Why You Shouldn't Start with an OKR Tool (Yet)

CareersSelf-LeadershipMindfulnessNo-BS OKRsYou Are A Strategist

Dec 11

Written By Sara Lobkovich

Thinkydoers Episode 34

Thinking about implementing OKRs?

Your first instinct might be to shop for an OKR tool - but that could be setting yourself up for failure.

In this candid Thinkydoers Short, strategy and OKRs coach Sara Lobkovich explains why starting with OKR tracking software often backfires, and shares a proven alternative with a methodology-focused approach that will set your organization up for long-term OKR success.

Want to watch the full-length replay of the Live this episode is drawn from? It’s on YouTube!

Episode Highlights:

Common pitfalls of taking a tool-first approach to OKR implementation
Why methodology must come before software
How to track OKRs effectively without specialized tools
A practical timeline for OKR implementation that sets you up for success
Signs that your organization is actually ready for an OKR tool

Episode Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Thinkydoer Shorts

00:11 About Your Host, Sara Lobkovich

01:12 Today's Topic: OKR Platforms

02:10 Common Pitfalls in OKR Implementations

04:07 The Executive Excitement and Initial Challenges

05:25 The Role of OKR Platforms

07:10 The Downside of Platform-First Approach

15:05 Methodology-First Approach to OKRs

21:41 Tracking OKRs Without a Platform

30:06 Conclusion and Resources

Notable Quotes:

“ People need an OKR process that isn't yucky. If it's yucky, then they're going to do all sorts of work for a process that might generate a pretty dashboard for the leaders. But we want people to love our OKR implementations. We want people -- not just leaders -- to see the benefit of OKR implementations.”

"We want to focus on Objectives and Key Results as continuous learning, and we want to keep our tools and ops simple."

"We let folks struggle until they're suffering with the lack of software, and then that makes our software adoption so much more successful."

"What's ultimately most important is that leaders need objective information to make decisions."

Key Takeaways:

Strategy is about clarifying situations so everyone can do the smart thing
Strategic thinking is independent of job title or role
Good strategy makes work better but often remains invisible
Clear expectations and empirical measurements are crucial for success
Strategy achievement is fundamentally about human behavior change

Resources Mentioned:

Get the No-BS OKRs Workbook ($19): https://saralobkovich.com/no-bs-okrs-workbook-pdf
Info about the upcoming print version of the No-BS OKRs Workbook & Sara's forthcoming book: "You Are a Strategist: Use No-BS Objectives and Key Results to Get Big Things Done" is available at https://youareastrategist.com
Other Free No-BS OKRs Resources: Access all free resources
Thinkydoers (not-just-an OKR podcast) Home Page: https://saralobkovich.com/thinkydoers-pod

Find full show notes and the episode transcript via https://findrc.co/thinkydoers

Full Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00]

Sara: Welcome to Thinkydoer Shorts, where we embrace anti-perfection and dive straight into the messy middle of strategy, leadership, and personal and career growth.

I'm your host, Sara Lobkovich, creator of No-BS Objectives and Key Results,

host of the Thinkydoers podcast,

and I'm a strategy coach, big time goal nerd,

health and wellness coach with a focus on work life well-being. And in the next few minutes, we'll explore a current topic or insight to spark your curiosity and provide you a pragmatic starting place to take action.

Let's dive in.

Today's topic is one of the spicy ones, especially because I have a lot of friends who are with the OKR platforms,And I do love and think very highly of the OKR platform space, even though I don't play in that space too terribly often.

In this episode, you'll hear why I don't recommend starting with an OKR platform and what I do recommend instead.

[00:01:00] So buckle up, enjoy this short, and I look forward to hearing the questions it prompts for you.

Welcome to Friday, all! This is Goal Friday. We get together once a week during these series to spend a little bit of time together focusing on what is most important and why it matters. If you are here today, then you have come to learn a little bit more about tracking OKRs.

