Common problems in OKR reference material
The state of OKR reference material available is not great. Here are some broad problem areas to be aware of.
OKRs are quickly being adopted by many organisations and challenges are being quickly being discovered… or far worse, for some organisations, challenges are very slowly being discovered. Why is this happening?
OKRs are not a formalised framework.
In some ways, this has helped the rate of adoption as the basic format is simple and accessible. Some of the primers available for OKRs are very simple and consumable. The challenge with those resources is that the inherent complexity in using OKRs is largely ignored. The result is you only discover these challenges too late and find yourself without the material to support you through challenges. The nature of the challenges you may face typically may affect the impact you are achieving with OKRs or the successful adoption of OKRs more broadly in the organisation.
Another challenge that results from the lack of formalisation of OKRs is that many resources for OKRs will contradict each other. It’s common to see poor OKR practices being reinforced by OKR online resources which share those poor practices as gospel. A classic example is the practice of using Key Results of higher-level objectives to be the objectives for teams contributing to that top-level objective. The number of times I’ve seen people cite examples of this practice from some post they found on the web as their reason to do the same is alarming. That such materials are prevalent and have a sort of appealing woolly truthiness can create stubborn adoption of practices which may actively work against your organisation’s goals for adopting OKRs in the first place.
Examples of Key Results OKR documentation are inconsistent in terms of approach, format and structure.
What is documented on how to use and approach OKRs is inconsistent. Not just across different publications but also, more alarmingly, within individual bodies of knowledge! One glaring example, many resources will describe objectives as being reflective of outcomes but then give many examples that show objectives as activities expressing HOW you will approach a problem with very little context of WHY they may help you achieve WHAT you are trying to achieve.
For instance, an example of a poor objective in these resources might be something like “Build widget X”. Building stuff is an output - it doesn’t communicate what the effect of building this thing will be.
Other resources do something similar with key results - “Improve retention for Y, as measured by Building widget Z” - in this example we may have a better-articulated objective but no explicit understanding from its key result of how building something actually represents meaningful progress towards that objective.
The very large variety of ways to draft and assess key results makes it very hard to assess if progress towards achieving them is meaningful. If an objective was an outcome it follows that key results would be most descriptive of achieving that outcome if they were symptomatic of the outcome being achieved.
Most examples you could find invert the causal relationship where key results are measuring the output of activities with the presumption that completion of those activities causes the objective to become true. The ability to learn and adapt to this form is far more challenging because assumptions about those activities are baked in — you could be successfully achieving the activities but not making any actual progress towards your objective.
Common challenges found in OKR reference materials
Here are a few of the broad challenges that are present in many of the OKR resources you can find online:
OKR frameworks often don’t separately address WHY.
Better alignment to a common understanding can further be achieved by not just agreeing on WHAT but also by understanding and agreeing on the WHY. For instance, choices that are made in trying to achieve a goal can differ depending on a person’s understanding of the logic behind why the goal is presumed to have the right impact the organisation is looking for. We know this from our own personal interactions in the world “if you had just told me why you wanted to do that, maybe I could have helped you better!” and this issue scales up with organisations.
Much of the publicly available resources don’t address how to communicate the logic behind the OKRs we are setting. There are however many great OKR coaches who have approaches to doing this. I will address and help build a public resource on how this can be achieved in this publication, Focus on outcomes.OKR frameworks often don’t separately address HOW.
More recently some resources for OKRs have been sharing templates which have a separate area for potential activities (some refer to these as OKRAs - Objectives, Key Results, Activities) that are being considered to try to make progress towards an objective. I personally found this approach very helpful with teams I have worked with. Most resources do not use this approach however and as mentioned above, mix activities with both objectives and key results.
Having HOW addressed separately rather than conflated with the Objective or the Key Results ensures better clarity. When WHAT is distinct from HOW and the signals of true progress are unobscured. We can get carried away with the satisfyingly misleading doing. Doing is important but also important is our economy of movement. We want to know as quickly as possible when what we are doing is not actually worth doing. Understanding what represents actual progress is critical to the efficiency in which we reach our objectives.OKR frameworks don’t address planning in terms of outcomes.
Often the desire to break down goals into more manageable chunks or address dependencies might lead a team back to the activities. This is due to common approaches such as Work Breakdown Structures or Dependency mapping tending to be task-oriented and away from thinking in terms of outcomes.
OKR reference materials don’t do a great job of providing alternative approaches which are compatible with outcome-oriented ways of thinking. E.g. How do you manage the goals of different granularity and timeframes? How do you think about dependencies and relationships through the lens of outcomes? How do you align goals across teams in a larger organisation beyond grossly inadequate football team analogies?
In laying out some of the potential and some of the gaps and challenges with the multitude of conflicting OKR resources this hopefully establishes a leaping point for adding some rigour and other tools which could support better working towards outcomes. Note: there is no one true way or universal theory to cover all, I will share a variety of practices in use in workplaces across the world that in various ways look to address or improve on the situation. I will also share the approaches we found valuable over time and what we learned along the way.
Follow me here on Focus on outcomes by subscribing for free to continue on this journey. Please share your own experiences or areas where I can improve the clarity and accuracy of what I am sharing in the comments.