When OKRs are criticised (which is fair enough; there's plenty to criticise), it can be hard to know which version is being referred to. OKRs are a moveable feast. Here's why.
I assume it's being a negligent manager or leader based on your definition. So by extension we are examining is ANY use of OKRs are a form of negligence by managers.
There's no debate that some use of OKRs is reflective of negligent behavior - such as using OKRs for managing teams rather than supporting alignment and awareness across teams, linking OKRs to performance and other incentives, disempowering by managers setting the OKRs for their teams, disempowering by defining goals as outputs or actions on behalf of teams, disconnecting from learning by tracking progress through activities without considering what causal relationships may exist, working without a hypothesis...
But what Noah has put out there and you have asked me to consider (and I have, long before anyone asked me to) is are all applications of OKRs negligence. Albeit Noah qualified his view in his post identifying that link to incentives, cascades, managers setting the OKRs to name a few are the specific concerns he has with OKRs. But you wouldn't find any experienced practitioner recommend any of these practices. So those stripped away, where exactly is your discomfort.
He also suggested he'd instead use goal trees which are all recommended amongst the same set of experienced practitioners (the list of the people I am thinking of when I use this term was linked to from my post).
You mentioned no discomfort with team goals so what of the remaining aspects of OKRs provide the discomfort you have? Is it that they are public? Is it that cultures that use them may expect them used universally? These are all areas worthy of debate. I suspect there will be shifts in these areas true.
Another area worthy of debate is OKRs as targets. A lot of practical applications of OKRs in organisations soften their effect as targets because failure is more than acceptable its seen as learning and that is valued more than the result over a short period. OKRs are most widely used in SaaS businesses currently where competition is fierce and these companies are trying to prevail over the long term, not just juice metrics. But is it enough to not have the destructive effects of targets. It's part of my affection with PuMP - Stacey Barr has designed a performance measurement approach entirely around not setting targets.
Finally there's some discomfort with expressing outcomes separate with the method as per John Willis reference to Deming 'by what method'. But this seems to be based on what you imagine happens. In my experience where teams are defining their goals they also have a rich view on what their hypotheses are and how they will test them. OKRs being for alignment only don't typically define how they approach the activities so they use any of the wide range of options for engaging and theorising and testing their theories. You don't have to take my word for it, plenty of my colleagues have written about their experiences working this way.
Hi Daniel, thanks for this great rundown on the history of OKRs and their various forms over the years.
I’d like you to consider, for 1 minute, that all the forms you outlined above are some form of management malpractice. My argument is that they all stem from one concept- the idea that achieving an objective or gaining an outcome is the purpose of business.
Your newsletter title “Focus on Outcomes” reflects this philosophy.
At first sight outcomes appears to be praiseworthy. As businesses mature and go through “boom and bust” cycles, outcomes feel less sturdy.
A focus on creating joy at work might first appear flippant. At best this is a subsidiary goal. As with all reinforcing loops, flywheels in modern terms, their efficacy comes when tested.
The same with alignment. Who could argue that alignment is not a good thing, until we are all aligned like lemmings on falling off the same cliff.
The test of good management is not how they perform in good times but how they handle the bad times. Ask any receivership business?
I will spend more than a minute Martin :) This series is to entertain precisely that question but first I am trying to at least narrow down to what I write about rather than all of human history of goal-setting.
I think we can agree from the history tour I laid out that every concept from MBOs have been altered significantly over the years and continues to as OKRs. You can tabularise a Mutually Exclusive Completely Exhaustive description of each iteration and see that this is true. And yet some invisible force you claim persists that binds each iteration together - the spirit of Malpractice maybe? :) I always wondered in the movie Christine, if a mechanic replaced its parts one by one would the car still be evil? :D
I am particularly interested to learn from you what are examples of objectives / outcomes you think I might believe is the purpose of a business? You may have some assumptions about what I view to be outcomes and how one might use these to orient work. Some specific examples may help highlight the connections you see with these being connected with poor resilience in bust cycles. I might not ascribe to those things nor believe they are outcomes.
>the idea that achieving an objective or gaining an outcome is the purpose of business.
