I recently gave a small internal talk about “Don’t be a Blocker” value. This is actually flipped in my mind to “always be unblocking” which is action oriented. This is a brief summary of the talk.
To me there are two constituencies to unblock:
Unblocking others
Three things stand out:
- Communicating proactively - don’t leave others in the dark
- Timely decisions and responses - decisions must be made without perfect information
- Propose alternatives and contribute solutions
Regarding this last one, it’s easy to be a roadblock but it’s hard to build roads. When you are saying “no” to somebody, you obviously have to have good reasons but beyond that, you really want to at least propose a few alternatives or even (much) better, contribute an alternative solution.
Unblocking yourself
I care deeply about this and I try to teach my kids this - I consider it one of essential life hacks. Don’t learn to be helpless but rather:
- Take initiative instead of waiting
- Build your toolset
- Contribute solutions
There are two essential ways that you can be blocked at work:
- Functionally blocked: you don’t know how to do something
- Structurally blocked: you are not allowed to do something
Re functionally blocked, this is why building your own toolset is important - less you functionally depend on others, the more you can do, if you have to. And for anything involving text generation, we live in a golden age of functional unblocking. I am no front-end developer but for internally facing systems (so low level of true polish), I am probably capable of doing 80 to 90 percent of the work myself, just by being able to express my intent to LLMs, being able to run the generated code and test the outcome, maybe occasionally fix myself an issue.
As for structurally blocked, notice that usually you are not blocked from proposing something and, at least in software development, going all the way to contributing a possible solution (aka pull request). Done right (read: respectfully) this shows to others that you are actively trying to shoulder the burden and increase everybody’s velocity as opposed to “throwing work over the fence”.
Last modified on 2025-01-29