What's going to sound familiar to many of you who have worked with OKRs institutionally is a little story I'm going to share in a minute about how Objectives and Key Results implementations tend to happen in organizations. If you're here and you're a solo or a small-business person, the content from today still applies. while a lot of what I'm going to talk about is what happens with OKRs in large organizations, the first question most of us [00:02:00] ask ourselves when we decide to implement OKRs is, "All right, what software am I going to use? How am I going to track these?" With that, we're going to talk about why that isn't actually the first question we should start with and where we should begin instead. But first, before we get into all that, I am Sara Lobkovich. I'm a board-certified health and wellness coach, and I specialize in career wellbeing and impact. I have also trained over 2000 OKR coaches and led OKR adoption in multi-thousand person organizations. I'm an enormous Objectives and Key Results nerd. And I work with organizations from the Fortune 100 to purpose-driven solos. So today we're gonna flip the script on these things that tend to lead to challenged OKR implementations when it comes to taking the software-first approach. [00:03:00] So we'll talk about why starting with a platform might lead to failure, which is exactly what we don't want, and what you might consider doing instead.

And for my friends with platforms, hello, I love you. You're the best. You might not like the title of this live, but you're gonna like the finish of it. Because what I'm here to do is to make sure that people adopt the OKR platforms at the right time and successfully. So while the title might be rather provocative here for my, OKR platform friends, the message you're going to like. With that, let's dive in and take a look at how most how OKR implementations tend to start. This is how OKR problems are born. What tends to happen is an executive gets really excited reading a copy of Measure What Matters, and they read Measure What Matters, or they hear about [00:04:00] OKRs from a colleague or a business acquaintance, and they get all excited about the potential of Objectives and Key Results in their organization. So they come back to the office, they hand a copy of Measure What Matters to our hero, and our hero is our OKR core team champion. Our hero reads Measure What Matters and kicks off that first OKR cycle. And there's a lot of excitement, especially among the executives. There's a lot of excitement among OKR early adopters. And then there's a whole lot of skeptics. There's a whole lot of people who want to debate what words mean because they're uncomfortable with the idea of actually setting measurable goals. You wouldn't believe the things I've seen people do to try and stall on actually setting measurable Key Results. And so what tends to happen is then we get into this, like, panic [00:05:00] over the information we got from Measure What Matters is not enough for us to actually implement. And so things go off the rails. The first thing most people do when that happens is they sit down and Google, So they Google OKR or they look for resources online about OKRs. And what they tend to find is one of the over 100 OKR platforms that are here to solve everyone's problems with OKRs. And there are lots of them. They're very prevalent in the search results. They make great content. You can't argue with the prolificness of the content that the, OKR platforms create. Some of it is really awesome too, as a newer practitioner, it's hard to tell what is actually helpful and what might not be so much, or what might be a little bit of smoke and mirrors. They all have incredibly talented marketing and [00:06:00] designers and people that make everything look amazing. And so it's really easy to fall into the funnel of the OKR platforms. And then once you're in that funnel, they say, Just trust them." That's what they exist to do — to help people with OKRs. And so sign here, get your seats. You're going to want to onboard everyone because you need everyone in the system for this to work. And that's how people wind up in the OKR platform ecosystem. We can solve all your problems. Trust us. Sign here. This is going to work best if you have us handle your platform onboarding. So getting people into and established with the software and services. So, we're going to help your team learn how to do OKRs successfully so that both those things together lead to wins. We're going to get quick wins with our OKR implementation using this approach. That's the message from our software friends. And [00:07:00] sometimes, that is what happens. But too often, what I see is that the services are often really overburdened, like very busy. And so it's not that they're doing anything poorly actually those people, like I've been in that position, they're the people who wind up in services in these companies are some of the most talented and passionate OKR practitioners on the face of the planet. They go above and beyond for their clients absolutely every day. But because of the system and incentives and our OKR platform that wants to maximize the number of seats that are sold, they want as many people using their software as much as possible. You might see there's a little bit of a conflict potential there, where the OKR services onboarding might focus on methodology just enough for people to create OKRs to [00:08:00] type into the software because they want to get those OKRs into the software and get people using the software. And that lack of careful attention to methodology might yield a low-quality adoption. And so, the end result of this specialty software to the rescue approach that's really easy to fall into is frustration of why isn't anyone using the OKR platform? We spent all this money. We've got all this labor and no one's using the platform. I've seen remarkably low utilization rates on large deployments. And this was with clients, not when I was working with the platforms, but I had one client that deployed, I think it was over a thousand seats of an OKR platform. And there were three regular users of the platform.