I don't think I've ever written that in my life :)
To me outcomes are effects and are fractal in nature ("its outcomes all the way down") - that may map to ToC's definition of 'necessary conditions' which I'd argue are framed as so because of Goldratt's view of organisations having a single goal. I don't subscribe to Goldratt's view - the goal he describes to me are outputs: "To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow."
For example, I am suspicious of a description that MBOs focus on outcomes. I'd say 99% of the examples I've seen of MBOs were focused on outputs. As are 99% of OKR examples - that has been the purpose of this publication - to call out the toxic effects of setting teams output targets. So are we talking about a focus on outcomes or a focus on outputs? Because to me a focus on outputs quite predictably leads to inhumane working conditions.
You mentioned 'creating joy' - I think it is a good connection and may indicate we are closer than we think. But you didn't quite connect the dots. Are you saying I see 'creating joy at work' as flippant or not a fundamental goal of an organisation or not a discreet outcome in its own right (ok putting aside it contains a verb - I assume we mean something like 'people enjoy working here') ? I'd see this as a desirable outcome close to the central purpose of an organisation in addition to the effects the organisation would aspire to have through its existence.
I see these dimensions of outcomes as fundamental to the purpose of a business. The dynamics and DNA of different businesses can be described by the relationships between its aspirations on different dimensions. I use organisations as a term more than business because what I am describing is broader than profit maximising businesses.
If OKRs is only that we write down what we are trying to achieve determines how we are trying to achieve, and provides a method of determining whether we are talking about the same aspiration - is it as dangerous as you worry it is? If its not, then which common assumption about OKRs tips it over the edge to where it does? If we can name it then we can at least assess whether its something I believe should even be part of how OKRs are practiced.
Why in your mind are the Lemmings falling off the cliff? If I am defining success as "people love working here" and "we are financially healthy" and "we are [meeting our purpose]" and we are working on points across the causal chain of leverage points that may lead to these effects / outcomes then that in my experience has been quite resilient in the face of changing market conditions.
I write about feedback loops over different timescales. That we are oriented to a richer purpose beyond making money over a shorter time period is part of that resilience because of the course-correcting feedback loop.
In inhumane organisation, leadership have aspirations but don't communicate them and they don't provide the opportunity for their teams to share their aspirations either nor synthesise together to inform eachother for a better whole. I talk of alignment as the idea of not having accidental disconnects because we are unaware of inconsistency. That is not the same as forced alignment which is striving for consistency which has the effect of removing variance to maintain the status quo. The latter is very fragile and maybe the risk you are describing.
In the working environments I've been a part of where instead leadership proactively shared context to teams and teams shared what they were trying to achieve transparently the ability to self-organise and tackle problems together was more common that in other organisations I've been in where that wasn't true.
The last assumption I will highlight seems to be something like: "if we write down what our goals are" then that will overwhelm the approaches of achieving goals. That's not been my experience but it was certainly a risk we actively worked on to mitigate. I have written about the risk of Gap Thinking vs Present Thinking. Action must be based on where you are. The outcomes are there to orient you.
There's reasonable consensus by experienced practitioners of OKRs around these concepts:
- aligning not cascading
- set by teams not leadership
- outcomes not outputs
- evidence of progress not measurement of activities
- paired with a persistent model of the causal assumptions that help you identify where leverage may contribute to desirable effects.
- are there to orient direction only
- deliberate focus on the present adjacent not gap thinking against the future ideal
Anyway, more than a minute. Hope that illuminates some of my perspective and the aspects I am considering when assessing what contributes to worsening working conditions. Interested to know if that challenges any assumptions or reveals my blindspots more clearly for you?
I think the dictionary definition of “malpractice” has references to improper, illegal, or negligent professional behaviour.
The way I see it is that we wish to elevate the practice of management to be a profession (consider the Australian Institute of Management or its NZ equivalent). It is in this context that the word malpractice has specific meaning.
Oops - somehow posted this outside the thread. Trying again.
"Management Malpractice" - I assume it's being a negligent manager or leader based on the definition you shared. So by extension we are examining is ANY use of OKRs are a form of negligence by managers. Fair?
