NCTs is a relatively new goal framework that we have seen a few customers start to use within ZOKRI. It’s beginnings are unclear but NCT as a goal framework looks to be associated with Reforge, and learning community targeting product management, marketing, engineering, and other tech professionals that offer programs and content designed specifically to drive meaningful impact. Which means the NCT does have great credentials and is well tested.
NCTs use intelligent labelling
Narrative
NCTs have been smart to firstly allow the Objective entity to become a Narrative. Which is essentially the story of what needs to be achieved and why.
OKR coaches often use an extra field ‘Why Now’ to capture this, and in ZOKRI we can make fields like this optional or mandatory.
Our view is that whether you use Objective or Narrative you need to know and share the ‘Narrative’ and ‘Why Now’ to provide much needed context and urgency, and make any associated measure, projects and task make sense.
Commitment
Here are the types of measure that can work well when creating Commitments or any other goal achievement definition.
Measurement [Increase / Decrease] [Metric] from X to Y
Learning / Discovery New Product Innovation, Customer Insight
Input Hiring People, Improving a Process, Raising Money
Output Key Strategic Project
Commitments firstly is a great word to use. It’s a word that carries weight, emotion and substance. Commitments are not usually undertaken lightly.
Did you know that the framework 4DX® uses the term Commitment as the label to describe what will be committed to move or leverage the measures contained within their goal entity – the WIG® (Wildly Important Goal)?
ZORKI support the creation and tracking of a huge variety of measurable commitments. These range from using KPIs from integrated tools and spreadsheets, progress updates from project and task software integrations e.g. Jira, and simpler manually updated formats and configurations.
Tasks
The T of NCT is Tasks. These are the things that could or should be done to achieve the Commitments.
The idea is of course to choose tasks that will help you make progress on your Commitments. These could start life as an idea and eventually get completed. If you want to borrow concepts like ‘goal difficulty’ labels e.g. aspirational, committed, from frameworks like OKR, you can, or keep it simple.
Progress and completion state of the Tasks can all be managed in ZOKRI is via connected tools like Jira.
NCT vs OKR
NCT vs OKR is a question we’re starting to get asked. As we’ve explained, there is an elegant simplicity to the labelling, structure and requirements of NCT that OKRs could fairly be accused of lacking.
What’s in a label you might say. At ZOKRI we’ve found that it turns out that there is a lot in a label, which is why we allow our customers to choose their labels and advice notes.
Our collective aim is to make the goal setting and executional process and related management processes as simple as possible. When what is required is simple and understood, what you want to happen usually happens.
With ZOKRI our OKR coaches and trainers have a history of helping people succeed with OKRs. That said, we also really like NCT and can see why it’s starting to get traction. We are fully behind both and will invest in allowing customers to succeed with OKR or NCT.
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