So, we'll talk about some of why that happens, but we get that frustration over why isn't anyone using this [00:09:00] thing that we've put all this effort into and it was supposed to ease all of our OKR problems. And it isn't. And then we also get this exasperation of why are we tracking milestones in our OKR platform and our delivery platform? Because a lot of times, the platform services folks are always going to say we want to focus on outcomes, not activities, in our Key Results. But the reality is, if they're going to get butts in seats deep into the organization, at some point, people are probably going to stop writing measurable Key Results and start identifying activities. And so then, we wind up with people dual-entering their planned activities into the OKR platform and managing it in their project management or whatever their delivery system is. And so then, we wind up the sad cat with the, Heating or cooling pad on his head. They're just looking absolutely exhausted. Is this really any better than what we were doing before? Often, it's just a couple [00:10:00] of core team members who are nagging people to put their updates into the system so that we can get the dashboards, which is what the executives really wanted to see — the pretty dashboards. But there might or might not be any labor saving or efficiency compared to however we were doing it before, and however we were doing it before is probably things like spreadsheets or Power BI and PowerPoint and compiling our quarterly or monthly business reviews manually. The selling point of a lot of OKR platforms is they make that process automatic. You can plug everything in, the updates go in automatically, you get your beautiful dashboard, and it saves a bunch of labor. But getting to that point — it's not always as easy as it sounds. So, this isn't to knock the software companies because they do a really good job at what they're good at. And that's why we'll talk about, I'm not [00:11:00] anti-platform. I am just pro-getting your methodology established before you adopt an OKR platform.

So, where does this go wrong in the specialty software industry to the rescue approach? There tends to be an oversimplification of methodology because we want to get people into those butts in seats. There's sometimes some winging it involved with the approaches that are taught by the platforms. They might teach more practically than Measure What Matters does, but they still might not provide enough practical information to successfully implement. Sometimes also, because we're adopting an OKR platform, and it's a separate piece of software, it can feel like our OKRs are bolted onto the organization when they need to be woven into the organization. We don't throw everything out. We don't throw out our existing systems or planning [00:12:00] methodology. We want to weave it all together so OKRs are solving a specific problem in an existing strategic implementation stack. Most organizations really underestimate the magnitude of the culture shifts here. So, whether working with someone like me, who's on the methodology side or the platform side, implementing OKRs is a massive cultural transformation in terms of the decisions you're going to be making about transparency, about. What gets communicated to who, about what our mandatories are, what our must-achieves are, and what our stretch territories are. Big culture shifts that the OKR platforms, despite their services, people wanting to help with all of that and be successful, it's just not in their remit. OKR platforms have huge awareness, and they're really good at what they're really [00:13:00] good at. And it's really easy to fall into that software funnel.

I saw Catherine's here, and she said, "I'm a giant software-as-a-service shiny object person." Absolutely, me too! That's how I wound up working with specialty platforms for a while. Because I went down the tool funnel myself when I started working with OKRs. But the platforms are awesome, and they're really good at what they're good at. They have huge awareness. They have big dollars to spend on search advertising. So, you're gonna see a lot from the platforms when you start trying to learn about OKRs. But we have to remember that the platforms exist to sell and retain software seats. And so, yes, they need their methodology to be enough successful that they retain their users. But most of the tool-first implementations I've seen are designed for users to make happy [00:14:00] executives, because executives are the ones writing the checks for the software, most often, not always. But there is that focus on we want to make whoever's signing the check happy so that we retain them as a client. And that's different from working with a methodology-focused person like myself, where I don't have a retention target. There's no goal for me to keep clients. I want clients to get successful, implement, learn, get enabled, get successful, and then help them get to a point where they're ready to work with a software platform, because people are banging down their doors because they need the software solution. There are just different incentives or different reasons at play with working with software providers versus people. methodology practitioners. And then the other bottom line is, tools alone don't solve the core challenges of implementing [00:15:00] OKRs. I talked about the magnitude of the culture shifts, like, we have to actually change behavior for Objectives and Key Results to achieve what we're hiring them to do. So anyway, it's probably too much time on where does this go wrong, but it's so common I just wanted to break down a little bit why so many organizations fall into this funnel. And then if you're in it and you're struggling with a platform adoption, you are not alone. And so, what I'm going to talk about from here on out applies to getting started with Objectives and Key Results, and it can also apply to rebooting an OKR implementation that's struggling.

