We’re back again for another fireside chat, this time to discuss something that’s in our everyday wheelhouse: OKRs.

So, I want to explore the real goal of an OKR implementation. I think it’s safe to say that there is a spoiler alert: Do not set goals in the OKR format.

So, that’s obviously the thing we see a lot, and it often causes failure.

And what I’d like to introduce our listeners to is the concept of OKR maturity.

We’re very attached to this idea, and I’d like to discuss it with you if that’s okay.

Absolutely. Yeah. It’s really interesting, and setting OKRs in that hard and trusted format is pretty easy. And you can probably teach someone the basics of OKRs in twenty minutes.

Not surprisingly, that doesn’t lead to the kind of business outcomes and change that leadership wants. So this is this is really interesting to to dive into.

For sure. And I think I’m a kinda student of lots of goal frameworks as I guess you are. And before the call, we were talking about V2MOM, but, obviously, you got smart goals amongst many other types.

And, what you learn is that most forms of goal setting will get you so far. And you know, if you can get a team or a company or an individual to set a goal, which is essentially just as forward winding and sort of describing a future state that we’d like to get to that will always have some level of benefit. And in the okay art context, we kinda call that an okay art novice.

And if you become okay at that, you kind of hit this glass ceiling where you’re getting the benefit, but you’re not getting the full benefit.

So, to become mature, actually, pass through that glass ceiling, and move towards OKR mastery, where company performance, team performance, and individual performance are all multiplied and accelerated, a number of key building blocks need to be in place. Do you want to sort of take us through some of those?

This is about the requirements that allow you to move towards OKR mastery, away from that glass ceiling where you multiply performance at the company team individual level and feel that in revenue. These are high-level traits that we would help people to both be capable of and see.

Great. Yeah. When I think about OKR maturity, there are quite a few elements to that.

I always talk about OKR as a strategy execution framework, so not surprisingly, that’s point one on my maturity list. And there are lots of different views of what strategy is.

I like to think of it in a very simple way: It’s an evolving view of how we will win. To achieve that, we need to identify where customers are very clearly.

We need to understand the problems we’re solving for them.

And in the words of Michael Porter, the essence of strategy is deciding what not to do. So it’s it’s not just about, you know, the identification of what we could do. It’s about being very, very explicit about we’re gonna try and do this. We’re gonna leave this till later or not do it at all. So having a well articulated view of our strategy is, yeah, for me, it’s it’s point one.

I think it’s better to interject there, and I think it’s, sort of in your opinion, and, obviously, we’ve been coaching, consulting for a long while now. How often does a leader come to you with a fully formed, well-articulated strategy?

And why do you think you know, I think we, you know, I think we can really guess the answer to that as well, but I was interested in your opinion.

Why do you think people find it so hard or there’s so much misunderstanding around what a what a genuine strategy is?

Yeah. So that’s a great question. How often does a leadership team come to me with a fully formed strategy? And I’m gonna give you the really obvious answer, which is almost never.

But I think it’s also a continuum. It’s a spectrum of how good or bad a strategy can be.

At one extreme, a strategy is just a kind of aspiration. We want to be number one in such and such a market.

Sometimes it’s it’s more nuanced.

And I think back to when I was a strategist in a couple of roles, GlaxoSmithKline, for example, and I look at what I put together there. And looking back, it’s quite embarrassing because I wouldn’t I wouldn’t really call that a strategy. It wasn’t making clear choices.

It wasn’t mindful of the fact that many of our ideas don’t work. So, I certainly empathize with leaders who are struggling to put together a good strategy. So, yeah, that really would be my answer. How about you?

I’m the same. I anointed myself as a chief strategy officer once upon a time. And, you know, I’d read every book there was, and, you know, I like the fact you can sort of coach yourself in strategy whilst, developing. And then I went to business school too and, you know, I did a degree, in it. But I wasn’t very good at it back then.

I am a good learner, and I’m a good student, but I think probably only in the last six or seven years as I have I really got the essence of what it is and the kind of things that you were describing there, the different ways that you can approach it, and how you can kind of make it less jargon-filled and take some of the bull out of it and actually make it more accessible. And I think maybe that was the issue I had, you know, fifteen, twenty years ago, is it it was it was a bit old school back then. It was full of jargon. It was complex. What you could read was orientated around companies that weren’t weren’t really like your company. They were often, you know, very big enterprise-type customers or, companies and leadership teams that they were targeting.

