's often lacking. Like, it's either very concrete, which like, "these are the 10 projects we need to complete in the next 12 months"—which is okay, sure, we do that, but it's not so inspiring. Then you have the lofty purpose statements like, "Our company exists because we're going to transform the human condition, blah, blah, blah." Which is very inspiring, but that's not concrete, right? It doesn't create any alignment, and I have no idea what that means for me today if I joined a new team. So strategic intent sits at the intersection of both. It first requires leaders to get really clear themselves on what they really need to have, what they really [00:21:00] aspiring to. What really helps is if you don't focus on 12 months, but if you focus on two to three years, which is more long-term. It's still mid-term. It's not like 50 years, but it's still, long enough that we can beputting some pretty lofty, pretty ambitious things in there. A colleague actually said, often, we highly overestimate what we can do in a year, but we completely underestimate what we can do in two years. There's something about the two- to three-year period which allows us to think a bit more dreamy and more aspiring, but still, you can think back of what does that mean concretely that we need to do. It could be we need to build this capability. It could be we need to really master this outcome. Then you need to get really concrete and action-oriented in your description. For example, in the book—and there's a lot of good and bad things being said about Tesla and Elon Musk-he's a bit of a goofy guy these days. Butthe fun thing about Tesla is that a lot of their strategic language is actually out in the open. At one point, he—or I don't know if he was the person writing it, but [00:22:00] he definitely presented it. When they were presenting their project to do autopilot, like self-driving cars, you could put the strategic goal like, "Launch the first version of autopilot." It does make sense. Okay, we have autopilot, it needs to work, and we have to launch it, which is very output-oriented. But the strategic intent version of that was, "Develop a self-driving capability that is 10 times safer than humans through massive fleet learning."

Sara: Yeah.

Jurrian: So that is interesting. It's an inspirational because 10 times safer than humans, that's a pretty high bar. But it's also pretty concrete because it says we're going to do it through massive fleet learning. So that is the choice we're making that's our bet that we're doing it through massive fleet learning. It's just one example of a strategic goal that is super clear, super inspirational, and you can imagine it drives the work of thousands of people. This simple sentence. So when we work with leaders— and I think you do some similar work —when you create a strategic intent, try to be super concrete and inspirational, and also acknowledge that it is a [00:23:00] fractal. You can have a strategic intent statement at the top line of the organization that still needs to be somehow translated and connected to the day-to-day work of everyone. But also don't make the mistake of cascading those goals, which is the other challenge I see a lot. It's like, "Okay, we set the goal, now we just have push it down, and then people need to understand what happens." No. If you have highly autonomous teams that are highly aligned, you can ask those teams or departments to say, "You know what, this is our overarching strategy. These are our goals, our hypothesis of what we want to achieve. Now you set your strategic intent based on what you know about what you're owning and what you are learning. So what would you do and what would you set as a goal in the next two to three years to feed into that overarching goal?" Andthen it becomes like a two-way conversation and it becomes almost like a marketplace. If these things are transparent, we can look at them and say, "Oh, interesting. I see some things that are divergent or something that are unexpected. Let's talk about that."

Sara: When I was reviewing your second book, I highlighted the word fractal because I'm a strategist, but a big part of my toolkit is OKRs. [00:24:00] And the picture of how OKRs cascade down through an organization has always, even deciding what picture to put in my own book. I had the thought last night that I'm really, Glad that we are not yet in layout because I might have to ask my designer to depict that as a fractal instead of as aboxes on a flow chart kind of style.I do think that is really a much better way to describe productive localization goals—to recognize that It's not the org chart, the way that strategic goals get aligned, or even the teams in the org chart. It really is that goals fractal out all the way through to the individuals. So that was just a really cool way to see it described.

