The Goal-ification of OKRs
How Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are going increasingly mainstream as a helpful model for organizational goal-setting (and, words and meanings matter)
Episode 05: Show Notes.
When the book Measure What Matters was published in 2018, it created a lot of excitement about Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. Unfortunately, the book provided little practical information about implementing them, and many organizations have struggled to actually make OKRs work in the wild. Now we are seeing a rapidly growing OKR software market which is expected to reach $2.6 billion by 2023 but there is still a lot of confusion around the implementation and the potential benefits of OKRs. In today’s episode, we are going to look at what OKRs are and give you a few tips to keep in mind when you start to hear these words around your workplace – especially with the “goal-ification” of OKRs that we’re seeing with product releases including Microsoft Viva Goals and Asana Goals -- with OKRs being incorporated even into non-speciality software. OKR platforms and goal software have their place: but they aren’t required to start and operate a successful goal-setting and goal-achievement rhythm. We then go into detail about our specific definition and usage of “Key Results” in the term “Objectives and Key Results” to explain why that phrase should be treated as a term of art, as well as why Key Results – in the Connected Strategic® model – don’t typically describe activity. To find out how OKRs can help fill the gap between your company’s big outcome goals and the work you actually need to do to reach them, give this one a listen.
Key Points From This Episode:
What OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are: a collaborative goal model.
Sara’s experience as an OKR coach.
How Measure What Matters created excitement about OKRs but provided very little practical information about implementing this model.
The existence of the rapidly growing $923 million OKR software market.
The launch of Microsoft Viva Goals and Asana Goals and how the shifts made in their language in the goal-ification of OKRs are significant.
How we're seeing OKRs being incorporated across non-specialty software as well and how you don't have to be an OKR expert to use these tools.
Why if you’re a leader in a larger organization, you should use a more formal approach to goal setting than this software.
What makes the term “Key Results” distinct, and why people should be careful with their specific definition of it.
The problem of focusing your goal setting only on the financial measures at the company level.
Why “Key Results” should not be confused with “Objectives” and how Key Results can help you determine if you’re making progress on your objectives.
Questions that we can ask to identify objectively measurable Key Results.
The difference between Key Results and Key Initiatives.
How you can find out more information about OKRs.
Tweetables:
“Objectives and Key Results are most uniquely important because of the specific addition of ‘Key Results’. Key Results deliver on the idea that we need to align on our most important measures of success and those most important leading indicators of progress or risk.” — @saralobkovich [0:11:41]
“Our Key Results, when written well, can fill the gap between the big outcome goals that companies typically identify and the work we actually plan to do.” — @saralobkovich [0:12:01]
“We reserve the term ‘Key Results’ for objectively measurable leading indicators and outcome measures. So with that, our Key Results describe our most important areas of change, improvement, experimentation, innovation, and the places we're stretching together toward a goal that is specifically designed to achieve maximum performance.” — @saralobkovich [0:15:37]
“It's important that organizations treat the term ‘Key Result’ as a term of art. If that word is used interchangeably with ‘Objective’ or ‘goal’ or if we permit goals that aren't an objectively quantifiable measure of success to be called a ‘Key Result’, we're headed for big confusion.” — @saralobkovich [0:17:30]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
EPISODE 5
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:04] SL: Welcome to the ThinkyDoers Podcast. ThinkyDoers are those of us drawn to deep work, where thinking is working, but we don't stop there. We're compelled to move the work from insight to idea through the messy middle to find courage and confidence to put our thoughts into action. I'm Sara Lobkovich, and I'm a ThinkyDoer. I'm here to help others find more satisfaction, less frustration, less friction, and more flow in our work. My mission is to help change makers like you transform our workplaces and world. So let's get started.
[EPISODE]
[00:00:46] SL: Hey, friends. Thank you for tuning in today. We are going to talk about something that I've been observing in, actually, the software market around goals and OKRs of all places, which isn't my usual topic of conversation. First, we're going to back up a step and just give a real quick introduction to what OKRs are, where they come from, since I do get some questions from folks who don't have a background working with OKRs. We'll step back to go forward. Then we'll go from there with a little conversation today about the mainstreaming of Objectives and Key Results.