So, the alternative approach, which is what I work with, is we go methodology first. We introduce the Objectives and Key Results methodology, and in my model ideally, we start with leaders. We don't always, sometimes we start within the [00:16:00] organization, but starting within the organization can present some risks. I talk about that. I usually call it the L3 problem, and that's a topic that I cover more in my book. But in the ideal case, we're starting with leaders, and leaders go first with creating Objectives and Key Results at the top of the company. And that's important because our leaders are going to model for the rest of the organization, what an objective is and what a key result is. So, what the leaders do establishes the best practice. We want our leaders to learn and use the key words and meanings of OKRs. This is one of the places where implementations go sideways all the time — they don't necessarily establish a definition and an, and a working example of what an objective is, and especially what a key result is. When we're working with platforms, they [00:17:00] always, or almost always coach, "We want our Key Results to be measurable, not activity. We want them to be outcomes, not activity." But in practice, they're trying to get OKRs into the system. So, there are sometimes some corners cut on quality of the Key Results, especially. That just doesn't work. We need to model best practices of Objectives and Key Results, and we have to have quality assurance practices that ensure nothing gets called a Key Result that isn't a key result because that term really needs to preserve its meaning. This is for bigger companies, not our solos, but a lot of people, especially in large organizations adopt OKRs, because they want to localize from the company-level goals or strategy down into the organization. With a methodology adoption, we don't localize or scale until our leaders are reliably walking the talk, because they set the best [00:18:00] practice for the org, for everyone else. Their behavior is what other people look to learn the practice.

So, when we're getting ready to localize or when we're getting ready for scale, we establish and document the norms, we reconcile OKRs with rest of our strategic stack, we avoid avoidable known issues. That is a plug for working with a methodology pro. We've seen it all. Most of us have playbooks and practices to avoid stepping in the things that can be avoided because we've seen all of the common issues that affect the quality of a OKR implementation. That's not a challenge to my clients to surprise me, although inevitably it happens. You can still surprise me sometimes. But we want to focus on Objectives and Key Results as continuous learning, and we want to keep our tools and ops simple. So we focus on the methodology until people, and not just leaders, are [00:19:00] begging for an OKR tool. And that's by design. We want to keep our tools and ops as simple as possible so we can focus on the methodology adoption, really learn how we're going to use OKRs, and then that makes us better customers of OKR platforms because we know exactly how we are going to use it. We know our use cases, we know how many people, we know how different parts of the organization might use the platform. It's really hard for OKR practitioners, but we have people saying, "We just can't do the spreadsheet thing anymore. We need software." And that is such a better position to be in than adopting software, and having no one use it and asking why we're using it or why we're paying for it. So, we let folks struggle until they're suffering with the lack of software, and then that makes our software adoption so much more successful.

[00:20:00] In the model that I work with, a sprint or a fast rollout over the course of a year, and this is, again, in an organization, not a small business. Small businesses just go really faster. They can accelerate this. But in a methodology-focused adoption, in the first quarter, we'd focus on company-level OKRs created by a senior leader or by senior leaders. At the end of Q1, we do a review and reset of the company OKRs so we can see what did we learn about the OKRs we were working with and what might need to change for the future. If the leaders are walking the talk, we might localize OKRs for a next level down. Sometimes we do all of that in one quarter, but it's really nice to get a company level. This is an ideal case. In an ideal case, we work with a company level for a quarter before we localize. And then, at the end of Q2, if we've localized, we review and [00:21:00] reset the company and organizational OKRs. And then quarter four or whenever we're ready, then we can scale so that we're supporting cross functional OKRs or team level OKRs and even aligned individual goal-setting where people's individual goal-setting is aligned to the OKR model. So, that's a fast rollout with a methodology focus. And then, a slower rollout with a methodology focus — I use this when I have organizations that have a really established strategic plan and we're taking that fast, learning-focused approach. That fast approach is very experimental and learning focused. If that's not culturally appropriate, then we do a slower rollout that might start with just creating a strategy one pager in Q1 so that people can see the organization strategy on a single page, which doesn't usually exist. Sometimes it [00:22:00] does, but that's where we start. If we have one of these orgs where we need to move a little slower, then in Q2, we create company-level Objectives. We get folks used to the idea of company- level Objectives. And then, in Q3, we might layer in some experimental company-level Key Results. And again, we can scale when ready. So methodology-focused adoptions are focused on achieving methodology success, and then we get into the platform.

