First and foremost it would be irresponsible of me to not tell you that our new book on OKRs, Who does what by how much?, comes out on May 28 (that’s 8 days from the publication date of this post). You can pre-order the Kindle version now and the paperback version will be available on launch day.
Also, if you haven’t signed up for my free, 5-day email course, The OKR Repair Kit, you can do so here.
In the 2010’s when every organization was hastily implementing some form of Agile software development there was a strong belief that, “If only we could get this Agile thing to work, we’d solve all of our problems.” Fast forward many years, millions of dollars in training, coaching, hiring and reorganization, new vocabularies, updated facilities, roles and high expectations and many organizations still haven’t reached the pot of gold at the end of the agile rainbow. They’re frustrated. They did everything right. They implemented Agile. But the magic of agility, collaboration, faster time to market and a continuous learning loop never appeared. What these companies eventually realized was that simply deploying a framework isn’t enough to change how an organization works. They have to shift the mindset and the culture.
OKRs are suffering a similar fate at the moment. So many companies are implementing or have already implemented OKRs and are now waiting to reap the benefits of the newly-rediscovered goal-setting framework. But, like Agile and its derivatives the magic didn’t come by simply deploying a new set of goals. This should have been obvious to these companies as many of them were the same ones who invested heavily in Agile ways of working. Yet they still sought out a silver bullet for their organizational challenges.
Objectives and Key Results are a tool
Imagine you bought a drill. You felt all powerful. You were going to go make some holes in your walls and hang some stuff. As you set out to decorate your home you began to realize that the drill you bought is actually quite powerful and comes with a variety of accessories. You used the wrong accessories on the wrong walls. You made a lot of holes. Many were useless. Some were truly disastrous. At the end of the day you look around your house, seeing all the errant attempts at hanging stuff, and you blame the drill. “It’s the wrong tool.” “It didn’t work for me.” What you didn’t think about before buying the drill was what you were ultimately trying to achieve. You didn’t think about the implications of using this powerful drill in places where it didn’t make sense to do so. You ended up doing some damage to your walls and, in the end, rather than blaming your lack of preparation and training, you blamed the tool.
OKRs are the drill (in case that wasn’t obvious enough). They are not “beautiful decorations hanging on my walls.” They are one way to get there. In some situations they’re the right tool. In others, they’re not. But just like owning a drill doesn’t make your walls beautiful, deploying OKRs won’t make your teams faster, more collaborative or agile. Like buying a drill, deploying OKRs is the beginning of your journey. You’ve acquired the tool that can help you achieve your goals. Now you have to learn how to use it. You have to see how it complements the other tools in your toolbox. You may have to develop some new muscles to truly make it work for you. Expecting the deployment of OKRs to magically change everything is the same as expecting owning a drill to give you instant carpentry skills. They won’t. What they will do, though, is force you to examine how you’ve been working.
Culture and mindset shifts are the goal
In the same way that Agile didn’t instantly make companies agile, OKRs won’t make you instantly better at delivering consistently to your customers’ needs. At first, at least, they’ll expose the ways of working, culture challenges and mindsets that aren’t aligned with delivering continuous customer value. They’ll force you to reexamine how you make decisions and why you make those decisions.
OKRs are a means – a tool – to changing your teams’ mindset and your company’s culture to be more human-centric. That’s our goal. Changing how you measure success is a great starting point. From there, though, you have to identify what is getting in the way of achieving that success. That will undoubtedly be uncomfortable at times. Incentives, personal agendas, and missing skill sets will all have to be remedied. But isn’t that why you set out to do this in the first place?