Jurriaan: Yeah. And the other thing I talk about in the book, and I wrestle with the language for a while because if it's not cascading, what is it? Like, how do you call it?So, I landed on two terms. [00:25:00] One is self-alignment, which is like what I described before, here is the thing and what you're responsible for. Can you align yourself towards this goal? And the other one is integration, which is more like a two-way conversation. Because if you're in a C-suite, you don't know the details of what's happening on the ground, or even better, at the edge of the organization. If you see it more as a peach, with a heart bit in the middle, and the outside is interfacing with the market and the customers, the outside is learning day to day and they know what is happening and what is needed. The people that are in the center, they have the overarching picture of what is happening and they could see things and trends that people on the edge don't see. So it's just a different perspective. And those perspectives need to be integrated to make sense. Otherwise, what you have see happen often is there's a strategy, and people are like, "Oh, great. I didn't know how this impacts my work," or "I already learned that's not going to work, so whatever." And it has no effect or it has the adverse effect, where people are like frustrated and say, "You know what, this doesn't make any sense. You're asking me all these goals [00:26:00] and all these principles, and you're not prioritizing what I actually needs to do my job better. So how are you going to help me with the strategy?" That is one of the challenges in strategic alignment across the organization.

Sara: Yeah, listening to this is making me grateful that I decided that my book is It's going to be a print book, and there is also going to be a Notion-based wiki version that I can continually update.

Jurrian: Yeah.

Sara: Because the term that I use in OKR practice was one I first learned at WorkBoard, one of the OKR platforms, they use the term localization, which I think is a great choice of language to describe that translation of goals, down or down-and-out through the fractal. I use "rolling up" for that self-alignment and then "rolling down" for the goals that roll down. But I don't have a term for that integration. I use alignment, but I think integration is a more precise term to describe that [00:27:00] two-way responsibility.

Jurrian: Yeah, I think alignment is a state, and integration is a verb, right? It's a thing we do.Integration should lead to alignment, at least until, it won't be a perfect alignment, but at least be aligned enough so that it makes sense. That's what I think.

Sara: Awesome. I think I could talk about motorsports all day, but I do want to get into your second book because, I think it's a very important read for leaders. And your second book is called Unblock. It outlines six elements of unblocking. And so first, tell us what the six elements are.

Jurriaan: Yeah. So the subtitle is Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization. It's a practical guide for leaders that want a certain result or are ambitious, which is probably almost all leaders. This is very geared towards creating an organization that is able to deliver the result that you have in mind. And that's why it starts with strategy. We already talked about that quite a bit—strategic intent is part of [00:28:00] it. it's also about prioritization: How do you set heuristics so people know how they can prioritize themselves, which is a big problem in many organizations? We try to do too many things at once.

The second big topic is steering—in particular continue steering, which is all about both setting goals that are outcome-oriented.

I have a small chapter on OKRs in there too,but it's about 90-day outcomes. It's about using metrics to your benefit, and it's about constantly feeding into that loop of learning, and experimenting, and trying.

The third one is decision-making. So how do we accelerate decisions in organizations? It's also a big part of my first book, because that's also about accelerating organizations, creating organizations or creating decisions that are acknowledging decisions that are reversible, and making them just a lot faster, and getting to consent rather than consensus in teams is what that chapter is about.

The next one is on developing an organization where ownership is a big thing. [00:29:00] So it's a big frustration of many leaders that they don't see their people taking ownership, and that chapter is all about acknowledging the fact that it's usually the system and the organization that are lacking, and not the people. I really believe people want to take ownership if they can, for the most part, they do it in their private lives all the time, but many organizations don't create the conditions for that to happen at scale. So that is in one part about decision rights and making clear what types of decisions can we make,what type of risks are we allowed to make, and making those boundaries clear. And it's also about. creating marketplaces where people can choose what they want to contribute to, because another big part of ownership is my emotional investment in the work I do. If I can choose,then the good chance is that I will be engaged and able and willing to take ownership of that work.

Next one is teamwork. We already spoke about that a little bit about developing psychological safety and developing habits for reflection, and giving and receiving feedback.

