'Are OKRs Management Malpractice?' Part 4: It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.

OKRs appear to present a solution for two distinct needs of executives. One enables the empowerment of their teams, and the other is something much more limited. Why do many reach for the latter?

control versus alignment

In my earlier post, I explored whether ‘OKRs are Management Malpractice’, as Noah Cantor posits, or whether some disconnects make it difficult to draw a conclusion:

Are OKRs 'Management Malpractice'?

My theories about the disconnect are as follows:

1. It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.

2. The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.

3. It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.

4. How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

5. There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.

Examining what' job' they hire OKRs for can be very helpful when seeking to understand how companies attempt to deploy OKRs.

Some companies are interested in hiring OKRs to help increase awareness of different teams’ intent and reduce friction from misalignment or wasted effort due to ignorance of relevant efforts elsewhere in the organisation. This reflects the primary benefit I associate with OKRs: a method to help synchronise planning that provides the opportunity to adjust goals to improve the degree to which teams pull in the same direction and have confidence that each is describing the same objective.

Others will describe a desire to reduce variance from the leadership’s plans or even a desire to exert more control over their teams’ choices. This is an understandable but destructive use of OKRs. It creates pressure towards managing outputs and for leaders to set goals on behalf of their teams, a disempowering approach that reduces teams to mere doers and shuts the organisation off from ideas from those most likely to know what is possible.

Why do companies ‘hire’ OKRs for the wrong reasons?

When I say ‘understandable’, I mean from what is incentivised in the average organisation and the biases that influence decision-making. The tendency to look for quick fixes and a framework that can be installed, which claims to increase effectiveness, looks appealing. It's even more appealing when packaged with a tool, certifications, and certified trainers assuring success.

Why do these types of solutions appeal to executives? I’ve written about how bias influences decision-making towards compromised options many times, such as here:

The role of bias in the mediocrity cycle

Are there good tool vendors? I am sure there are. I’ve had some reach out and agree with my recommendations of not starting with a tool but instead adopting one when it addresses material challenges that could increase your success. Unsurprisingly, such self-aware vendors also have significantly better documentation than the average vendor (OKR guides, HowTos, training videos, etc.).

Great OKR trainers and coaches are also actively working with companies, evolving the range of OKR practices relevant to different situations and improving goal-setting for better alignment.

And good certification factories? It’s unlikely, but we’ll save that topic for another day.

Unfortunately, for every good vendor, there are more who increase the chance that new people to OKRs begin from a poor starting point.

Where does that leave us?

It's not a great situation. By volume, most OKR documentation is outdated and of low quality. And the majority of companies that are reaching for OKRs are reaching for the wrong reasons. The offerings from the vendors speak directly to these reasons, and the net result is that most implementations of OKRs are likely bad, disempowering, and destructive.

You could find and replace OKR with agile, which describes the play in that adjacent field fairly well.

Fortunately, the leading voices in the OKR space are experienced practitioners of OKRs and continue to provide an evolving description of how to help address the challenges OKRs are best able to address, those of alignment.

You can see my list of people who are furthering what I describe as outcome-thinking for the point of alignment here:

X (Twitter) List of 'Outcome Thinkers'

What this suggests to me is ideally, an organisation embarking on the use of OKRs is:

1. Doing so in response to a need for improving alignment and reducing the friction that can come with scale, such as many teams contributing to a complex software ecosystem that serves a wide range of needs.

2. A competency is built internally for alignment through shared understanding encapsulated by goals and the relationships between goals.

3. If external expertise is needed to find a successful path to working with OKRs, it is done with a commitment to building internal competency.

Using goal-setting for alignment is not easy. It takes discipline and commitment. The benefits can be significant. Teams are not only empowered to set their goals and chart their path to achieving them but also have a natural rhythm that enables adjusting goals to align their respective contributions better and increase the likelihood of starting together.

The importance of starting together and timing I’ve covered before:

Timing and starting together is important for successful change

So, what may seem like a dire situation may be more par for the course. There may come a time when the OKR community needs to consider whether formalising OKRs would be beneficial. It may involve a different path than the tired certification industrial complex.

Still, someday, an open-source, collaborative effort to document variations of OKRs and references for the most relevant context variations may be most applicable. This might help people new to OKRs have a greater chance of following a path that positively serves their needs.

Bad bosses looking for quick fixes or instruments of control can choose vendors who know them well and have tailored their flawed offerings to call loudly to their tendencies.

Next, I will look at how all this noise and variety may be making things difficult for people to navigate OKRs and find what is the best current understanding for how they might work best in their context:

'Are OKRs Management Malpractice?' Part 5: How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

Do you think it’s likely that poor implementations of OKRs represent the majority of cases? Are OKRs in use at your workplace? If so, what has the experience been like? Share your experiences in the comments.