Earlier today, we sent out a thank you note and message to the Red Currant Co mailing list (and if you haven’t subscribed, here’s your chance):

We’re not going to share all the details here on the blog, but I do want to catch you up on where we started and where we are now. (The sneak peek of where we’re going is only for the folks who’ve joined our email list.)

Where we started

Red Currant Collective was a hopeful idea: that my background and track record working with the Objective and Key Result (OKR) goal-alignment methodology was rare and valuable enough to build a solopreneur business around. The business plan when I opened was me plus a part-time-bookkeeper, with a theory that by year three I’d find “my best client,” then be able to expand into the work I’m most passionate about: Working with CEOs and strategic implementors to put more of their organization’s effort toward what’s most important. Helping changemakers and status-quo challengers create more impact while burning less "fuel." In short, helping leaders and their teams do less, better.

Over and over, we saw clients adopt OKRs as “the answer” to all their organizational problems, and then wind up discouraged and disappointed when the results didn’t meet their silver-bullet expectations. In response, we now work with clients to help craft OKRs to optimize what they’re really good at: helping people and teams set exciting and motivating stretch goals. And, we help clients fill in the other pieces of their “expectation clarity” model by identifying and clarifying commits, KPIs – the measures they’re watching but not actively invested in improving at the moment – and getting smarter and more strategic about how they plan toward and objectively quantify progress (or blockers) on their most important goals.

The work our clients do with us today reduces noise and dramatically increases signal. It reduces reliance on subjective evaluation of progress in favor of getting curious about objectively measurable progress indicators. We celebrate accomplishments and see setbacks as valuable learning opportunities. Our clients are either winning or learning, which can dramatically improve employee engagement and performance, as well as psychological safety, all of which are more important than ever in the era of the Great Resignation.

When we launched, my goal was to hear from clients that their organizations were increasingly achieving their most important measures of success with fewer surprises along the way. I could never have imagined what else we’d hear from clients during our first year of operation.

What clients have to say

Over the last twelve months, we’ve heard from clients who chose RCCO over big-ten management consulting firms for strategic operations consulting engagements. (We’ve also had consultants from four of them come through classes I’ve taught to learn how to coach OKRs.)

During one of the most challenging parts of a client’s OKR engagement, the full alignment review, a client spontaneously shared: “Working with you is effortless.”

We also hear the words “excellent,” “productive,” and “painless,” a lot. We’ve been surprised to hear variations on the phrase “You’re the best _______ consultant we work with,” where the surprise has come from how different clients fill in that blank. As a generalist strategic consultancy, we don’t specialize in specific areas of business, but our clients experience us as experts in theirs. That blank is often filled in with the specialty area of the team we’re working with — “human resources,” “innovation,” "compliance," “business operations,” etc. — but we are not discipline specialists. What clients are experiencing when they say that, I think, is that our work helps them do stronger specialty work. And remaining generalists, focused intently on strategic operation, has let us build tools and practices that work across all disciplines and industries, better than some of the earlier approaches to OKRs that favor easier-to-measure parts of the business and underserve harder-to-measure parts of the business.

I’ve noticed the consistent challenges that operational, creative, strategy, and product/engineering teams often experience with OKRs: they exist in spaces where objective measurement may require both creativity and courage. We’ve developed approaches to helping teams write meaningful OKRs in these harder-to-measure parts of the business. We’ve created new models for increasing shared meaning in organizational goal setting and alignment – including recognizing that not every team is in a position to set healthy stretch goals – so we’ve introduced the idea to clients of ambitiously pursuing readiness to stretch instead of forcing every team into a model of setting stretch goals via OKRs.

What we could also never have dreamt of is the feedback we receive from people in client organizations who spontaneously share the positive impacts of our work together on their energy and well-being in their careers. Our clients spontaneously share message with us about their increased self-esteem; increased confidence; psychological safety; and increased efficacy in their work, and these messages are the absolute best reward.

And from our CEOs and senior leaders, what we hear most is that the work we do together brings an increased sense of “calm” to their operations: less noise, more signal. More and better time to think and focus on what’s most important.

What's coming next

I am so excited for what’s coming in the next few months.

We're getting into a regular production schedule for this newsletter and the Thinkydoers podcast (find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen), with a spicy new episode dropping next week;

[But the rest of this sneak peek was only for email subscribers.]

Personally, I’m so grateful to be doing exactly what I’m doing, exactly how I’m now doing it.

Thank you for reading this far. I'll keep it shorter and sweeter in future mailings, but some of you have been waiting quite some time for a full update, and now you have it.

And most importantly of all:

Thank you for playing a role in our first year in operation, and for your belief in the revolutionary idea that our work lives can be impactful, equitable, coherent, and free from harm. ❤️

We are not alone, and I look forward to making that vision a reality, together.