Simon Sinek’s TED talk, “Start with why”, has been watched over 11 million times. I’ll be honest with you – it really annoys me. He repeats the phrase, “people don’t buy what you sell, they buy why you sell it” so many times it drives me crazy. Here’s the even more annoying part, he’s absolutely right.

Anytime you want to sell something to someone – be it a product, way of working or new idea – you need to explain to them, first, why this is something they should care about. As we’ve been writing our OKR book, we’ve realized that this was a huge missing part of most OKR conversations. Leaders (or someone) bring in OKRs to an organization and immediately start implementing. The staff has no idea why they need to adopt this aside from “the boss said so” and begin doing so begrudgingly. Soon, the idea becomes a chore, people resent it and it fails. We saw this with Agile as well. To make OKRs succeed you have to start with why (thanks Simon). 

What’s the problem we’re solving?

If you’re a leader introducing a new way of working, especially a new way to set goals, to your organization you need to explain to your staff BEFORE you start implementing what problem this new system addresses. I guarantee you that your company had a goal-setting framework before it tried OKRs. What was wrong with it? How was it no longer meeting the needs of the business? What proof do we have of that? What are we trying to achieve that the current system can’t help us with? This is the first conversation leaders need to have with their organization when it’s time to implement OKRs. 

For years we’ve been working towards production targets. We’ve made a lot of great products (and some not so great ones). The reality is that most of our customers don’t use most of our products. We have no idea why they don’t use them. We maintain the products and provide support costing us millions a year with no obvious ROI. These products were the result of the agendas of various leaders and failed to align us around a cohesive strategy. This needs to change. 

Boom! You’ve framed the problem space for your staff. You know what else you did? You showed some humility and admitted some mistakes in the past (this goes a long way). 

Here’s what’s next…

What will the future look like?

Now that you’ve defined the cause for the change – the “why” (thanks, again, Simon) – you need to paint a picture of what success will look like in the future. Instead of continuing down the path that got you to where you are today, you’re going to change things up so that the organization behaves differently in the future. Share that vision with your teams. 

Our goal is to become a customer-centric organization that deeply understands the people that we serve, ensures we are meeting their needs and can respond to changes in the marketplace quickly. We want to become a learning organization that admits when it’s chosen a poor direction and can quickly pivot to a better alternative. We want to empower everyone to learn whether their work is having a positive impact on our customers and to feel safe when they learn that it isn’t and it’s time to change direction. Finally, we want to create a culture that celebrates the success of our customers rather than just the delivery of features to market. 

Wow! Now we’ve got a destination. 

The last step…

What will get us from here to there?

The last part of the framing leaders need to put in place prior to implementing OKRs (or agile or any other major change) is their hypothesis for how we’re going to get from the current condition to the future state. Whatever the method is, in this case OKRs, must be framed as a hypothesis with clear success criteria measured in changes of human behavior (mostly the behavior of your staff). In this way you’re not mandating a change blindly. You’re offering a proposed solution where the measure of success isn’t the deployment of the solution (that’s an output) but rather the visible changes in culture and behavior you laid out in your future state vision. 

We propose changing our goal-setting framework away from rewarding output and delivery and towards measuring outcomes, customer behavior, as success. We are going to implement OKRs to help us set new goals. We believe that OKRs provide the right framework to get us all thinking about the customer first. We’ll know it’s working when we see the customer present in the majority of our strategic decisions, a reduction in the time it takes us to learn if we’ve chosen the right work to do and significant increases in the topline behaviors of our customers. 

Ta-da! You’ve laid out the hypothesis for the new goal-setting framework in a way that ties together the problem statement and the future state. In addition, you’ve put in success criteria that will help both you and your teams determine if the OKR implementation has been successful. Ticking the box is no longer enough to say it worked. 

Start with why

If we want any change to work we have to let folks know why we’re changing. Forcing the change is always an option but it will inevitably come with resentment and frustration – and probably a dash of confusion. Putting forward a problem statement, a vision for a positive future state and a hypothesis for the proposed process/culture/method change lays a foundation your teams can rally behind. It also gives you the bandwidth to change course in case the method doesn’t end up making things better. In all cases, it’s in your best interest to start with why (one last thanks to Simon).