Writing OKR Guide: How To Write an Outcome-focused Objective
It's easy to fall into the trap of writing an objective describing an activity you wish to undertake rather than an outcome to achieve. These tips can help.
An essential aspect of OKRs is that they are deceptively simple in structure. This is part of the appeal: they are easy to draft and easy to consume. Of course, this simplicity is both accurate and misleading.
It’s easy to write something in the form of an OKR and get some benefit from it. However, crafting a good OKR that harnesses the potential to make a team more productive through their strong shared understanding of the goal is more challenging. The struggle of writing an effective OKR becomes evident later in your OKR journey. By that time, hopefully, you’ve recognised the potential of OKRs as a tool for alignment, which is clear and motivates you to elevate your approach.
One of the most important aspects of a goal's content is its focus on an outcome, which is part of the thesis for this publication. I argue this point in many of my other posts. This post explores how to draft a goal and offers some starting points for considering the attributes that a solid, outcome-focused goal should have.
How Do We Decide What to Set as an Objective?
This is a potentially massive topic and may become the subject of future posts. I would say that the pathway for how a potential objective is considered can vary. Some paths may lead a team toward an activity-oriented goal. For instance, sometimes it’s a leader approaching a team with an initiative or solution to tackle; sometimes it arises from research that has identified a customer problem, or it becomes evident when reviewing other opportunities; perhaps it's a solution that the team instinctively knows could provide value.
Regardless of where the inspiration for the direction originated, the task is to draft objectives and key results. This process involves engaging in dialogue with the broader business to negotiate a shared understanding of what the team aims to achieve.
Some of the opportunities brought to the team are solutions or activities, which may seem like a conflict, as we have already stated that the preference is for objectives to be described in terms of an outcome. Rather than viewing this as a problem, it offers us a fantastic opportunity. It provides a chance to ask questions and understand the outcome that is being pursued. This could help you frame the goal in terms of an outcome and better grasp what constitutes real progress and what other options for pivoting might exist. It may also reveal reasons to push for the proposed initiative if it doesn’t align with the organisation's desired effect.
If we have invested effort into exploring the WHY of the work, you likely are in a good position to do this — to learn more about an approach to this, read my post:
It is even better to build a causal chain or link it to a Results Map to see the complete set of connections and consider how you might test the key assumptions those connections imply. I cover these concepts in this post:
Attributes of outcome-oriented objectives
Here are several elements that can help with drafting an objective:
Objectives are Outcomes, not activities
Objectives represent a step-change
Objectives are ambitious
Objectives are accessible
Objectives are not measures
Objectives are Outcomes, not Activities.
Most importantly, the objective describes an outcome for reasons established in ‘Thinking in terms of outcomes’ and ‘Subtle aspects of OKRs and their effects’. An outcome is most straightforward to write as a short description of something we desire to become a reality due to our work. You can think of it as the effects of our activity or the ends to our means.
An example we used in an OKR at one of my workplaces was ‘There are no critical security vulnerabilities’. Ideally, this would be a health measure for the business. Still, more than a few vulnerabilities had been identified, and it took a significant effort to get to a healthy state. As such, we set it as an objective for the company that all teams would align. At the team level, more specific goals contributed to us achieving that organisation-level goal.
Objectives represent a step-change
Suppose we are elevating some objectives to focus on for a quarter, to be ambitious, and to be transparently communicated broadly. In that case, it makes sense that we are choosing objectives that truly reflect a step-change from the current state.
Of course, there are always other things that we measure and improve incrementally over longer periods, but what we choose as OKRs should be focused on significant impact; this can be a helpful discriminator in choosing your objectives. OKRs are not intended for managing all measurements in your business. If you are measuring something's health and whether it stays within a healthy threshold, consider using KPIs for managing this.
Objectives are ambitious
Teams in low-trust environments who continue to find it difficult to conceptualise OKRs as separate from an individual’s or team’s performance management will struggle with setting an ambitious target because they worry they may be perceived as failing.
Getting past this — because the organisation truly supports the team and because the team has internalised the benefit of an ambitious goal in terms of stimulating lateral thinking — is to unlock an extra benefit of OKRs.
Suppose the team is working with OKRs framed as activities. In that case, this will also be challenging to grasp because it may be deemed a commitment to an estimate rather than a commitment to make progress towards achieving the objective.
Objectives are Accessible
The most beneficial element of OKRs is the ability to create alignment across an organisation. Given this, it makes sense to make your objective as accessible to the layperson as possible. Avoid jargon, acronyms and anything else that may alienate different parts of your organisation.
The goal needs to be understood by the team working on it and other teams, leaders, and other parts of the organisation. This is another crucial reason why goals should be outcomes. Most of the organisation will understand the broader purpose and its customers and their problems, so talking in these terms is more accessible than in terms of HOW, implementation details and aspects of what is done behind the scenes will be alienating, in addition to the drawbacks I shared in ‘Thinking in terms of outcomes’.
It also helps to keep objectives as short, inspiring, and memorable as possible. If the goal is something worth doing and impactful, this will be half the battle already. However, it is important to remember that for organisations where OKRs are adopted throughout, there can be a lot of competing for people’s attention, so some effort to edit for clarity can go a long way.
Objectives are not Measures
Don’t put your measure in the objective — you have key results for this. You can use the key results to qualify such specifics and to provide evidence that the objective is true. Mixing these makes it likely that your objective is less likely to be an outcome and can introduce ambiguity between the purpose of the Objective and the Key Results.
Now you have an Outcome-focused Objective, You can Write the Key Results
There’s little point in discussing the key results until you are clear and aligned on the objective. Small shifts in the Objective could drastically affect what good key results for the objective would be.
If you’ve written an objective and followed the guidelines in this post, you are now in a great position to write some key results. You can find out how to do that in this post:
Follow me or this publication for more practical tips and tools for improving your organisational goal-setting and alignment efforts. In the comments, share your experiences and any feedback that could improve these posts.
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