OKRs or Objectives and Key Results, are a collaborative goal model made famous by John Doerr in the book, Measure What Matters. The methodologies adoption by Google and many other high growth startups and enterprises. Here at Red Currant Collective, we work deeply with our specific flavor of OKRs. We call them Connected Strategic OKRs as part of our work with clients to help them build fully connected strategic operation and implementation stacks. I'm a very experienced OKR coach having trained over 2000 OKR coaches myself in more than 300 organizations worldwide. I've facilitated over 500 hours of OKR workshops. I stopped tracking at 500 hours, with clients from solo founder startups to Fortune 100 companies. I've worked with OKR rollouts for teams from one to 1000s.
I am a serious OKR nerd as part of my larger interest in workplace performance, human motivation and leader development. Despite the buzz that measure what matters made in the field and despite practitioners like me, who've gone deep on the practice of OKRs, Objectives and Key Results still aren't mainstream. If you've never heard of OKRs, you're not alone. If you've heard of OKRs, and have an aversion, you're also not alone.
Many organizations have experimented with and abandoned OKRs in part, because Measure What Matters created a tremendous amount of excitement about OKRs, but provided very little practical information about implementing them, especially in cross functional organizations and large matrix organizations. Google has a Google playbook for OKRs and that works great for Google, but cross functional deployment based on the Google playbook can be confusing at best, and really frustrating for organizations and teams at worst. Much of the rest of what most of the market knows about OKRs comes from the rapidly growing $923 million OKR software market. I'll include a link to the source for that in the show notes that also says that is headed for $2.6 billion by 2023.
Specialty OKR platforms have done a lot to increase awareness of OKRs and to build out practice guides training courses that helped make it easier for organizations to roll out OKRs at scale, enough to need and renew those platforms subscriptions. And the specialty platforms are incentivized to sell and retain software seats at scale. Not necessarily to do the painstaking work of architecting and supporting the operational and behavior change necessary for OKRs to take root and then deliver on their promise in organizations and that's where OKR nerds me come in, that's where practitioners like me come in.
As I mentioned upfront, I don't typically work with OKR software and platforms. My specialty is really on the methodology side. Some of the most successful and mature OKR deployments I've worked on with clients don't use an OKR platform at all. They're focused on the communication and clarity benefits of OKRs, rather than the compliance elements and were able to set up rhythms of business that work for their purposes, using existing tools in their business software stack. The OKR platforms definitely have a place, don't get me wrong. What we're seeing in the market right now, we can't help but notice a shift in the position of OKRs in the software market. With these shifts, we may hear about OKRs, a little less and about key results more or about objectives and key results more. That's a shift that we hear at Red Currant Collective welcome.
We'd like to give you a few tips to keep in mind when you start to hear these words around your workplace of objectives and key results.
In July, Microsoft Viva Goals launched a generally available trial release, that's the post Microsoft acquisition of a tool formerly called Ally. Asana added a product called Goals for tracking OKRs to their core platform. There are still lots of other platforms and tools using the name OKRs for their OKR tracking, but the shifts made by Microsoft and Asana in their language in the goal-ification of OKRs really caught my eye.
Recognizing that Objectives and Key Results are helpful building blocks for increasing consistency, organization, and meaning to goal setting is a logical addition to these team-based products. We are continuing to see proliferation of OKR modules under the name OKR included in non-specialty software. Airtable has an OKR template. Miro has OKRs incorporated into a bunch of their template. I've got links to one of them in the show notes. Smartsheet has OKR templates and systems and we've worked with a few clients that have implemented in Smartsheet.
Now in addition to the purpose built OKR platforms, we're seeing objectives and key results being incorporated as a goal and planning system across all sorts of non-specialty software as well. Someone who doesn't have experience with OKRs might sit down with one of these tools and wing it. You don't have to be an OKR expert to type words into these tools. For smaller organizations and teams that are used to nimbleness of operations and continuous learning, you may learn what works for your organization by sitting down with one of these systems and winging it. With some exceptions highlighted by motivation science research that we'll cover in another future episode, any goals are better than no goals. So have at it, write your goals. If you find that one of these tools helps you organize them and track them, then awesome.