And for that, you kind of had to plug a lot of the holes yourself. And I think it’s not until you kind of really get under the skin and try and simplify some of the basic principles and ideas, that you and I sort of talk about and try and help teams with that you really get to have that eureka moment where you kinda go, okay. I get what I’m trying to do now.

Mhmm. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think there’s a really interesting point you made there about the jargon because a strategy is only as good as the communication of the strategy.

And one of the problems I’ve seen is organizations have a clear strategy. They communicate it maybe once in a town hall, in a deck, and, of course, people learn in different ways. They don’t get to ask questions. So I guess the strategy is only really kinda tangible and real when everyone understands what it means and can certainly under and recall key elements of it.

Okay. I don’t expect people to understand or remember it word for word, but that’s that’s as equally important as defining the strategy for me. And I think another important point that organizations forget is that strategy exists at multiple levels. Yeah.

It’s not just a corporate strategy. You may have a strategy for a particular product or a tech strategy. And that kind of leads me to another point, which is that everybody feels they can contribute to that discussion.

Yeah. It’s not it’s not your responsibility on the ground to write the strategy, but you feel that you have a voice, and you can approach leaders and say, have you considered this? Or this is what our customers are saying. That kind of thing.

Yeah. I think your point around being able to articulate it, is is critical, and that’s why, you know, it can’t be in a long, verbose document.

I think allowing people to recall it is also important, and that’s a sign of good communication. We certainly ask when we’re getting under the skin of a company to work out how we can help them, different leaders, what they think their strategy is. And we almost never get a consistent answer from the leadership team. And I think that’s indicative of kind of where we are on this topic.

Yeah, absolutely. So that’s, I think, strategy covered. And one of the final thoughts on why it’s challenging is that I think a lot of leaders have never seen a good strategy.

I think that that’s the problem.

And I think once you see one, you kinda get to understand, okay? How can I apply that to my context?

This leads to data. Do you want to talk us through data as it pertains to OKR strategy and this idea of maturity?

I mean, if I were to describe my definition of an OKR or a certain key result, it would be a measurable beneficial outcome.

For somebody. Usually a customer, sometimes for the business, sometimes even for a stakeholder, you know, a supplier, for example.

One of the key parts of that is measurable.

And when I see teams and organizations struggle with OKRs, it’s because they haven’t got an idea of the data that powers their business.

So every time they come to the OKR setting, it’s like scrambling. Okay. What can we measure? How can we push things forward?

Whereas if you have what I would call a persistent data model, and that sounds that’s, you know, going back to your jargon point, that sounds like jargon. But by persistent, I mean, it’s not a one-off and not thrown away. It’s something that you use over time, and using it over time means it evolves. So we that data model is never right, and it connects to, you know, what in strategic terms I think of as a narrative.

When you describe how you think you can succeed as a business, your data model brings that into a more measurable world. So yeah, you talk about levers in a strategic narrative. They should be really explicit in a data model.

And so, just to de-jargon a little bit, think of it in a really simple way: Think of a tree, a tree of data, where, progressively, as you move up the branches of a tree, you’re moving further away from top-level items like revenue, but you’re moving towards things that maybe teams can control in a reasonable time period.

So, yeah, for me, that’s a really simple version of a model: a KPI tree.

And it just makes OKR settings so much easier.

What was your experience at a tree and model generally?

So, obviously, we run workshops on KPI trees. As a tool, I think it’s incredibly powerful. And when we do get the chance to support teams in creating these and understanding how they’re both how they’re created, and this idea of influence and confidence and the ability to have hypotheses on what metrics might influence another metric, and when you will do those exercises and how they act on, you know, the big headline, KPIs, so things like revenue or customer satisfaction or more strategic orientated, KPIs. Once you see that cascade and when you’re having those hypotheses and when you’re proving those relationships, has all kinds of implications for not just how we set goals and set key results and that ability to act on those lead indicators that are really good predictors of future performance.

It also allows us to improve our reporting, onboard new staff, and give them purpose because they know what they’re there to do.

Mhmm. But as a kind of enabler of not just OKR mastery but also team performance, culture building, and providing purpose, I think it has much wider ramifications, and it is an important tool to have in your toolkit.

Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It’s I think you’ve touched on some great kind of benefits that people don’t necessarily think about with a data model. I mean, this idea that, you know, you come into a new team and you’re trying to understand, okay. How does this team win? How does, you know, how do we feel we’re beating our competitors?