How can we track OKRs without a platform? There's like an adage in software that any software problem that's solved by a piece of software could ultimately be solved by a spreadsheet and email, and it's not wrong. So, a lot of starting out starts in spreadsheets with tracking OKRs. This is an example of an Excel [00:23:00] that we used for a couple quarters within my organization, and that we've used with other solos and small businesses, where we're not localizing, we're just creating Objectives and Key Results for the company level and then working with them. What this spreadsheet does, it gives us a structure for our Objectives, Key Results, any nested Key Results, and really simply, this isn't full localization. But here, you can see the example revenue stuff at the top has some nested Key Results. And then this has a little calculation in it so that you've got your start value, your target change, your target value, your current progress, and then it gives you a little red-amber-green score. It's just a really simple spreadsheet-based approach. And if you're in a large organization and you're like, "There's no way we could do spreadsheets," some of the most successful [00:24:00] OKR implementations I've seen in large organizations are based on SmartSheets, where they are able to manage two levels of localization and then have a linkage to their L3. It actually is possible to manage large systems of OKRs in spreadsheets because if we're going to try and do that, we just make the system simple. We don't try and link everything that could possibly be linked. We recognize there's probably math that connects at level one and level two, and then there's probably way less math that actually connects below that.

So, we tend to focus on managing level one, or the company, and level two in the spreadsheets, and that's the extent of what a spreadsheet can usually handle. When we get to three levels of math or more, that's where platforms really become essential. [00:25:00] It's pretty hard to manage more than two levels of math in a spreadsheet-based approach.

Yeah, Catherine, this isn't perfect, but it is just a simple way to track and have the essential information you need about a single level of OKRs. And then we always need some sort of visual of our Objectives and Key Results. And again, this is another example from really early in my own business, where this, we did in Miro.

it was powered by Excel spreadsheets for the graphs. And then we were really focused on just getting our foundations established. And so this even shows our aligned initiatives down on the bottom, and the graphics help us align, which initiatives align to which of our Objectives, and this isn't an automated dashboard, but it only took a few minutes [00:26:00] for me to update whenever we needed to see the updated version. So, we can be really lo-fi with the tracking and still get the information that we want and need.

I see Juan says — Juan, it's so good to see you here — so one practice that works for them is that they limit the OKRs to a maximum of five, either at the organizational, group, or individual level. I even encourage clients toward fewer Objectives. You might be talking about O's and KR's, but yeah, that's one of the ways that, whether you're taking a methodology-focused approach or you're working with software, one of the biggest problems is just way too many of everything. Juan's exactly right — we help ourselves when we zero in, narrow, and focus the number of Objectives and Key Results. It works better for everyone. So, what's ultimately most important is that leaders need objective information to make decisions. They need data on which they can report [00:27:00] up and across on team performance. They need insight into progress, blockers, and resource needs. And they need that information that they actually have to rely on for collaboration and cross-functional alignment. That's what's most important for leaders. Leaders want the nice, connected, beautiful, automated, fully synced, integrated dashboard. But what they actually need is these four things. And then our people in an OKR implementation need, first and foremost, clear expectations. That they're able to see really clearly what's expected of them. They also need an OKR process that isn't yucky, because if it's yucky, then they're gonna have to do all the work for this process that might generate a pretty dashboard for the leaders. But we want people to love our OKR implementations. We want people to see the benefit [00:28:00] of OKR implementations. People also need the ability to align their work to what matters, and that doesn't always have to be systemically connected. If we can see our Objectives and Key Results on a page, and they're really well-formed from a methodology standpoint, then people in the organization can look at that single page and say, "I see how my work aligns. That objective I can support. This theme applies to my work this way." And being able to see that on a page view, instead of with some of the platforms, it's almost like a "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist" issue that people run into because it's just a big box of software with lots of stuff in it. Most of them have some sort of all-in-one view, but it is different to see the software based all-in-one view versus the kind of single page that you can print and sit next to you on your desk that [00:29:00] practitioners like me work with. And then, people need a psychologically safe culture to be able to tell the truth about their progress and what they need. And that's not something that software does for us. We have to achieve that with our impact on culture and with how we approach our methodology.

