Hey, it's Laura and Jason.
Welcome to Issue #9 of The Weekly UNLOK, where human potential meets organizational performance.
"THE SPEED ISSUE"
I received an interesting response to last week’s newsletter, which inspired this week’s (thank you everyone that responds, truly it means so much).
Anyway, this email response got me to adjust my thinking big time, and if you stick with me to the end, it just might activate something in you to adjust your thinking, too.
He offered me a correction….
"Remember, Laura," he wrote, "the sun doesn’t go around the earth, the earth goes around the sun."
I read that twice. OK. Yeah, the earth goes around sun. The earth goes around the sun, not the other way around.
And then went on to offer several perspectives about external market factors.
Oh…ok.
What if it’s all about asking what the OUTSIDE, aka market forces, are doing to disrupt businesses?
And right now, “outside forces” are moving far faster than most organizations were built to handle.
So many are feeling it. And that’s why there’s so much uncertainty.
ON PROCESS: JASON
I spent 25 years building inside ONE organization. One.
We scaled from startup to $190M. Worked through fourteen acquisitions. Yes, fourteen. Expanded into multiple lines of business, multiple locations, and multiple states.
The secret sauce in all of it was a methodology, a way of leading, that I thought was just common sense until I started talking to leaders outside those four walls.
Turns it out wasn’t just common sense at all.
What we built, what made it all work, wasn’t magic. It was architecture.
Decision rights, career paths, operating rhythms, environments where people felt they belonged and could think and act without waiting for permission.
When the external environment demanded something of us, we had the internal machinery to respond.
We navigated economic downturns, a pandemic, massive changes in our marketplace… all of it external, seemingly out of our control.
What was in our control was how we were built to face these external challenges, and we faced them well. Not always perfectly, but well.
Most organizations don’t have that. They have good intentions and a lot of meetings.
A market shifts, a competitor emerges, a new technology shows up unexpectedly, and the organization responds by scheduling a leadership offsite to discuss their response to the thing they should already be responding to.
The external environment doesn’t wait for consensus.
It doesn’t pause while you finish your planning cycle, and it’s moving faster.
It creates pressure constantly, and the only question that matters is whether your organization is built to move under that pressure or freeze inside it.
The pain most organizations are experiencing right now isn’t coming from inside their walls.
It’s being revealed by what’s happening outside them.
Things that were manageable inefficiencies two years ago are compounding risks today.
Organizations that were underperforming are now dangerously exposed.
The ineffectiveness (dysfunction?) was always there, but the pace of the external world is making it impossible to ignore.
So what do you do?
You can’t solve a speed problem with a culture initiative, or outrun the external environment with a values statement on the wall.
The organizations built to navigate this faster world are the ones that have intentionally built genuine architecture for how they move work through the business.
There are three core ways in which we think about this architecture:
The first is Belonging — whether people feel connected enough to the mission and to each other that they’ll tell you what they actually see when the pressure is on.
The second is Authority — whether the people closest to the problem have real permission to act on it, or whether every meaningful decision escalates up.
The third is Mastery — whether people know what good looks like in a fast-moving environment and have enough support to meet that standard without waiting for someone above them to define it.
For 25 years I watched what happens when you build those conditions versus when you don’t.
The organizations that build them aren’t waiting to respond when the world moves.
ON PEOPLE: LAURA
30,000 career conversations over the past 20 years gives me a little insight into how people have been feeling.
And what I can tell you is that the people who struggle most in rapidly changing organizations are the ones whose sense of identity and safety lives entirely in how the job looks today.
You probably know someone like this.
Maybe you ARE this person right now, and there’s no shame in naming it. I was this person for years.
I built a professional identity around being good at a particular version of the work.
And when the work demanded that I change, my first instinct wasn’t curiosity. It was protection.
Hold the line. Prove the value of what I already know. Wait for things to stabilize.
The problem is that things don’t really stabilize anymore.
The pace you’re feeling “out there” is PERMANENT. Chaos “out there” isn’t going away. It’s only getting louder.
The question is whether you’ve updated your inner operating system to hold it.
The leaders who move well through disruptive change aren’t fearless… they’ve just done the internal work.
What is “inner work,” you say?
It’s your ability to adapt, be curious, and understand your gifts, strengths, and values…and those of your team.
Learning to be ok with the discomfort of change… yes, this is a skill to build.
Learning to lean into that discomfort and do the inner work of understanding the unique value you bring to work.
Practical questions to ask yourself:
- When you imagine your organization two years from now, where does your sense of safety come from? Is it based on the world slowing down, or on your capacity to move through it? Be honest.
- If a significant external shift hit your organization tomorrow, how many decisions could your team make and act on without escalating? And if you decide on a strategic adjustment, how well do you think your team can execute at speed?
We’re here for the ripple effect ✨,
Laura & Jason
P.S. - Have a story to tell? Reply back and let us know. We're collecting more evidence from those who have lived it.
BEFORE YOU GO: HOW WE CAN HELP
FOR COMPANIES: If your team is making decisions more slowly than the external environment requires, that's probably a design problem, not just a people problem. Book a strategy call.
OR... [Take the free self-assessment →]
FOR INDIVIDUALS: Laura works personally with a small number of people to build the internal stability and clarity that make rapid external change navigable Book an activation session and let’s get into it.