You can tell a story around that, and I think that’s really important. Yeah, but having the data and seeing, okay? Oh, yeah. Right. They’re trying to use this lever to achieve this outcome.

It’s just incredibly insightful Yeah.

For most of us, I think. Yeah. So a hundred percent agreed. It’s it’s an incredibly powerful tool, underused.

But this idea also that you said there again, you mentioned about their hypothesis.

I think there is a there’s a great there’s a great phrase about models that all models are wrong. Yeah. Some models are useful. Yeah.

Absolutely. It’ll never exactly reflect the real world. That’s not its job. It’s to help you gain insights into how to achieve the goals you want for yourself and your customers.

And, yeah, the idea of this, yeah, how strong is the connection between two elements in your tree?

I’m being mindful about that and honest and open. You know, sometimes you see a data model, and it’s just it’s black and white. It’s this this lever, you know, that leads to this outcome. It’s never really like that. You need to know, you know, how powerful that relationship is and, you know, how confident are you that it’s really gonna have the impact you expect.

For sure. You want to talk to us about OKRs as they relate to both departments and sub-teams of that department, as well as cross-functional OKRs, what we tend to see out in the wild, and how people approach those.

Yeah. So I think it’s really interesting that we talk about that journey of maturity.

I think back to the first time I used OKRs when we started with a cross-functional leadership team.

And we talked about some of the things we could achieve, and that was a good discussion.

The mistake we had made then was that functional leads jumped off and built their own OKRs Yeah. Which had absolutely no relationship to each other.

So, you know, the technology team had some things that, yep, were useful outcomes but potentially completely clashed with what the product team was trying to do. Yeah. And this is, to me, really, it’s not just a kind of OKR discussion.

However the key outcomes we want as a business tend to be achieved by cross-functional teams. They’re not achieved by just the engineers working on themselves.

When a group like that comes together to own an outcome, it’s incredibly powerful. And this is a little bit of the challenge really for OKRs: If you’re in an organization that’s very functionally oriented, where people report to an engineering leader who reports to an engineering manager who sets my goals and who sets my performance measurements, it can be quite tricky to start to embrace cross-functional OKRs.

You know, it’s a real challenge, and I think it’s where OKRs start to leak into the organizational design and topologies.

I think probably one of the best examples in the world is Amazon, which used the idea of a single-threaded team responsible for one problem. And, yeah, that mix of that team will be the people they need to achieve their goal. It won’t be ten engineers. It will be all the roles I mentioned before. Yeah. And they also talk about the two pizza teams. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that one.

Yeah. And, you know, that team needs to be not so big that everyone can’t contribute, but you need that mix of roles. So, yeah, this is, I think, an incredibly important area for OKRs. It’s one of the early but important signs of progress is you’ve broken out of these functional silos to create cross-functional OKRs. What were some of the things you’ve seen that challenged that?

So the first thing I was kind of reflecting on as you’re saying is when you and I do workshops, they’re often represented by a number of teams in those workshops where we’re kind of exploring what the strategy is, what the priorities are, and what we’re going to need to achieve in order to execute that walled by one team. I would exist in one team only.

And that’s one of the big eureka moments I quite like in OKRs when you’re trying to facilitate those sessions is everybody realizes they need each other at the end of that of multi-day workshops and that they actually can’t achieve what really matters, separately. Yeah. If you’d have given the task of, you know, there’s a company OKR, everybody goes away and creates your team OKRs, they would probably also come up with very different things. And I think that’s indicative of kind of the power of cross functional groups and actually solving problems together and appreciating what each other does as well.

And I think that’s one of the things that always excites me is that when you have teams that sort of self-declare that they operate in silos when you bring them together to get into the hood of what the company needs, they learn what each other does, almost like for the first time. And, it’s a little strange, but always nice to see that when they actually leave those sessions appreciating each other a little bit more, which is which kind of, you know, again, it feels that common sense. And a lot of what we do and talk about is actually common sense, but it’s common sense that seems to be hard to get right in the business environment.

And then the other thing that I think so kind of just focused on is is also those lessons from Amazon of which, you know, we can read about in books.