But if you're a leader in a larger organization, or you anticipate working with goals that cascade or localize into multiple levels of your organization, that's where I'd steer you toward a more formal approach to goal setting. And specifically, if you adopt one of these goal tools to ensuring that your organization uses the term of art of key results with a definition that's rooted in OKR implementation best practices.
If you do that, if you reserve the term “key results” for a specific meaning, you can avoid some of the preventable pitfalls large organizations do run into when they wing it with adopting a goal model, especially in the area of key result formation that imprecision around that term can lead to huge confusion down the line. And it's completely preventable with a little bit of education and organization upfront based on what we see working with clients every day.
Next, let's talk a little bit about what makes key results special and why we recommend that clients are careful with that term. Over and over for over a decade now. I've seen organizations focus their goal setting on financial measures at the company level. I will never forget the first enterprise I worked in that unveiled their annual plan every year with the goal of grow revenue by 10%. The organization would scurry like worker ants to come up with activities and plans that might achieve that growth goal, often without cross functional alignment, and with a serious disdain for any questions that might slow down our worker activity. So questions like what's good growth versus bad growth? Or what resources do we have to grow with? Or are there things we need to stop doing to perform better?
Those questions were not received well, not popular. Activity Plans would be formed, status meeting scheduled, and then we'd all hope that the activity we planned would somehow magically add up to the growth number, the organization set for itself. Sometimes it did, often in a strong market. Sometimes it didn't, often in a weaker market. But we rarely learned how to do better than next year, because we didn't have other measures of success that we were able to set and learn with beyond just growing revenue. We didn't have other measures of success, or other potential leading indicators of success or risk that we could work with and learn from in the business. It meant that our activity was a little arbitrary. It wasn't designed to achieve outcomes that we knew would ladder up to that revenue goal that the organization had set.
So let's talk about how key results help in a situation like this. Objectives and key results are most uniquely important, because of the specific addition of “key results”. Key Results deliver on the idea that we need to align on our most important measures of success and those most important leading indicators of progress or risk. Our key results, when written well, can fill the gap between the big outcome goals that companies typically identify and the work we actually plan to do.
We can ask an answer the question, how are we going to know we're making progress on that outcome goal? Or how could we measure that we're headed in the right direction or the wrong direction? How are we going to know when we're at risk on our outcome goal? We can also ask, what are we going to see change in our business if we're making progress toward our outcome goal? Or what other sub measures do we need to achieve measurable improvement on? What supporting measures of success do we need to achieve to keep our long-term strategy on track? Again, can we quantify our leading indicators, so we reduce the risk of any surprises on our outcome goals?
Those are the kinds of questions that we ask and answer to identify actual, objectively measurable key results based on data, not based on opinion, or instinct, or weather checks or temperature reads. So asking and answering those questions, and aligning on our key results, instead of just Activity Plans, lets us all increase our confidence that when we organize to achieve our key results, our labor will add up to greater success on our outcome goals.
Only certain roles in the organization might see how their work directly supports those big outcome goals at the company level, the grow revenue by 10% goal. When we set key results, by asking and answering questions the ones I just shared, that gives us more measures of success that really matter, because they are connected to our most important outcomes, but then more people in the organization are able to look up at those key results that we set and think, how does my work support this? Or which of these does my work ladder up to? Then when we see our work connecting to the upline key results, those are places where we know that's a priority to focus on our performance. If it's connected to our key results, it's one of the most important priorities of the business.
A couple other nuances in the model we work with, activities are not key results. In the approach that we take, if a critical result is activity based, say like release of a product, or if progress is evaluated subjectively, then we treat it as a key initiative, not as a key result. Key initiatives may have outcomes that are measurable, that might be key results, but if what we're talking about is the activity or the subjectively evaluated progress, we're going to estimate progress at between zero and 100% then we consider that a key initiative, not a key result.
