A response to 'By what means? Management without objectives'

Readers may have noticed that I had been having a discussion with Martin Chesbrough about OKRs. You may have missed a long comment of mine on his blog. An edited version is reproduced here.

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Martin Chesbrough wrote an insightful post recently about some of the risks and issues of using OKRs, which is worth a read. He highlights, in particular, an issue when leaders highlight the desired output or outcome, as they might do in the form of an OKR, without engaging their team on how they might achieve that.

His conclusion is not to use OKRs, which differs from mine as evidenced by the fact that I’ve used them in multiple work contexts, which is his prerogative. As I’ve stated several times on this blog, OKRs are not the only way to solve the alignment challenges they were conceived to address, nor are they the best available goal-setting approach; they are merely the most popular (and only of the formal and semi-formal goal-setting systems i.e. if you ignore the generic use of SMART goals, ad hoc goals, or not using a goal-setting approach at all which I am sure are all more popular still).

For me, the interest in OKRs has been because that was where we started, and it was a stepping stone towards ideas such as, and because their relative popularity helps with accessibility and familiarity for the audience:

The concerns he raises are part of why I suggest OKRs should respond to a particular need and not a universally relevant practice for all companies at all times. This should not surprise any of you who have read my various posts on the importance of context. They are also why I feel that OKRs alone are insufficient to help an organisation and why I was motivated to write the post Improving OKRs. I would never suggest they are always a good thing to do as context-free advice for companies. They should be a response to a problem and tested to see if they help address the issue and either be adapted until they address it or abandoned in favor of something else.

Martin was responding to Noah Cantor’s post: OKRs Are Management Malpractice and my series of response posts, which challenged Noah’s quite definitive take on the subject:

I wrote a long comment in response to Martin’s post, which I thought the audience of this blog, especially those of you who were drawn to this publication because of the exploration of goal-setting I’ve covered. I also encourage you to check out Martin's comments in other posts' comment sections, such as the thread at the bottom of this post:

'Are OKRs Management Malpractice?' Part 2: It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are discussing

Enjoy!

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Hi Martin, it's a nice post. I agree that ‘outcomes over output’ is reductive—it's not a phrase I like to use. It can't be one or the other.

Leaders who fail to discuss how something will be achieved would be derelict of duty.

You seem to suggest that because a team wrote down their agreement of what a desirable effect of their work was, they won't engage in the means of achieving it, and neither will any leader who may be supporting them.

That's not behavior I've observed.

I wholeheartedly agree that leaders tend to copy and paste what worked in a previous situation or what they perceived worked. They tend to focus on the final form of where they evolved, addressing needs as they developed.

Look at all those applications of the Spotify model or SAFE, etc. These are context-free solutions applied to unexamined problems. OKRs could easily be misapplied using the same flawed thinking. Dr Jabe Bloom's Ideal Present Design is a very accessible introduction to Ackhoff's ideas in Idealized Design and Gap Thinking vs Present Thinking, which I've found helpful in helping others spot the same error.

Google used OKRs and was successful. People copied OKRs initially because they wanted to be as successful as Google, failing to notice that many factors were at play in Google, including many invisible factors that contributed to their success. That might be like thinking the horse symbol on a Ferrari is what makes the car fast.

A more helpful reason to adopt any goal-setting method is that you observe energy wasted on pushing towards divergent outcomes. The desired result is implicit, and because of this, there was a lack of awareness of the differences in views. This issue led to adoption at a team level.

Another scenario was that teams that seldom but very occasionally have interactions that can contribute to an effect were unaware because, absent of any summary of intent, they would have needed to consume a lot of every team's modelling, plans, etc. This led to the public sharing of goals.

In Seek's example, teams with consumer-facing products could sometimes operate independently. Other times, they would collaborate or coordinate with teams updating AI models shared across interfaces (mobile apps, email, and push notifications) or operate on changes that affected both sides of the employment market—e.g., a change that affects how candidates interact with hirers.

Being aware of those intents, often before any work had occurred, was very helpful in triggering those teams to reach out and identify how they might need to interact—coordinate, collaborate, self-service, etc. Leaders also helped with this, but there were so many teams and potential interactions that it helped if this could be something everyone could participate in.

OKRs was only one of many things we and most teams felt was helping. We also modelled everyday interactions between teams, relationships between goals (i.e. the logic of why we thought interventions would have the effects they might have - theory), "TEAM APIs", etc.

My purpose in writing about OKRs is not to advocate for them. I have written in great detail about my experiences. Hopefully, by accessing the details, people who opt to try OKRs can see why we tried them, what worked and didn't, and what it may have been about our environment that might explain that. The examples above might illustrate how I differentiate alignment with management.

You also mentioned tampering with just part of a system—that it's an issue we were aware of and why we mapped relationships and systems rather than using OKRs with teams in isolation. It's a valid concern, and we expect teams not to get it initially, but that was a nice on-ramp into systems thinking for everyone.

Similarly, when adopting OKRs as a solution to an issue—I don't advocate starting by applying them across the board—we started incrementally and experimentally and monitored whether it was helping.

Hope that's helpful insight into your line of inquiry.

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Note 1: I’ve edited my writing further, improving it for clarity but hopefully without changing its substance too substantially.

Note 2: I was fortunate to catch up with Martin on a video call recently after posting this last comment, and we had a good chat. Martin shared some of his career experience, in which he’d seen firsthand leaders who were very focused on sharing an outcome but less interested in engaging teams to understand how they might support them in achieving the goal. I explained the distinction between using OKRs for managing teams and using OKRs to address alignment and a bit more about what led us to choose OKRs as a solution in a few different contexts (a corporate with 20+ teams and a startup with effectively a single team) and the very different implementations that applied to those very different contexts.

Where do you stand regarding the usefulness of approaches such as OKRs? Do you share the concerns covered in the post I am responding to? Have you experienced these challenges? Did you persist with OKRs? Let us know in the comments.

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