And they are quite powerful in many ways, whether it’s the pizza idea. And the phrase that I kinda took out of the book many years ago is if you wanna make your kind of top goals or your priorities and other team’s priorities, they’re probably gonna fail because, you know, you gotta set each goal or each OKR up for success. And if that’s requiring people to, you know, change their BAU activities, change their own priorities, to give up time, to work late, and you’re not resourcing these things for success, then actually the risk profile on good OKRs is very high. And that’s that’s probably one of the sort of high-level skills that we dig quite deeply into is that whole idea of resourcing. Do we have the time, people, resources, tech…

What are we gonna need you know, what are the issues that are gonna come up the premortem that we’re gonna might have to deal with? And how do we kind of, make this as as smooth and as, quick as possible in order to make progress and actually make this achievable? There is nothing worse than a goal that’s not achievable for demoralizing a team or realizing that, yeah, you’re falling behind very early on and you’re being pulled from pillar to post, yet you’re still turning up to these check-ins and, you know, not feeling like you are contributing when actually the reality is you’re working really hard. Right?

Mhmm. Yeah. And I think this kinda connects back to kind of having a few goals. One of the things you see organizations struggle with early on, I got one example I often think about where I came into an organization that’d struggled with OKRs, and I think they were two hundred and fifty people growing rapidly, very successful business, but we’re stalling a bit.

And the first thing I asked was, okay. Let’s look at your OKRs now. There were seven hundred and fifty OKRs between two hundred and fifty people. So three three per person, let alone anything at a team level.

And really reducing that down is one of the first steps, you know, being clear about what’s important. But then you that kind of rolls on a little bit into one of the challenges, which is not an OKR challenge, but I see with the effectiveness of teams is how much work in progress they’ve got on. Yeah. And a lot of that isn’t necessarily explicit. And a technique I love using is just put a post it down for everything you’ve worked on in the last two weeks, and people are shocked. You know, across a team that’s supposed to be maybe working on one or two things together, there’ll be a whole host of, you know, things that they’re they’re working on.

And one of the things I love I love to get an organization to do is actually to say, you’re ring-fenced. You’re working on this. Okay. It’s your top priority.

Yeah. Okay. People you know, there’s gonna be some interruptions, but this is this is the thing you’re working on. You’re not going to be working on BAU.

You’re the team for this OKR. It’s tough because it’s often not how teams have worked in the past.

Yep. I think that just sort of relates to the idea of working more in serial than parallel and the idea or concept of diluting your effort and how frustrating that is for anybody. And, you know, if we’re doing five things when we get up and we’re bouncing between them and then perhaps no order or sequence or even priority amongst those, that doesn’t make for a great day.

When you’ve got one big thing to achieve and you can achieve it, that’s obviously much better.

So I think there’s, you know, there are again very simple ideas.

Some of those draw on things like agile, the idea that we can have a backlog of things we want to achieve, and those things can sometimes be okay ours too. But we can draw down as and when we have the time, people, resources, etcetera, as and when required, as opposed to having them all active right away.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the old Kanban board—when you set one of those up and they’re really honest about the work that’s going on—it’s an eye-opener. It really is for the team. So, yeah, this is a powerful lesson, I believe.

So I think, you know, related to this kind of data and metric maturity, that idea of separating out the how. What have you seen in the field here?

Yeah. In some ways, this is the crux of product management and OKRs for me.

And it’s a really fascinating question.

I know we’ve touched on this in the past: What is a leadership team hiring OKRs to do? And sometimes, they may say it’s better outcomes, more focus.

But, honestly, in some cases, it’s because they feel they’ve lost control, and they want better insights into what teams are doing.

Now, the thing about OKRs is that they go hand in hand with the idea that we don’t know what will work.

If you think about that really, really clearly, you will conclude that I need to find out what’s going to work quickly, which means short feedback loops.

And when you say OKRs, what you should be thinking about is outcomes, as I said before, those measurable beneficial effects. Yep. But then you don’t tell a team how they’re going to achieve it because you’re forgetting this lesson that most ideas don’t work. You’re also forgetting that the team is best placed to work out how to achieve those goals. Yep. They’re closer to the customers. They’re closer to the technology.

They’re the ones who can actually, you know, come up with the best way to achieve an outcome. So you have to separate those two things out. Yeah. Often, it isn’t the case, and it’s not necessarily the leadership is enforcing it. I mean, in some cases, it is. It’s this idea of the feature factory.

But sometimes the team just think, okay. What are we going to build next? And as humans, we we jump to solutions.

You can get a book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Coonerman. It discusses the idea that we have two brains, one that kind of stops and thinks and one that jumps to a solution.

It works, and it happens in organizations as well, and we do think, okay, we’re going to build the next feature.