Some key initiatives are important enough that we might set an objective and key results for them, it's a great practice, because then we've got a workload and we, the line and agree on what the objective for the businesses and what the measures of success that workload is going to be measured by. But we don't just list Activity Plans as key results, because we reserve the term key results for objectively measurable leading indicators and outcome measures, so with that, our key results describe our most important areas of change, improvement, experimentation, innovation, the places we're stretching together toward a goal that is specifically designed to achieve maximum performance.
The key results that we work with, the model we work with here at Red Currant Collective are key results that are specific and difficult. Our key results are specific and difficult and our approach to key results is designed to align to over 35 years of empirical research on goal setting theory, as well as the most currently available research on motivation science.
The taxonomy we work with, the words and meanings of goal setting in the connected strategic model is very simple. It's easy to learn and it makes intuitive sense. The attention to words and meanings avoids huge potential confusion in the implementation, since we only call something a “key result” if it is indeed a most important measure of progress or success. This discipline in taxonomy help avoid the most common issue we see with new OKR adoptions, which is way too many key results and way too much activity in our key results.
When our goals are meant to provide focus, and we wind up with long lists of activities and ideas along with a few maintenance measures thrown in, and maybe some actual key results, then our key results lose focus and clarity. That's when OKR implementations lined up in my inbox for rehabilitation and turnaround.
It's important that organizations treat the term “key result” as a term of art. If that word is used interchangeably with objective or goal or if we permit goals that aren't an objectively quantifiable measure of success to be called a key result, we're headed for big confusion. If the organization ever does want to implement actual OKRs.
You and your organization don't have to use OKRs. You don't have to follow any rules or dogma of OKRs, but you may at some point find yourself leading or supporting one of the many organizations craving more objectively measurable progress and performance information. More objectivity about your organization's contributing measures of success and those big bold outcomes that your annual plan calls for and when you do, you may wish you'd started with a solid definition and set of practices around key results from the beginning. It's way easier to start with that terms, words and meanings than to have to reclaim and redefine that term down the road.
If you'd to learn more about anything I've shared today, you can drop your email on to our newsletter at ck.redcurrantco.com or if it's easier to spell, there's a shortcut to that URL from findrc.co/subscribe. If the spelling on Red Currant is too tricky, it's C-U-R-R-A-N-T like the berries.
We're getting ready to announce a few new ways to work with us in time for the 2023 Reset cycle. In addition to our current clients, that list is going to be first in line when we open up availability. Our new flexible and on demand service models are designed to expand access to services for clients who aren't able or interested in signing on for long term consulting, but who would like some expert help ensuring their OKR implementations are designed to help not hurt their organization's performance. So that URL again is findrc.co/subscribe and we'll get an update out in September to get ready for the 2023 Reset cycle.
[OUTRO]
[00:20:04] SL: All right, friends. That's it for today. Thank you for joining and listening. I'd love to hear from you about what your resonated, where you got stuck or confused and that's on me, not you. Also, if there's anything you have questions about, you can find me @saralobkovich everywhere. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one. It's S-A-R-A-L-O-B-K-O-V-I-C-H. No, nothing here is easy to spell. I’m sorry. I'd be thrilled to have you as an email subscriber for infrequent more formal, just business messages, you can subscribe at findrc.co/subscribe.
I also have a more personal list that takes side trails into topics around wellbeing, mental and emotional health and my motorcycle life and other serendipity at saralobkovich.com.
You'll find a shortcut to the show notes for today's episode via thinkydoers.com. We've got a few different topics in the works right now to help you get ready for your year-end reset, which is scarily right around the corner for many of us. If we still have room in our roster after we announce our new support model to our list, I'll share an update about those new opportunities to work with us here on the podcast soon. You're also always welcome to drop me an email. The easiest one to spell is sara@thinkydoers.com. If you've got other ThinkyDoers in your work world, please pass this episode along. We really appreciate your referrals, your mentions, your shares and your reviews. Thank you for tuning in today and I look forward to hearing the questions this prompts for you.
[END]