There's no debate that some use of OKRs is reflective of negligent behavior - such as using OKRs for managing teams rather than supporting alignment and awareness across teams, linking OKRs to performance and other incentives, disempowering by managers setting the OKRs for their teams, disempowering by defining goals as outputs or actions on behalf of teams, disconnecting from learning by tracking progress through activities without considering what causal relationships may exist, working without a hypothesis...
But what Noah has put out there and you have asked me to consider (and I have, long before anyone asked me to) is are all applications of OKRs negligence. Albeit Noah qualified his view in his post identifying that link to incentives, cascades, managers setting the OKRs to name a few are the specific concerns he has with OKRs. But you wouldn't find any experienced practitioner recommend any of these practices. So those stripped away, where exactly is your discomfort.
He also suggested he'd instead use goal trees which are all recommended amongst the same set of experienced practitioners (the list of the people I am thinking of when I use this term was linked to from my post).
You mentioned no discomfort with team goals so what of the remaining aspects of OKRs provide the discomfort you have? Is it that they are public? Is it that cultures that use them may expect them used universally? These are all areas worthy of debate. I suspect there will be shifts in these areas true.
Another area worthy of debate is OKRs as targets. A lot of practical applications of OKRs in organisations soften their effect as targets because failure is more than acceptable its seen as learning and that is valued more than the result over a short period. OKRs are most widely used in SaaS businesses currently where competition is fierce and these companies are trying to prevail over the long term, not just juice metrics. But is it enough to not have the destructive effects of targets. It's part of my affection with PuMP - Stacey Barr has designed a performance measurement approach entirely around not setting targets.
Is there some discomfort with expressing outcomes separate with the method as per John Willis reference to Deming 'by what method'? This seems to be based on what you imagine happens when the organisations I've worked with use OKRs.
In my experience where teams are defining their goals they also have a rich view on what their hypotheses are and how they will test them. OKRs being for alignment only don't typically define how they approach the activities so they use any of the wide range of options for engaging and theorising and testing their theories. It starts with blame-free cultures and a culture of being comfortable using evidence for decisions.
You don't have to take my word for it, plenty of my colleagues have written about their experiences working this way. Hence its hard to reconcile all use of OKRs with "Management Malpractice".
I assume it's being a negligent manager or leader based on your definition. So by extension we are examining is ANY use of OKRs are a form of negligence by managers.
There's no debate that some use of OKRs is reflective of negligent behavior - such as using OKRs for managing teams rather than supporting alignment and awareness across teams, linking OKRs to performance and other incentives, disempowering by managers setting the OKRs for their teams, disempowering by defining goals as outputs or actions on behalf of teams, disconnecting from learning by tracking progress through activities without considering what causal relationships may exist, working without a hypothesis...
But what Noah has put out there and you have asked me to consider (and I have, long before anyone asked me to) is are all applications of OKRs negligence. Albeit Noah qualified his view in his post identifying that link to incentives, cascades, managers setting the OKRs to name a few are the specific concerns he has with OKRs. But you wouldn't find any experienced practitioner recommend any of these practices. So those stripped away, where exactly is your discomfort.
He also suggested he'd instead use goal trees which are all recommended amongst the same set of experienced practitioners (the list of the people I am thinking of when I use this term was linked to from my post).
You mentioned no discomfort with team goals so what of the remaining aspects of OKRs provide the discomfort you have? Is it that they are public? Is it that cultures that use them may expect them used universally? These are all areas worthy of debate. I suspect there will be shifts in these areas true.
Another area worthy of debate is OKRs as targets. A lot of practical applications of OKRs in organisations soften their effect as targets because failure is more than acceptable its seen as learning and that is valued more than the result over a short period. OKRs are most widely used in SaaS businesses currently where competition is fierce and these companies are trying to prevail over the long term, not just juice metrics. But is it enough to not have the destructive effects of targets. It's part of my affection with PuMP - Stacey Barr has designed a performance measurement approach entirely around not setting targets.
Finally there's some discomfort with expressing outcomes separate with the method as per John Willis reference to Deming 'by what method'. But this seems to be based on what you imagine happens. In my experience where teams are defining their goals they also have a rich view on what their hypotheses are and how they will test them. OKRs being for alignment only don't typically define how they approach the activities so they use any of the wide range of options for engaging and theorising and testing their theories. You don't have to take my word for it, plenty of my colleagues have written about their experiences working this way.
