The No-BS OKR Maturity Model
This is an excerpt from an early draft of “You Are A Strategist: Use No-BS OKRs to Get Big Things Done,” which is now available wherever books are sold!
I'm going to dive right into this week's section: sharing the No-BS OKR Maturity Model.
For the last couple of years I've been working with clients around a maturity model, but this is the first time I've written about it or tried to share it outside of work with my clients. (And even my clients haven't all seen this yet!)
This is the second of three frameworks that I share in my books -- the third is a Connected Strategy, or a "Strategy-on-a-Page."
All material here is (c) Sara Lobkovich, Red Currant Collective LLC (2023). All Rights Reserved.
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Chapter Three, Part 2: The No-BS OKR Maturity Model
Even early in my work with organizations implementing OKRs, I noticed patterns to the challenges, behaviors, and practices that organizations experienced trying to implement OKRs without a cohesive and coherent “playbook.” Those patterns informed a maturity model that I now use with clients to help them make decisions about what to focus on to improve their own OKR implementations.
Figure 6: The No-BS OKR Maturity Model (formerly the Evolutionary OKRs Maturity Model)
The full model is far too much information for a small, useful book, so what you see above is the simple, condensed version I use both to assess an OKR implementation’s current state and to gauge the organization’s appetite for maturity progress.
Not all organizations share the same aspirations or cultural factors, so not all will aspire to the far right of this particular maturity model: many organizations find value in landing even on the far left of this maturity model, since having some direction and goals enunciated may improve performance compared to having no externalized or communicated meaningful direction and/or goals.
The beliefs and behaviors on the left reflect the state I most frequently observe when I walk into a new client organization that has tried to implement OKRs and is struggling.
The beliefs and behaviors on the right describe one possible “fully mature” OKR implementation outcome; but not all organizations will have the culture (or necessity) to land at the far right on every one of these spectrums.
The usefulness of this maturity model is that we can use it to self-assess an organization’s current state and then calibrate on which of those beliefs and behaviors are most important to make progress on, to help the organization move up a step in terms of the return on investment – in terms of financial investment and labor time -- of their OKR implementation. Organizations do not jump from the far left to the far right of this model in one step: each spectrum is a building block of progress, and making progress on one may begin to advance progress on others.
Assess your OKR implementation maturity
Rather than walk you through this model step by step, let’s take an opportunity to actually use the model to perform a self-assessment.
If you are working with OKRs presently, you can complete this as a self-assessment of your current implementation. If you’re new to OKRs, you can complete this to calibrate on your own appetite for implementation maturity: Of these factors, which ones will most help your organization improve its performance?
Take a look at Figure 6 and self-assess:
Where does your organization or team (or self) fall on each of these spectrums?
Does the option on the right sound more like you, or the option on the left?
Or, does your organization fall somewhere in the middle?
Mark up a copy of the model for your own implementation’s maturity, and then step back and look at the results and consider:
For each spectrum where your organization sits closer to the left of the slider:
Is that working for you? If so, no need to change.
Is that belief and / or behavior getting in the way of making progress or generating important impacts?
For each factor where your organization sits somewhere in the middle of the slider, consider:
Will prioritizing change on this factor help us accelerate our progress on our most important outcomes?
If your organization would benefit from prioritizing one, two, or three of these factors for improvement, which would they be?
Improvement on each of these factors requires different shifts and changes in different organizations, but there are some patterns to the types of shifts that help us make progress.
To help you develop your own “maturity prescription,” look at the example in Figure 7 below. This was prepared for a hypothetical organization that has adopted home-grown OKRs and are running into all the common challenges we often see. They’re looking to improve generally, so we identified which factors are more “foundational” and identified those as P1 priorities for improvement, now. When the organization has some success at those shifts, which may happen quickly once identified, they can move on to the P2 and P3 factors to make further progress.
Figure 7: An example maturity “prescription”
Source: “You Are a Strategist: Use No-BS OKRs to Get Big Things Done.”
On the far right I’ve included an example “prescription” for each factor. These “prescriptions” won’t be perfect for every organization, but they’re pretty close for many, and speak to the biggest repeated issues we see in our work with a large number of organizations.
We use this same model to help clients set goals around which factors are most important to improve: in that case, we add a second set of stars so they can identify where they are and where they hope to be by X date (which again, helps us prioritize what beliefs and behaviors must change).
In a fully mature No-BS OKR implementation – designed to achieve transformation, innovation, and change – a few characteristics are common:
Leaders must model the behavior they’re asking of the rest of the organization, including all OKR best practices;
We have a small number of Objectives and Key Results, at the company level and for any given team or person, ensuring that we’ve adequately focused in on what’s most important to achieve;
Our Key Results are objectively measurable, and give us important information about our progress and risks that we can use to make important business decisions;
The model makes clear which goals are “commits” and our Key Results are presumptively “stretch” measures on which we are safe to try (and even fail) in the pursuit of learning and progress;
Goal owners create their own OKRs: coaches and OKR experts (and administrative support) may provide review and quality assurance oversight, education, and scheduling support; but coaches and OKR experts do not create OKRs for leaders, teams, or people;
Our Key Results have a balance of outcome measures (important “big goals” that may be measured infrequently) and progress measures (that help us understand whether we are on or off pace on our outcome measures); and
Ultimately, the organization is using Objectives and Key Results flexibly, with Key Results identified where necessary to help reduce risk and improve performance (e.g. for projects and initiatives); and Key Results identified for important cross-functional outcome and progress measures, not only functional OKRs within organizational silos.
To have these factors all be true requires a great deal of focus, prioritization, courage, intellectual humility, and a learning culture. This maturity state is not for all leaders, and not for all organizations. But if you’re in the business of change, transformation, and innovation, landing on the far right of this maturity model helps build systemic readiness into your organization and reduces reliance on unicorns and heroism to keep your business on its front foot.
Hi, I’m Sara Lobkovich!
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