Off the Presses: Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World

Back to Index of Newsletters

From NetSpeed Leader Volume 20, December 2004

The dust jacket of Unstuck describes the book as a “smart, fearless, and totally practical guide to turn to for inspiration and immediate solutions.” That’s exactly what the volume is. Written by consultant Keith Yamashita and management professor Sandra Spataro, Unstuck provides gems for transforming team conflict as well as team exhaustion, lack of direction, and other unproductive conditions.

Unstuck evolved from MBA classes at Yale. Seeing a class need for practical real-time tools, the authors created a set of flashcards: “Unstuck Cards.” Each card was to function as a tool in the students’ management toolbox. The cards evolved when they became the basis for an experiential presentation involving 250 people at a Fast Company conference. And the book evolved from there.

Because of its evolution, the book reads like an excellent, interactive workshop experience. For instance, it’s in steps—not chapters. In Step One, “Admitting You’re Stuck,” you, the reader, are encouraged to jot notes on the pages, with prompts such as these:

• Write down (in full glory) what you’re feeling, why you’re stuck, why it seems you can’t forge ahead.
  
• Can you identify the roadblocks? If so, what are they?
  
• Is it just you? Or is your whole team in a funk?
  
• What are you trying to achieve? (Don’t just focus on the end goal. Think about your values.)

Like an effective workshop beginning, Step 1 provides models in the form of illuminating graphic renderings of circles relating to other circles. These illustrate the healthy team in balance, the “Protocol-crazy” team, the “Off-kilter” team, the “All heart, no action” team, the “Stuck in your own lore” team, the “All brains, no brawn” team, and the “Discombobulated” team. Merely studying the models is a powerful step in understanding and transforming team conflict.

When the book/workshop progresses to Step 2: “Diagnosing Why You’re Stuck,” it offers seven primary causes of teams being stuck. One, for example, is feeling “battle-torn.” According to Yamashita and Spataro, these, among others, are signs of battle-torn teams (verbatim):

• Team members with hurt feelings, bruised egos, or political agendas.


• Team interactions characterized by unresolved conflict, defensiveness, lack of communication, and high levels of inhibition.
  
• Factions, cliques, bullies, and desertions.
  
  

Step 3 is “Getting Unstuck,” and it’s the core of the book. As though in a workshop, once you have determined that you are stuck and have diagnosed why, you go to pages like workshop stations and try the tools you find there. The pages/stations have evocative titles. For example, among the pages to visit if your team is battle-torn are “The meeting has gone ballistic,” “Before any idea can become brilliant, it must first be heard,” and “Groupthink. Yep. Yep.”

Here’s the activity, in part, for a page entitled “Be clear about which mode you are in” (verbatim):

Change requires two modes: blue-sky mode (“Given a clean slate, what would we do to live out our vision?”) and tuning mode (“Given the hand we’ve been dealt, how should we proceed?”). Often standstills in groups result from the blue-sky people being dragged down by the tuning-mode people, or the tuning-mode people thinking the blue-sky people are nuts. This issue can be solved by declaring which mode you’re in—and ensuring everyone else is in that same mode. . . .

How does your company move from one mode to another? Is it typically a strategic decision? Or is it a reaction? If you find yourself more reactionary, it might be worth visiting page . . . .

Among the pages of tools and techniques are brief, thought-provoking case studies from the U.S. Postal Service, Public Broadcasting System (PBS), Nike, the Sierra Club, and other entities.

Unstuck: A Tool for Yourself, Your Team, and Your World is a gem of a book—unique, stunning, and inspiring. Published by the Penguin Group in 2004, it’s available in a compact 5-by-7-inch hardcover retailing for about $20. Visit http://www.unstuck.com to sample the book’s style and content.