Hi Daniel, thanks for this great rundown on the history of OKRs and their various forms over the years.
I’d like you to consider, for 1 minute, that all the forms you outlined above are some form of management malpractice. My argument is that they all stem from one concept- the idea that achieving an objective or gaining an outcome is the purpose of business.
Your newsletter title “Focus on Outcomes” reflects this philosophy.
At first sight outcomes appears to be praiseworthy. As businesses mature and go through “boom and bust” cycles, outcomes feel less sturdy.
A focus on creating joy at work might first appear flippant. At best this is a subsidiary goal. As with all reinforcing loops, flywheels in modern terms, their efficacy comes when tested.
The same with alignment. Who could argue that alignment is not a good thing, until we are all aligned like lemmings on falling off the same cliff.
The test of good management is not how they perform in good times but how they handle the bad times. Ask any receivership business?
I will spend more than a minute Martin :) This series is to entertain precisely that question but first I am trying to at least narrow down to what I write about rather than all of human history of goal-setting.
I think we can agree from the history tour I laid out that every concept from MBOs have been altered significantly over the years and continues to as OKRs. You can tabularise a Mutually Exclusive Completely Exhaustive description of each iteration and see that this is true. And yet some invisible force you claim persists that binds each iteration together - the spirit of Malpractice maybe? :) I always wondered in the movie Christine, if a mechanic replaced its parts one by one would the car still be evil? :D
I am particularly interested to learn from you what are examples of objectives / outcomes you think I might believe is the purpose of a business? You may have some assumptions about what I view to be outcomes and how one might use these to orient work. Some specific examples may help highlight the connections you see with these being connected with poor resilience in bust cycles. I might not ascribe to those things nor believe they are outcomes.
>the idea that achieving an objective or gaining an outcome is the purpose of business.
I don't think I've ever written that in my life :)
To me outcomes are effects and are fractal in nature ("its outcomes all the way down") - that may map to ToC's definition of 'necessary conditions' which I'd argue are framed as so because of Goldratt's view of organisations having a single goal. I don't subscribe to Goldratt's view - the goal he describes to me are outputs: "To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow."
For example, I am suspicious of a description that MBOs focus on outcomes. I'd say 99% of the examples I've seen of MBOs were focused on outputs. As are 99% of OKR examples - that has been the purpose of this publication - to call out the toxic effects of setting teams output targets. So are we talking about a focus on outcomes or a focus on outputs? Because to me a focus on outputs quite predictably leads to inhumane working conditions.
You mentioned 'creating joy' - I think it is a good connection and may indicate we are closer than we think. But you didn't quite connect the dots. Are you saying I see 'creating joy at work' as flippant or not a fundamental goal of an organisation or not a discreet outcome in its own right (ok putting aside it contains a verb - I assume we mean something like 'people enjoy working here') ? I'd see this as a desirable outcome close to the central purpose of an organisation in addition to the effects the organisation would aspire to have through its existence.
I see these dimensions of outcomes as fundamental to the purpose of a business. The dynamics and DNA of different businesses can be described by the relationships between its aspirations on different dimensions. I use organisations as a term more than business because what I am describing is broader than profit maximising businesses.
If OKRs is only that we write down what we are trying to achieve determines how we are trying to achieve, and provides a method of determining whether we are talking about the same aspiration - is it as dangerous as you worry it is? If its not, then which common assumption about OKRs tips it over the edge to where it does? If we can name it then we can at least assess whether its something I believe should even be part of how OKRs are practiced.
Why in your mind are the Lemmings falling off the cliff? If I am defining success as "people love working here" and "we are financially healthy" and "we are [meeting our purpose]" and we are working on points across the causal chain of leverage points that may lead to these effects / outcomes then that in my experience has been quite resilient in the face of changing market conditions.
I write about feedback loops over different timescales. That we are oriented to a richer purpose beyond making money over a shorter time period is part of that resilience because of the course-correcting feedback loop.