And the final one is about meetings. [00:30:00] Which is a lot about replacing full calendars with unuseful, undesigned uh, meetings with a cadence, like the rhythmic learning that we talked about. It also describes a specific meeting practice that we just love, which is the unblock meeting, which is a way to have a weekly meeting that is super effective and efficient. Together, all these elements, I believe, are necessary for an organization to consistently deliver good results, and good outcomes. But don't ask people to work on all six at the same time because it's not a fixed framework. It starts by understanding which of these six elements do I need to unblock first so that I can move the needle a little bit.

Sara: I appreciated that right up front you said this book doesn't have to be read linearly. Something that I also say in mine. that makes it a very useful book, giving people permission right away. And then now I know the challenge of writing a book to not be necessarily read linearly. There were a couple of things that really stood out to me in the six [00:31:00] elements. People are going to have to read the book to hear about the air sandwich, because I think that is a concept that folks need to become aware of, You mentioned trying to do too many things at once and the practice of prioritizing with specific trade-offs. I'd love for you to talk just a little bit about that concept.

Jurrian: Yeah. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. And it's a challenge that we face a lot. And often prioritization is done through management layers, right? It's the managers that have to constantly triage, "Oh, are we going to do this or that, or are we going to do both?" And we want to do all the things all at once, because it's very hard to choose, and it's very hard to say no to certain things for social reasons, but also sometimes we just have too much ambitions. The practice of making trade-offs explicit is one that we call "even over" statements. It's about describing short sentences that can be used as a heuristic where you make clear what are you willing to trade off to get something [00:32:00] else.There's a couple of examples in there of brands. For example, let's look at Patagonia, a well-known brand. They have clearly prioritized sustainability, even over profit. Which gives everyone in the organization the permission when they are faced with the choice to do either the sustainable thing or the profitable thing to go for the sustainable thing. It's this simple heuristic that is both known on the inside and the outside that drives a lot of day-to-day decisions and day-to-day prioritizations. But it could also be something else, right? It could be like, are we going for the best quality or are we just going for meeting our delivery date? And if you write down, "quality even over meeting the deadline," that's a very clear choice. It makes it explicit that we are always going to go for quality. A good even over statement is reversible. where it's like, "We need to meet a deadline, and we're willing to sacrifice quality." It's about the conversation about setting those things. Again, it's a fractal, so you can set it at a company level, like we said with Patagonia, but I also encourage teams and departments to set their own. They change all the time, so it could be [00:33:00] just prioritizing a certain behavior or a certain thing for a couple of weeks, for a couple of months. And then you're like, "That's for this quarter. We're really going for quality and for next quarter, we're really going to go for meeting our deadlines." It could also be behavioral. So, honesty, even over comfort. Which could be a thing that a team sets to everyone to speak up more, and on a weekly basis in your meeting, you can ask, like, "Did you do it this week? Did you prioritize honesty even over comfort this week?" Those are a few ways to use the practice.

Sara: While you were talking about even overs, I was going through my mental checklist of the even overs that we have been operating with without communicating them in our team. Oh yeah. You know, of like, uh, Honesty over comfort is one, or performance over comfort is one that is really difficult to, On board new people to in the motorsports paddock because it can be incredibly uncomfortable and we still have to execute our jobs as crew at 100%. The [00:34:00] riders,they're having to go ride the bike in whatever conditions we're operating in. Um, and it's...

Jurrian: And then when you say comfort, is it the team comfort or also the rider's?

Sara: No, um, human comfort. Things like, if we have a schedule change, we might wind up working through lunch. If the rider falls down, we may miss dinner time, Andwe do our best to take care of our humans at all times. And there is also an element of what has to happen because we are always racing. We are always on the clock. But the first one that popped to my head was power over longevity. specifically with engines, But again, that applies to our humans to of do we need to be in power mode? Or do we need to be in longevity mode? And it's a good example of that back and forth.

