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Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) are a goal setting framework created at Intel in 1980 to respond to growing competition from Motorola.
They help create focus on outcomes, alignment, & transparency across teams, enabling them to experiment with different methods and tactics without losing sight of the small set of clearly measurable outcomes that define success within a specific time frame.
OKRs form a helpful bridge between strategy and execution.
They work best in genuine teams which are small in size having members with complementary skill sets and shared definitions of success. This definition of a team comes from the Wisdom of Teams via Christina Wodtke.
The four key disciplines of OKRs are:
By linking actions to outcomes and encouraging experimentation while relentlessly pursuing a small set of measurable outcomes, OKRs can be considered a learning framework to help entire organisations to evolve and grow.
OKRs have 3 primary components:
Underneath the OKR and separate from it, are all the actions that will be required to achieve the OKR.
This must be clear and well-known. Running a mile in five minutes is very different from doing it in 20. I recommend binding OKR-cycles to calendar quarters. While this can feel somewhat arbitrary it does two useful things.
Firstly, it puts everyone in your organisation on the same cadence of setting, closing, and re-setting their OKRs. Secondly, it helps teams to stop thinking of key results as project milestones and rather, as observable growing or shrinking numbers that we want to sample at a particular moment in time – the end of a quarter.
You can use other durations like trimesters, halves, or even 7 week cycles depending on the rhythm of your work but try to arrive at equally sized cycles and clearly communicate when they start and end.
These are big, bold, inspiring, aspirational statements which are not true today but which could be true in the future if everything goes our way. “Customers love our product”, “Every donor feels personally valued”, or “Our release process is as smooth as butter” are all good examples.
Objectives should use emotional language to supercharge our desire and get us leaping out of bed in the morning to achieve something remarkable.
They should inspire us to learn more about what it means and how we’ll know when we’ve achieved this thing.
I think of the objective as the prize.
Behind every objective are the cold, hard, measurable key results. These are quantifiable, observable, externally verifiable, outcomes – numbers that demonstrate the degree to which we’ve achieved the objective. They are the proof and the only proof we will accept that our objective has been met.
They are NOT the work we will do to achieve the objective.
Activities represent the WORK we will do to bring about the change described by our OKRs. Projects, deliverables, tasks, initiatives – whatever you call it, the work matters. It is the only mechanism you have to make things happen. You must be able to execute beautifully as a pre-requisite to using OKRs. But OKRs help you to recognise that the work alone isn’t what counts. It’s the impact your work has – the change your work brings about in the world. Faster times to market, fewer bugs, happier customers, whatever matters most to your organisation is described in the OKRs – how you achieve it, is the work.
When setting OKRs, I welcome the appearance of activities but encourage teams to see them for what they are: a means to create the conditions described by our key results.
Learn more in setting OKRs.
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