We’re gonna build Yep. A new payment model.

Or, really, OKRs are telling us to slow down a little bit. Yeah, and to embrace the fact that, you know, we need to test these ideas.

Having a nine-month project that builds something beautiful and then doesn’t achieve our goal is completely pointless. So this separation of what we’re trying to achieve and how we’re going to achieve it is right at the heart of sort of product management and OKRs for me. And it’s not easy. I mean, that empowered model involves trust.

It involves if you’re moving away from a feature factory, it involves better communication on both sides, and involves giving different updates.

So, yeah, to me, this is banging the centre of the problem with many OKR implementations. What about you? What have you seen?

Obviously, you talked a lot about products there, and, you know, I’ve managed products as well. I’ve also been familiar with the idea of hypothesis and proof point and the different ways of quickly and effectively proving or disproving a hypothesis.

It’s important, but it’s also important for other teams. You know, marketing needs to do the same, and so does sales, and they can create their hypotheses and beliefs about how they’re going to generate more leads, customers, or higher conversion rates.

And, you know, that has many names too. Growth hacking being one and the idea that, you know, we’re gonna run these experiments.

And it’s no surprise that we coach, you know, that experimentation capability and mindset as part of an OKR session.

Because by the end of it, teams start talking with sentences left like I believe. And once they do that and that sort of logical building steps, that that actually then follows, it’s incredibly powerful. And, you know, personally, I find it really rewarding when people start to think like that and then think, how can I prove it? How can I prove it quickly? As opposed to, you know, going straight to code or investing in an agency or a campaign or a bill that’s really expensive without really kind of proving something first and adding a bit more robustness and science to what we do. But I think there’s another element to it that I really like, which is if you can be explicit about the steps and things that you would need to do, you or have a hypothesis for what you need to do in order to achieve the outcome that’s stated in your OKR.

What the kind of researchers have found is that creates more belief that a a goal can be achieved. If I can break it down into steps, I now have more belief, and what comes with that belief is also more resilience. So if something goes wrong, if we get sidetracked, because you’ve been as, you know, part of those planning steps, you’re gonna get back on track more easily, which I think is important. And also by getting down into the weeds of the show, you can be more inclusive. You know, lots of people have ideas for how an outcome might be achieved.

If they can be part of that, they’re part of the goal too. And and I think that’s an important, probably underappreciated part of that.

This resilience is really interesting as a point because we are not used to accepting that we’ve failed and that we’re wrong.

And that’s actually what learning is. Yeah. In most cases, it’s just accepting that the idea didn’t work. And it’s really hard, you know, especially with think of the sunk cost fallacy.

We start off with an idea, and we really believe it’s going to work. We’re so confident, and it’s a knockback to accept, well, this approach isn’t going to work or even yeah. We’ll maybe talk about this a bit later, but this okay r isn’t right. Yeah.

And that once you’ve done that a few times and then found a path that succeeds, then that’s when you start to really build that resilience. So, yeah, okay. This side didn’t work, but we’ll find one that does.

Yeah.

This then taps again into those evergreen principles of things like psychological safety and fear of failure, which are to learn and fail.

Yeah. And, you know, we’re just starting to touch on culture there, which is a which is a whole other topic.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

Yeah. But, incredibly important. And, yeah, if your leaders are being open to saying, yeah, failure is fine, failure is learning, becomes a lot easier for the teams to think in that that way too.

So I know you and I talk a lot about check-ins, meetings, communications, retrospectives, and all those buzzwords associated with OKRs. Do you want to go into why they’re critical and actually use the health of those as a leading indicator as to whether you’re going to succeed with OKRs? I know you have some strong opinions on this.

Yeah. And this goes back quite a few years ago. As some people may know, I was working with Felipe Castro, and we kind of came up with our hypothesis for client success, which was other leaders turning up for check-ins on a frequent, regular basis.

And there’s a there’s a few reasons why it’s so important. I think, number one, because if your OKRs, which they should do, reflect your most important goals, why wouldn’t they? Yeah. And that’s the first question. And if they’re not if they’re not turning up, that that suggests to me that the goals are we haven’t identified the most important goals because they don’t care about them.

Number two, if you’re turning up to those meetings, you are you I guess what you’re doing is you are buying into the whole process of OKRs as a yeah. Implementing OKRs as a learning as a learning journey. You know, this this journey towards maturity that we talk about a lot.

