28 Jan 2026 · 2 min
Bill Gallagher suggests replacing "stuck" and "blockers" with "top challenge" in team meetings. The shift in language reduces psychological resistance and gets people to share more openly about what's actually slowing them down.
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So one of the things that we've noticed across many teams meeting agendas is that they have a round of things and in the dailies too, the weekly and daily meetings, they'll have a round of things that they call stock stucks or blockers. And what happens most of the time is as the meeting goes around, people say, no stocks, no blockers, or some version of that. And here's the problem that plays against our psychology as human beings to really do it. Most of us are not interested in saying that we're blocked or stuck on anything. And so we say that on the regular. In fact, we don't even think of it that way ourselves. Because to think or to say that you're stuck, to even think that you're stuck, is a kind of admission of defeat. It's a kind of a surrender and it's just not in our nature. Excuse me. So there is a way to upgrade that, and it's by focusing on your main challenge. What's your top challenge today?
Right.
Is a totally different way of talking about the same thing. We all have challenges. If I were to tell you my biggest challenge, most important challenge of the day, I could probably everybody could come up with their top challenge because we all have challenges all the day. But if I don't have to say I'm stuck or I'm blocked on it, then I remove that sort of psychological surrender that happens with the other language and suddenly everybody has something to share all the time, which is far more valuable as a team. If I knew what you were stuck with, right? But we said challenge. If I knew your main challenge and your main challenge and your main challenge, you, you don't have to say you're stuck. You could just say this is my top challenge and I'm still struggling with it. That's fine and now we can listen for opportunities to help each other. But shifting away from stocks and blockers, which have a kind of a psychological surrender, and focusing on top challenges really is a way to upgrade the quality of your meeting and allow more people to have input on a regular basis to be able to name and call things out on the regular. Hope that's helpful. We'll talk to you again soon.
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