Sometimes Getting Stuck Is the Breakthrough

Have you ever been in a workshop where everyone is talking, discussing, contributing ideas… and somehow you’re getting absolutely nowhere?

Yeah. That was me recently. 😅

Let me tell you what happened.

We knew something wasn’t working

There was a growing feeling that different parts of an organisation were too far apart.

People wanted to collaborate better. There were frustrations, things that weren’t running smoothly and a general sense that something needed to change.

So we brought people together.

The goal of our first workshop was to understand what wasn’t working and, hopefully, agree on some concrete actions.

And we had plenty to talk about!

But when we tried to turn those conversations into actions, things got tricky.

We realised that we didn’t really have a clear, shared process for how we worked together.

Okay, there’s something we can work with.

Let’s have another workshop and define that process!

Workshop number two. Here we go!

I went into the second workshop genuinely hoping we’d leave with some kind of process.

It didn’t have to be perfect.

Actually, I didn’t want it to be perfect.

Just something we could agree to try, learn from and improve along the way.

Sounds reasonable, right?

Well…

We talked.

And talked.

And talked some more.

There were discussions about responsibilities, expectations, routines and all sorts of details.

And individually, many of those discussions made sense.

But we couldn’t seem to connect them into anything resembling a process.

We kept getting stuck.

And I’ll admit it. I was getting a little frustrated myself.

We’d brought everyone together. People were engaged. We had the right conversations happening.

So why couldn’t we get anywhere?

And then it went quiet

After all those discussions, there was a moment when the room became pretty quiet.

We had all these pieces, but nowhere to put them.

And that’s when I pointed out what I thought was happening.

We were trying to define the details of a process without having agreed on how we actually wanted to work together.

We didn’t just lack a documented process.

We hadn’t even agreed on what we wanted that process to look like.

And I swear, I could almost see little lightbulbs appearing above people’s heads. 💡

It was one of those moments when something suddenly becomes obvious to everyone.

The penny had dropped.

I hadn’t expected to be happy about getting stuck

Here’s the thing.

I’d suspected before the workshops that we might be missing this shared understanding.

But I wasn’t certain.

And I genuinely hoped we’d be able to put together something practical during that second session.

So when we kept getting stuck in the details, I felt frustrated.

But when I saw that moment of shared understanding, something shifted for me too.

I realised that this was probably the conversation we needed to have before we could create anything useful together.

And suddenly, I was happy.

Not because we’d finished what we’d set out to do.

We hadn’t.

But because we finally understood something that had been getting in our way.

Sometimes the symptoms are easier to see than the cause

I’ve noticed this quite a lot in organisations.

People experience friction.

They find workarounds.

They get frustrated with things that take too long or feel unnecessarily complicated.

And after a while, some of those things just become normal.

That’s how we do things here.

I’m naturally curious about those situations.

Why is this so difficult?

Why do we keep running into the same problem?

What are we taking for granted?

Often, the symptoms are already visible to everyone. It’s the connection to what’s causing them that isn’t so obvious.

And sometimes I have a pretty strong suspicion about that connection.

But a suspicion is still a suspicion.

I can point to what I’m noticing, ask questions and challenge assumptions.

What I can’t do is create shared understanding simply by announcing my conclusion.

Imagine if I’d walked into that first workshop and said:

“You know what? I don’t think you even know how you want things to work. 😊”

I’m pretty sure that would’ve raised a few eyebrows.

And more importantly, it wouldn’t necessarily have helped.

We needed to explore what wasn’t working, hear each other’s perspectives and discover what we were actually missing.

Together.

So, was the workshop successful?

Well, we didn’t produce the process we’d hoped for.

We didn’t walk away with a neat set of steps ready to implement.

And I’m not going to pretend that was the plan all along.

It wasn’t.

But we did walk away with something we hadn’t had before.

A shared understanding of why we were struggling to move forward.

And for me, that matters.

Because there’s a difference between a group of people being told what’s wrong and a group of people recognising it together.

The second one gives you a much better starting point for doing something about it.

Of course, an aha moment isn’t enough on its own.

We still need to decide how we want to work, try things out and see what actually helps.

There’s work ahead of us.

But at least we’re no longer trying to arrange the pieces of a puzzle without knowing what picture we’re trying to create.

And that feels like progress to me.

Sometimes getting stuck is exactly what helps you see what’s been missing.