Catherine says, "I'm a can't-see-it-doesn't-exist brain." I am too. I've been a software person and a technologist my entire career. For those of us who are technologists, we recognize I would much rather have people adopt the software at the right time, for the right reasons, and in a solid way, then try, to solve their problems with software and waste time, waste money, and ultimately confuse the people in their organization even further. that can't-see-it-doesn't-exist brain [00:30:00] comes into play in our project management systems, in our OKR systems. I've always wanted to get together with a bunch of other ADHDers and try and design an OKR system and a project management system that is, designed for the can't-see-it-doesn't-exist brain someday. Our OKR core team, the people who operate our OKR rhythm, need people to do their own labor. They don't like nagging everyone to update their OKRs, and to put their OKRs into the system and to write their OKRs. They need people to do their own labor including leaders Software can facilitate that. I said, what can be automated is automated, software can automate reminders, but reminders also just become something we ignore after a while. And what we need to do is build the behaviors. of people doing their own labor with [00:31:00] OKRs so that we don't rely on our core team dragging the organization through the OKR rhythm. Our core team also needs ease of preparation of reporting, and like I said earlier, they need people banging down their doors for an OKR platform. Because that's how we ensure a successful OKR platform adoption — when people have felt the pain of doing this without an OKR platform. And they're like, "We can't take it anymore. We can't implement that platform fast enough. It feels like we're failing." When people say that, what that actually is an enormous success, because if you've made it to that point, you have set your organization up for a successful platform adoption. So, the approach to tracking that I use with clients when they're pre-platform is we have our OKRs on a page. It's usually a slide, so we can see one set, the company OKRs, for [00:32:00] example, on a single page. And then we need a way to track linked, quantifiable progress. So, if we have multiple levels, we need that math connected so that we can update our child Key Results, and that rolls up to an updated parent Key Result. And we also, in an ideal case, need some way to have a linkage between our initiatives that align to OKRs and the OKRs they align to. And so, that is usually our spreadsheet, and that has our Objectives and our Key Results. And then for a Key Result, there might be a link to another spreadsheet where that Key Result's initiatives are, represented, or a link to whatever the project management system report is. for the Key Results for that initiative. I coach separating the delivery [00:33:00] plans or project management from OKR tracking, because if we don't, if we try and do those things in one tool, what tends to happen is the project management eats the OKRs, and it just becomes project management and delivery tracking. It is a pain sometimes if we have separate project management to then start up our OKR rhythm separately. A lot of the tools especially are combined. That might work, but we want to make sure that we have a really strongly established methodology culture before we try and put those things together so that the project management doesn't eat the OKRs.

Alright, that is the kind of why we start with methodology and not software, and how we do that is by keeping our tools very simple, by focusing on excellence of methodology, adoption — [00:34:00] whatever that means for that organization — and then scaling when the organization is ready to, when leaders are modeling best practices, and we have a solid playbook.

So, if you want more information about any of this — I do have a n OKR workbook that's currently available. The No BS OKRs workbook is only $19. You can get it at the URL that's on the screen there. You can also, I have a print version of that workbook that's in its final stages of layout right now. And I'm really excited to get that one out. So, the print version of the workbook is coming soon.

And then I also have a book called You Are a Strategist: Use No BS Objectives and Key Results to Get Big Things Done. That one's in proofreading right now — and so if I can keep my part on track, which is the wildcard in the schedule, then we're aiming for a December release for [00:35:00] You Are a Strategist.

Colin, nice to see you here!

This is fun. So I would love to see if anyone here has any questions. before we wrap up for today. You can drop those in the chat window.

