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OKRs are a team sport. They help a team to understand each other, their operating context, and what they’re capable of.
Writing OKRs is an emergent activity grounded in discovery. By involving everyone in the OKR-drafting process, you build accountability, clarity, and excitement.
To distill a diverse set of personalities, desires, and constraints into a simple, clear set of OKRs takes time, inclusivity, and flexibility.
Here’s how I do it.
It’s important to leave enough time to hear from everyone, explore different language, group things in different ways, and take different ideas to their conclusions. I like to allow at least two hours for an initial OKR-setting session but often ask teams to set aside four.
Christina Wodtke recommends scheduling 4 hours and says if you’re lucky, you might finish in two.
When crafting the invite, it’s important to remind people that you’ll be using this time to set the agenda for every delivery conversation you have over the next OKR cycle. This is their opportunity to have their voice heard and ensure the team is working on the most important outcomes at this moment.
The 2 main activities I invite people to do in an OKR-writing session are to reflect and dream. I use a combination of chatterfall and a kind of “guided daydreaming” that I describe in the video to do this before getting into more in-depth brainstorming and “sift & sort” editing activities.
When beginning to brainstorm OKRs and when getting into more “sift & sort” activities, it’s helpful to use a facilitation framework that is organic, playful, and fluid.
To do this, I created the “OKR map”.
The “OKR Map” is a simple but radically inclusive and flexible template & facilitation technique that helps teams brainstorm, juxtapose, sift & sort different ideas to collectively arrive at a draft set of OKRs, activities, and dependencies ready to refine, negotiate, and then deliver.
The OKR map includes 5 columns:
I’ll explain each of these and how to use them in the video.
After the initial playful session, if we’ve managed to set some reasonable OKRs that we’re pretty happy to pursue, I like to take them off the board and move them to a more structured document.
I invite the team to continue iterating asynchronously, using the comments feature of most cloud-based collaboration tools until they’re ready to share this even more widely for additional feedback from other teams and stakeholders either asynchronously or via an alignment session.
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