What’s the block?
There’s a certain inevitability when working on a project — at some point things might just grind to a halt. This can be due to your own inaction, but it can also be out of your hands: sometimes clients or collaborators just don’t get back to you with something you need to keep the project moving.
Recently, we’ve found ourselves being much more intentional about identifying when a delay becomes a block so we can address it. This seems obvious now that we write it down, but taking an intentional approach to blocks has changed our process around aspects of client (and internal) work for the better.
Our current unblocking approach started last year when we sent some draft content to a client for review and just… didn’t hear back. For ages. In these situations it’s easy to default to a) annoyance or b) just waiting… and waiting. However, a big part of our job is to help execute projects that people and organizations don’t have capacity to do themselves, so we realised we needed to take responsibility for the stall. Sending another “just following up!!!” email was obviously not the solution.
One day during our regular Antistatic catch up call, one of us asked: “what do you think [client]’s block is?”. As in: are they pressed for time? Or is a long document too daunting to review? Or do they prefer to give verbal feedback? We’re not psychologists, but we are here to make things easier for clients, and in this case reviewing and providing feedback obviously wasn’t feeling easy. So, we made our best guess about what might be blocking them from doing what we thought was an easy task, and adjusted our approach accordingly. And it worked a treat.
After this little client breakthrough, we started applying this approach to ourselves as well. If one of us just isn’t getting something done (responding to an email, writing a paragraph, reviewing a proposal) we try to pause and ask each other “what’s the block”. This can feel self-indulgent — what if the block is just procrastination? But even so, why is this the thing I’m procrastinating about? Perhaps I need more information, or I have a vague concern that our approach is wrong, or I’m nervous about the response to my unsent email. Once you’ve articulated the issue (and it’s almost never just I’m lazy) it’s much easier to work out what to do next.
That’s it: “What’s the block?”. It’s not rocket science, it’s just one little thing we do to be generous with each other and clients, and try to make sure everyone has what they need to do their best work.