Catherine asked, "For the if I don't see it, it doesn't exist brain. Do you have a simple one sheet option to keep them top of mind?" Yeah, that's where I use this kind of view. Oh, sorry. This is the dashboard view. We could have a one-slide dashboard view as opposed to the spreadsheet for our reporting visibility. But for our OKRs, unfortunately, I don't have one of those right at my fingertips to show you. But what I do is make sure that our OKRs fit on a single page. And so, I aim for a two-by-two. So, we've got four Objectives and then the nested Key Results [00:36:00] because that fits nicely on a page. If we have fewer Objectives, then we can use the extra box for major initiatives so that they can see all of that on one page. If we have five Objectives, it makes fitting them on a page really hard. Sometimes we just have to do it though. And again, I usually lay it out. either with three and two, and then one square for initiatives. Or if there's one that's a little bit more compact than the others, we can do a two-by-two and put the fifth one along the bottom horizontally. But basically, we just—for that "if I don't see it, it doesn't exist brain"—f or some reason. And you and I could definitely get into this. I think that brain is the type that looks to software to solve for our internal organization challenges. Like, I know that's why I became a project manager was because I couldn't internally organize. But if I [00:37:00] externalize into software, my thinking was I could externalize into software and then the software would help keep me organized. When in reality, for me, what I've learned is software just risks becoming a dumping ground.

I externalize the mess from my brain into the software and then, yeah, exactly, Catherine. So that's why I think it's part of why I focus on low-fidelity tools, because then, We have to manage our mess. If we're working with a spreadsheet, it can only get so big to be workable, as opposed to an OKR platform where it could get infinitely big. Or if we're fitting our OKRs to a single page, that makes them limited to the limits of space and time. If we don't have that view and we're just putting our OKRs into a system, we might not have that compression of the limit of a sheet of paper. So, [00:38:00] especially for those of us who have that, "if I don't see it, it doesn't exist" brain, who tend to look to software to solve for some of our internal organization gaps, that's the type of person who could really benefit from low-fidelity tools to begin with and focusing on methodology and learning. Because then you make it much more likely you're going to choose the right tool for the job. If you already understand and have managed the information and gotten yourself focused down to a manageable number of OKRs and built that habit. Awesome question and a really important one.

Colin says, "Some PPMs try to be everything for everyone. Users end up having to be programmers to create a custom implementation for their particular organization."

Yeah, so that can be an issue with OKR specialty adoption, whether it is adopting as part of an existing. project management system [00:39:00] or adopting a specialty software platform. One of the selling points for those platforms is the integrations and that we can populate your data automatically and have it all flow into the OKR system so you don't have to do manual updates. And that is possible in some situations. It's elegant in some situations, but I don't know about you, if any of you have worked with integrations and software, they're not always as elegant, or available, or as smooth as we would like. And sometimes we even have an issue with just getting the right data from our data source to pipe in to the OKR platform. So, sometimes we have to actually pull the data from the data source, clean it, and get to the right data, and then import that into our OKR platform, which at that point we have to ask, is that really an integration? How is that different from handling the data in a [00:40:00] lower-fidelity way? So no, we do wind up with the same challenge in OKR platforms that some of them do try to be everything for everyone. And that's again, the reason if we focus on methodology and we know what's really important for us, then we can choose an OKR platform based on our needs and meeting our needs. But then we can also decide not to use the parts we don't need just as a business decision. The methodology familiarity helps us make way better choices with our software. Great questions. Awesome team. This has been really fun. This is one of my favorite super spicy topics because, in the end, everyone's happy. Our clients have better OKR implementations by focusing on methodology. Our platforms have more successful adoptions because they're getting clients who are ready to adopt, who know what they need, who are [00:41:00] able to focus on software because they've already focused on methodology and can now focus on software. And then the users are happy because they actually learn OKRs and see the benefits before. They're having to learn and use software too. And to Catherine's point, the experience with the low-fidelity approaches to OKR management can help us learn and see OKRs in a way that our brains can understand them on a single page, or within the limits of a spreadsheet. We learn how to be responsible, OKR creators, because of those early limits, and then we can bring those good habits with us into our software.

So with that, I'm going to turn you loose. Have a wonderful Friday. My goal Friday thing is always what's on your to-done list. We're [00:42:00] not going to look at our to-do list after this. If you can afford to take an hour and decide what you're going to get to done in that hour, you're going to go into your weekend, a much happier person. So if you have that freedom, take an hour today, identify what you're going to get to done, and then get on with your weekend all. Thank you for tuning in, great questions, and I'll see you next time.

Sara: All right, friends, That's it for today.

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