Are OKRs 'Management Malpractice'?
A recent discussion of OKRs highlighted how little awareness there is of their current state compared to how they originated. Why does that matter and how does it change our approach to OKRs?
My former colleague, current co-host, and collaborator on the CTO Life Line monthly livestream discussion show, Noah Cantor, is learning about OKRs. As part of his learning quest, he asked the LinkedIn community whether his concerns with OKRs were warranted. This led to a wide and varied response from the LinkedIn software product development community and beyond.
You can read Noah’s conclusions based on what he has learned thus far about OKRs. Oof, it doesn’t sound good for OKRs. Is he right?
In short, Noah applies a systems thinking lens to OKRs. From what he has learned about OKRs, he feels they are incompatible with systems thinking principles, and conflicts with those principles cause destructive conflicts in the organisations implementing OKRs.
I find this position hard to reconcile with my own experiences working in and with companies using OKRs, and I have some theories about why this is. I expect this will be a more civil disagreement than the recent diss track arms race between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. This is not a defence of OKRs. There is plenty of bad in the history of OKRs and in how many companies deploy them today. OKRs are not the best approach to goal-setting and performance measurement; they are just the most popular. You will find significant criticism of OKR aspects in this publication and coverage of how these are evolving.
My theories about the disconnect are as follows:
It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.
It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.
There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.
For my extensive experience with OKRs, I used OKRs as a starting point for goal-setting and performance measurement in organisations where I’ve worked because there was awareness of and interest in OKRs and because some properties of the format of writing goals separate from their evidence of being satisfied appealed to me. I have detailed some of the changes and enhancements that were necessary to make OKRs useful in our context in this post:
Who knows—maybe these changes are so significant they should be called something else? OKRs not being a formal standard is quite neat because there’s less friction in adjusting and improving them as needed, much like other agile practices.
I’d say I am more influenced by concepts from the PUMP performance measurement framework and even ideas from the Theory of Constraints than from the chequered history of OKRs. Various improvements we applied were inspired by ideas from these and other sources and the work and experiences shared by the many people globally experimenting with OKRs. I’ve found it useful to understand the history of the choices in how different organisations apply various methods, frameworks, and other ways of working, so I will use that lens in this post. It also helps identify aspects of OKRs that are being criticised but may have fallen outside of what is generally considered good practice.
In terms of my experiences with OKRs, I’ve worked with coalitions in several organisations, where we adapted and evolved the approach in collaboration with the teams, creating valuable software products. I’ve also helped other organisations with their efforts to use OKRs. I am not an OKR coach, but plenty of good people can help you with OKRs, such as my friend Tim at OKRQuickstart (disclosure: I work with some of Tim’s clients as a CTO coach).
I have written a lot about OKRs, less about interest in the framework per se (I think there are better ones), but because I am interested in what it takes to have an understanding between two or more minds and what it takes for the mental models of those individuals to be aligned. That is, there’s no friction created because one or more parties didn’t know they were misaligned.
Plenty of organisations ‘hire’ OKRs for the wrong purpose. Some do so to manage the work, some to manage the people, and some to create strong ‘soft’ incentives. These are poor reasons to hire OKRs, and they would be ‘Management Malpractice’. The best use of OKRs is for multi-directional alignment.
Comparing notes with others on similar journeys, two things were obvious:
No two organisational situations were the same. The imperatives of the organisation and its shape influenced what it needed to do to address frictions of alignment - i.e. groups of people with agreement on what they were trying to achieve and understanding between groups on what each is trying to achieve.
There was some convergence of OKR practices, which emerged under similar conditions. Genuine cases of Multiple Discovery.
With an emphasis on agility and learning, we experimented and adapted to find a fit for what helped achieve the degree of alignment and sufficiently reduced the friction associated with misalignment. Similarly, I write about OKRs because I am interested in goal-setting and performance measurement, and OKRs are the most popular approach. Less popular, more consistent approaches may be superior (PUMP, 4DX, etc.)
I think I will learn more from this exchange with Noah about the potential implications and risks of OKRs and how they are applied, as well as a deeper understanding of systems thinking. Noah may learn more about the current state of OKRs, and it will be interesting to see whether doing so strengthens or weakens his conviction. We all may learn how to improve how we approach work, whether with OKRs or otherwise.
Making OKRs work
Noah included a great section in his post that suggested ways to make OKRs work. I agree with some of the suggestions here and highlight that some of these suggestions feature in most of the OKR Guides written by experienced practitioners.
I agree with his recommendation that using a Goal Tree is beneficial. This is one of the fairly strong consensus areas amongst the practitioners. You can find examples if you work through my list of outcome thinkers. Check out the list of influential group I’ve collected on this list of people who I call ‘outcome thinkers’
The details differ a little - but the core concepts are quite consistent:
I’ve also written about this a few times, including a quick survey of approaches I’ve observed in use to complement OKRs.
Tom Kerwin describes use of the Multiverse Map and Adaptative Triggers.
Noah takes exception to goals at the organizational and team levels and the definition of multiple goals out of concern for conflict arising. I suspect this is more of a difference in terminology across different fields. OKRs are not particularly precise about what is defined as a goal, and most of the time, what is described as a goal at the team level might be more akin to necessary conditions one may find in a goal tree that contributes to the organisation’s higher-level goals. I wrote a bit about how this is approached here:
I am not convinced that organisations always have a single goal, but absolutely less is better, and if it can be one, it is best. But don’t reduce to less than what needs to be described in the environment. There are dynamics in businesses that can be articulated as enduring goals with relationships between them. For instance, attitudes toward regulatory requirements may shape an organisation’s choices, as might the intent to sell a business. The purpose or structure of an organisation can dramatically shape how it views success. Not-for-profit, purpose-driven organisations, subsistence-level family-run operations - these all have gravities that can be expressed as goals that relate to the other aspects of the business. Its attitudes to its employees, and so on.
So, as I covered, these factors make finding common ground difficult until we work through some of the following issues:
It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.
It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.
There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.
With these addressed, we might still conclude that OKRs are Management Malpractice, but to conclude without addressing these will be difficult without discussing cross-purposes.
I will discuss each in a dedicated post over the next short while.
In the next post, I will explain why it’s:
Where do you stand on OKRs? Are they always a form of management malpractice? Or is it only when they are ‘hired’ for the wrong ‘job’? Share your views in the comments.