TL;DR: When your team is blocked, you take the ownership to unblock them.
You may have heard the phrase “Eat that Frog” which is a time management approach published by Brian Tracy emphasizing this point: make your day more productive by taking care of the hardest task first. In 2024, Andrew Yeung wrote an article about how he quickly rose up the career ladder at both Google and Meta by eating his boss’s frog — by taking on the tasks that his managers dreaded and handling it for them (on top of his own duties). “Plunging the frog” builds on top but has a more specific scope: unblock the team.
Have you been in situations where you feel you’re attending the same meeting over and over again getting nowhere? You feel like the team is using the same words, yet there is still lots of confusion and many leave the meeting feeling unclear of what their next step is? This is what “plunging the frog” takes care of.
A Critical Thinking Communicator would be the one to evaluate and audit the needed end state against current state affairs.
Through a process of “working backwards”, the Critical Thinking Communicator starts with the end goal — what SHOULD THIS THING BE. This is a must-do step that requires absolute clarity in order to successfully unblock the team. It’s best told from the view point of your end-audience.
The end state should sound something like this this: “Our <primary audience> will be able to do X, Y, and Z“. You must be able to use an actual person’s name (or audience segment) for “primary audience” and real scenarios to what “X”, “Y”, and “Z” are in order for this to work properly.
Afterwards, the following are critical components:
- Identify all involved people who have a part to play in getting to end state
- Map out where each person fits into the lifecycle of the work (are they design? are they testers?)
- Enumerate the elements that are preventing each person from being able to achieve their next step (this comes from having many conversations — whether 1:1 with team members or in small groups)
- Understand what it would take to achieve the next step — break this solve down to the smallest possible action
- Reconcile the work needed to the person who can do it
- Sequence out each person’s actions to show how all contributions work together to achieve the next step
- Task each impacted person with their action according to the diagram
- Confirm acknowledgment and shared understanding by each person for both their contribution and the end state
- GO GO GO
- Follow up with the team every day
Be warned — this process requires lots of patience and precision, but when done…everyone feels unblocked and refocused. But to you, the real win is that the team moved forward AND moved as a team.
I know I listed a lot of steps– if you need help or guidance with a current project of your own, I would love to work with you.