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 important aspect of OKRs is that they are deceptively simple in structure. This is, I think, part of the appeal: easy to draft, easy to consume. Of course, this simplicity is both true and misleading.
It’s easy to write something in the form of an OKR and get some benefit from that. But it’s hard to write a good OKR that realises the potential of making a team more productive from their strong common understanding of the goal. The challenge of writing a good OKR becomes apparent later in your OKR journey, and hopefully, by that time, you’ve seen the potential of OKRs as a tool for alignment, which is obvious and provides the drive to level up.
One of the most important aspects of a goal's content is that it is focused on an outcome—part of the thesis for this publication. I make the case for why in many of my other posts. This post addresses the HOW of drafting a goal and provides some starting points for thinking about what attributes a good goal, focused on an outcome, should possess.
How Do We Decide What to Set as an Objective?
This is a potentially huge topic and may be the subject of future posts. Suffice it to say that the pathway for how a potential objective gets to be considered can vary. Some paths may lead a team towards an activity-oriented goal. For instance, sometimes it’s a leader coming to a team with an initiative or solution to tackle; sometimes it’s from research that has identified a customer problem, or it surfaces when reviewing other opportunities; maybe it is a solution that the team knows instinctively could provide value.
No matter where the inspiration for the direction came from, the task is to draft an objective and key results. This process is part of the dialogue with the broader business, negotiating a common understanding of what the team is seeking to achieve.
Some of the opportunities brought to the team are solutions or activities, and that may seem like a conflict, as we’ve already stated that the preference is for objectives to be described in terms of an outcome. Rather than seeing this as a problem, it presents us with a great opportunity. It’s an opportunity to ask questions and try to understand the outcome that is trying to be achieved. This may enable you to frame the goal in terms of an outcome and thus better understand what would represent real progress and what other options to pivot there are. Or it may uncover reasons to push on the proposed initiative because it may not have the effect the organisation seeks.
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 ‘Set better objectives by starting with WHY’. It is even better if you have built a causal chain or have linked your chain to a Result Map.
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:
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