Aligning on goals using OKRs (summaries of my top goal-setting/OKR posts)
One topic I've covered in reasonable detail in this publication is goal setting using OKRs. This post summarises my posts on this topic, helpful for new and long term subscribers.
Welcome to new subscribers to ‘Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes’ who may have discovered this publication by way of Hacker News where this post featured for a day or so:
Improving OKRs
In this post, I cover a variety of adjustments and other complementary practices that can enhance the results you can achieve with OKRs.
This is my most popular post on OKRs but by no means my only post on OKRs. Readers who came here via this post, I assume your experiences with OKRs is why it caught your attention.
It may be helpful to provide you with a summary of what I have covered in terms of OKRs.
Avoiding common pitfalls with OKRs
For many organisations, their journey with OKRs started with someone reading the book or, at the very least, excerpts from ‘Measure What Matters’, the first popular book on OKRs and a very influential tome to this day.
What is important to note is while this book does a great job introducing people to the concepts of OKRs and shares how they have been adopted across a variety of companies, it also managed to popularise several practices that are now widely agreed to be OKR anti-patterns. It's worth reading to avoid these pitfalls.
Following a similar theme, the next most popular post goes deeper into crucial differences in the implementation of OKRs. These differences may appear subtle but can have enormous ramifications for the effectiveness of OKRs.
In the haste to get OKRs in place, it can be tempting to apply OKRs as a process layer over the top of what is already in place. This can sometimes make OKRs more of a bureaucratic chore than an enabling alignment tool.
In addition to the posts focused on identifying and avoiding pitfalls with OKRs, I have also described the practices we found most compelling.
For instance, as organisations often use OKRs to improve alignment (i.e., less friction because people are pulling in the same direction at the same time), the ideas in this post can be applied in the place where alignment begins: at the leadership level.
Much of the variation in how OKRs are approached is due to OKRs being an informal practice that each reference documents differently. There’s a proliferation of references as the gold rush of OKR tool providers led to each providing their documentation for OKRs. The quality varies greatly, and harmful practices, against which there is ample evidence, are perpetuated.
It may seem I am against OKR tool providers, but I am not. They have their place in helping organisations scale OKRs.
I do not recommend companies start with an OKR tool. To do so encourages spreading OKRs wider before succeeding with a pilot first and also solves a problem the organisation doesn’t have yet.
If teams using OKRs don’t value alignment, spend time on it - installing a tool to optimise further doing OKRs sends a reinforcement suggesting the organisation doesn’t value this time either.
Thinking in terms of Outcomes
Of all the ways to address the pitfalls covered in the posts above, one of the most impactful is to focus on defining objectives as outcomes and key results as evidence.
To do the opposite is to allow objectives and key results to be activities, i.e., your project plan is just in a new format. I cover what we lose when we take this approach here.
Writing goals that improve alignment
Organisations use OKRs to address a range of challenges. Of these, the most helpful problem OKRs can help address is alignment on common goals, which helps people be available and focused on making progress together.
If the inputs into OKRs come from a misaligned leadership team, any use of OKRs is off to a dreadful start and will show up quickly as issues. This post starts with the alignment of this critical group.
A method to test a leadership group's alignment is to test their thinking on the existing initiatives that are already running. This post covers how you can run such a session and is well-tested with executive teams.
To do this well it helps to have good fundamentals. Writing a well-formed goal is a good skill to establish with anyone adopting OKRs.
To extend this thinking to key results involves considering each key result as evidence of progress to achieving or not achieving the goal.