Jurrian: And what you say is really interesting because often those trade-offs are already in the culture implicitly. It really helps making them explicit and inspecting them time over time and say, "Are these things still useful?" Instead of you [00:35:00] joining a team and you try to figure out like, " what are the priorities here? What are people doing?" Then you learn that through experiences maybe after a few months. But it's so much faster if you write it down and people are like, "Oh, this is it. I know it now."

Sara: As humans, we get habituated. So we get into a habit. And I think that concept that our even overs might switch back and forth, or they might be able to be switched is a really good reminder. Because when we're always racing, we're always racing but you also do have to recover and sleep and rest as well. And it's just a good way to communicate transparently with each other, which of the modes that we're in at any given time. There are two other things that I wanted to mention. Can you tell us about hats, haircuts, and tattoos?

Jurrian: Oh, yeah. That's my other favorite thing.All right so this is about accelerating decision-making, and it's a concept that was first written down by James Clear. And he says there are only three types of decisions: [00:36:00] there's hats, haircuts, and tattoos. So a hat is a thing you can buy. And if you don't like the hat, you can either bring it back and get your money back, or you can just buy lots of different hats and try them all out. There's not a lot of consequences for getting it wrong. If you make that decision, it's not so costly to reverse. But if you get a haircut, it might not work out the way you want, right? You can feel embarrassed for a while. You can be frustrated about it. But for most people—not me if you’re looking at the video—but for most people, the hair grows back. Andin a couple of weeks, a couple of months, you can get another haircut. There's no need to analyze upfront all the possible barbers in a country or in the world and figure out what is the exact, precise, perfect haircut that I'm going to get, because even if you do that, you're not sure how it will turn out precisely, right? Because even the barber can have a bad haircut day. And there's also tattoos, which are types of decisions thatare not so reversible. They are technically reversible—I have no experience with that—but what I heard is that it's going to be painful if you reverse it. It's going to be [00:37:00] costly. It takes a lot of time. You get a tattoo, you better need to take the time to figure out what do I want, where do I want it, and who is going to set it. For those types of decisions, it does make sense to spend a little bit more time analyzing and thinking. But the problem in many businesses is that we treat a lot of different decisions as if they are tattoos, while in fact they are either hats or haircuts. So it's a really helpful frame to have the language to say, "What type of decision is this?" and "Do we really need to make a decision or do we really need to spend five hours of meetings and five months of delaying and thinking and analyzing to try to get it perfect? Or should we just do something and see what we learn from that?"

Sara: I didn't see it the first time I read Formula X, but as I was going back through my notes last night, getting ready for today, one of the takeaways that I had is both motorsports and in business, there's value in building in public. Like, in motorsports, we have no choice. We are building in public. That is how we operate. There is no other way. We're [00:38:00] constantly in development along with everyone else in the paddock, and we have good days and bad days in development in public. Where in business, there's a even over around building in public and pace and building in private and reputation preservation or image preservation or something like that.And so that was one of the big takeaways that linked to the decision framework in my brain—that we have to make smart decisions about when to build in public and when to build in private.

Jurrian: Exactly. Yeah.

Sara: The last thing I wanted to bring up, I was so excited in your second book when I got to the part where you were talking about consent, and then the role that choice plays in ownership. I have not read every book in the world, but having those two concepts together, I think, is pretty revolutionary and pretty unique. How did you come to have those two concepts in the book [00:39:00] connected the way they are?