In inhumane organisation, leadership have aspirations but don't communicate them and they don't provide the opportunity for their teams to share their aspirations either nor synthesise together to inform eachother for a better whole. I talk of alignment as the idea of not having accidental disconnects because we are unaware of inconsistency. That is not the same as forced alignment which is striving for consistency which has the effect of removing variance to maintain the status quo. The latter is very fragile and maybe the risk you are describing.
In the working environments I've been a part of where instead leadership proactively shared context to teams and teams shared what they were trying to achieve transparently the ability to self-organise and tackle problems together was more common that in other organisations I've been in where that wasn't true.
The last assumption I will highlight seems to be something like: "if we write down what our goals are" then that will overwhelm the approaches of achieving goals. That's not been my experience but it was certainly a risk we actively worked on to mitigate. I have written about the risk of Gap Thinking vs Present Thinking. Action must be based on where you are. The outcomes are there to orient you.
There's reasonable consensus by experienced practitioners of OKRs around these concepts:
- aligning not cascading
- set by teams not leadership
- outcomes not outputs
- evidence of progress not measurement of activities
- paired with a persistent model of the causal assumptions that help you identify where leverage may contribute to desirable effects.
- are there to orient direction only
- deliberate focus on the present adjacent not gap thinking against the future ideal
Anyway, more than a minute. Hope that illuminates some of my perspective and the aspects I am considering when assessing what contributes to worsening working conditions. Interested to know if that challenges any assumptions or reveals my blindspots more clearly for you?
Maybe we should start with what is management malpractice? Situational, isn’t it?
I took it to mean more detrimental than not doing it :)
I think the dictionary definition of “malpractice” has references to improper, illegal, or negligent professional behaviour.
The way I see it is that we wish to elevate the practice of management to be a profession (consider the Australian Institute of Management or its NZ equivalent). It is in this context that the word malpractice has specific meaning.
So, now what is “management malpractice“?
Oops - somehow posted this outside the thread. Trying again.
"Management Malpractice" - I assume it's being a negligent manager or leader based on the definition you shared. So by extension we are examining is ANY use of OKRs are a form of negligence by managers. Fair?
There's no debate that some use of OKRs is reflective of negligent behavior - such as using OKRs for managing teams rather than supporting alignment and awareness across teams, linking OKRs to performance and other incentives, disempowering by managers setting the OKRs for their teams, disempowering by defining goals as outputs or actions on behalf of teams, disconnecting from learning by tracking progress through activities without considering what causal relationships may exist, working without a hypothesis...
But what Noah has put out there and you have asked me to consider (and I have, long before anyone asked me to) is are all applications of OKRs negligence. Albeit Noah qualified his view in his post identifying that link to incentives, cascades, managers setting the OKRs to name a few are the specific concerns he has with OKRs. But you wouldn't find any experienced practitioner recommend any of these practices. So those stripped away, where exactly is your discomfort.
He also suggested he'd instead use goal trees which are all recommended amongst the same set of experienced practitioners (the list of the people I am thinking of when I use this term was linked to from my post).
You mentioned no discomfort with team goals so what of the remaining aspects of OKRs provide the discomfort you have? Is it that they are public? Is it that cultures that use them may expect them used universally? These are all areas worthy of debate. I suspect there will be shifts in these areas true.
Another area worthy of debate is OKRs as targets. A lot of practical applications of OKRs in organisations soften their effect as targets because failure is more than acceptable its seen as learning and that is valued more than the result over a short period. OKRs are most widely used in SaaS businesses currently where competition is fierce and these companies are trying to prevail over the long term, not just juice metrics. But is it enough to not have the destructive effects of targets. It's part of my affection with PuMP - Stacey Barr has designed a performance measurement approach entirely around not setting targets.
Is there some discomfort with expressing outcomes separate with the method as per John Willis reference to Deming 'by what method'? This seems to be based on what you imagine happens when the organisations I've worked with use OKRs.
In my experience where teams are defining their goals they also have a rich view on what their hypotheses are and how they will test them. OKRs being for alignment only don't typically define how they approach the activities so they use any of the wide range of options for engaging and theorising and testing their theories. It starts with blame-free cultures and a culture of being comfortable using evidence for decisions.
You don't have to take my word for it, plenty of my colleagues have written about their experiences working this way. Hence its hard to reconcile all use of OKRs with "Management Malpractice".