Jurrian: Yeah. So I've worked both with clients, but also inside organizations that, that are completely self-managing. So there's no boss or there's no hierarchy of people telling you what to do. You don't report into anyone else, which means like in these organizations, there are definitely rules and agreements and maybe even more than in traditional organizations, but it's all about consent. So if I don't want to do something, nobody's going to force me to do it. This has some advantages. It has the advantage that things that nobody in the organization wants to do sometimes they just die because it's not happening, while in other businesses, in traditional organizations, we just keep doing it or keep forcing us to do it even though everybody thinks it's a bad idea. Obviously, there are chores, like things that nobody wants to do and still need to happen, but that those can often be outsourced. So that's a different thing. but I'm really talking about voting with your feet: So, what is it that I want to do? What is it that I want to contribute that I think is valuable if I spend my energy [00:40:00] with it? Which creates a lot of entrepreneurial energy in an organization like that. The other thing about consent, if there's no, so a way to get out of the problem in self managing organizations, you either have. The problem that everybody needs to agree before you can do something, which is very paralyzing and really slows down everything. So, there's a couple of smart people that have been experimenting with the concept of consent. I think even in the Quakers and then in the sociocracy, and it was popularized by Holacracy, which got a lot of attention. And now it's often used as a separate framework, which I also offer my book, where it's like: Can we make a decision where everybody can live with it so that we don't have to all fully agree. And, the concept is all about getting to a place of "safe to try" where, we don't ask, "Does everybody agree?" We ask, "Is it safe to try?" And that lowers the bar for steps, and that lowers the bar for taking action and learning. And it also highlights the conversation that we need to have sometimes, which is, what is safe to try, and what is not safe to [00:41:00] try. And those things should be combined, right? We wanna make sure that what happens in your organization doesn't create any objections, that are, that are severe and we don't endanger the organization, but we also wanna create as much space as possible for people to develop the things that they think need to be developed. And that's why I think indeed those two concepts are pretty powerful.

Sara: Jurriaan, your books describe the corporate culture that I always wanted to work in, as an employee, I think it's really exciting that you pack as much pragmatic, practical heuristics and clear things to do. this isn't philosophical. Your books are very useful. And so you pack a lot of useful information into your two books and I'll put the links in my bookstore and in the show notes so that folks can find your books.

I really hope people will use it because that's the only thing that matters, right? there's lots of ideas out there—idea [00:42:00] books, which are like very inspirational or case studies, which like, "Oh, that company is doing something really cool, but that is very hard to translate into everyday practice."

Jurrian: And, with these books and especially the last one, I try to write down everything that I've learned. After trying it for 5 to 10 years with clients. So I know they work, but they won't work for everyone because every organization is different. And we also have to acknowledge that every situation, every organization is different. So every framework is by definition wrong. And I think if it comes to the, sometimes the snake oil that, that we, which I also say you and I are sometimes selling, we, leaders have to be aware and make their own choices based on what they see. We shouldn't fall into the trap of huge certification programs, all of those things. Taichi Ono is the founding father of the Toyota production system, the lean philosophy that was popularized in the Western world as well. And he at one point said, you know what, you have to look at your problems, think and think deeply and then decide what to do. It's really up to you as [00:43:00] leader to figure out what do I need to do and what can I ignore, as advice.

Sara: Just to dovetail off of something you just said, these practices might not work. But if what you're doing right now isn't yielding the result that you need, then doing something that might not work might help you learn what will.

Jurrian: Exactly. Yeah.

Sara: Where can people find you if they want to learn more about your work?

Jurrian: Yeah, so I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so just, follow, type in my name and you'll find me there. Happy to follow, follow or connect. And if you wanna learn more about the books, you can go to jurriaankamer.com or go directly to www.unblockbook.net which is the latest book.

Sara: Fantastic. thank you so much. I hope to see you someday in Assen.

Jurrian: Yeah, would be nice.

 

Sara: I hope this episode has sparked some new ideas for your own leadership journey. Remember, whether you're on the racetrack or in the office, success comes down to clear goals, continuous [00:44:00] learning, and a team that's aligned and autonomous. If you've found value in today's episode, share it with a fellow Thinkydoer. We love your reviews. And for more resources and insights, visit saralobkovich.com. Or if that's too hard to spell, there's a shortcut at findrc.co.

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