Mhmm. So there’s the cadence, which is important. Who’s turning up is important, but then you need the right discussions.

This is one of the things where I think consultants can really help because what leadership teams sometimes fail to do is be cynical about the discussion. So what you should be talking about in an OKR check-in is whether you are going to achieve them. Is our current route going to help us achieve our key results? And I’m sure you’ve seen similar things.

I’ve seen it many times where, yep, we’re gonna do it. Month one, we’re gonna do it. Week five, week six, yep, we’re great. You get to week seven, and all of a sudden it’s, oh, it’s Amber.

We’re not so sure now. Yeah. And by and by the end of the period, all of a sudden, oh, we didn’t achieve it.

Yeah.

And how do you avoid that?

I think it’s actually by, at the start of the quarter, saying, okay. You’re saying you’re green here. What’s the evidence behind it? It’s Yeah.

It really challenges people’s perceptions. Yeah. And once you start to do that, I think, you have much more informed, open, and engaged discussions, and that’s critical in those OKR check-ins for me. And what that leads to is, for me, the next step was being back to being more conscious about what you’re doing.

I think in lots of cases, and I’ve seen it, and I’ve been guilty of it, we kinda sleepwalk into just following a path that we’ve laid out before without really checking if it’s the right path. So when leaders are in those sessions and they’re saying, okay.

What are we doing next week to help us achieve our OK hours? That is what we thought was the best approach. It’s still the best approach. Making these conscious decisions, and being rigorous with each other about our opinions and where they come from, is absolutely the best leading indicator that your OKR program is going to succeed.

And succeed for me means that you achieve business outcomes ultimately. I mean, that’s why we do these things. At the very, very end of it, we may say we need more focus or better alignment but ultimately is to make the business succeed. And those discussions are the best leading indicator that you’re gonna get somewhere and then get what you need.

There are so many important ideas and concepts related to this. I mean, obviously, you’ve got the ability to actually meet as a team and generate value in that meeting. And we have, you know, coaching programs just around meetings for that reason because we spend an enormous amount of time in those, and then we can have them with a, by a ROTI, which stands for return on time invested.

Then, you know, that allows us to achieve more, increased productivity, etcetera. But, you know, as far as the OKR meeting goes, that ability to, you know, check, is this still the right goal? Are we measuring the right things? Are we what issues do we need to solve? What priorities do we need to set? They’re actually quite efficient short meetings that have a very high return on time invested when you get them right. But like any new something new when it gets introduced, it is it is a ritual.

And it does have to it has to become habitual.

We have to be able to, you know, ensure that it is a good use of our time and the OKRs and the things we’re doing and the conversations that we’re tracking, have to be the right things. And, of course, Yeah. You know, some of the frustrations we often see are, you know, teams being dragged into BAU. Therefore, actually, there’s not much to talk about this week on the OKR because we were doing other stuff, which is, again, a failure in some of the planning sometimes.

And, again, you’ve gotta be brave enough to talk about, which is, you know, once upon a time, we said this was, you know, business-critical. It was material to how, you know, we’re gonna achieve what’s gonna allow us to thrive in our market, yet something else has taken over that’s, you know, probably less important. But, hey ho. That’s just what we’ve gotta do now.

You’ve gotta have the ability to say that out loud and come together as a team and actually decide whether this, you know, this is more important than that. How do we invest our resources more smartly in generating the outcomes that we want? And I think sort of one of the things that I know you’re, keen on observing as part of the mastery maturity idea is also then the ability just to say stop. Do you wanna talk to me about that?

Yeah. Yeah. I did just before I jumped, I think you you really touched on a really crucial point now, which is this idea of what people are working on. And it it links back to our point about a few important goals. And when you see that there’s no progress, a great question to ask there is, what are you really working on?

Being able to call that out and talk about it can be really powerful in a leadership context.

Yeah. So this idea of, stopping or, you know, saying stop.

If we go back to our data model and we think they’re you know, that in itself is a set of hypotheses with some, you know, levels of strength and confidence in in how strong those relationships are between items. And when we implement OKRs, we’re looking to identify our leading indicators. So these are the things a team can influence in the period of an OKR that leads us towards a business outcome.

And we have to appreciate that that is in itself a hypothesis.

Now, we may find that we’re moving the needle on an OKR, but we realize that, in essence, that isn’t connecting up to the outcome and the business outcome we thought it was. Yep. And we need you to know? So when you’re using OKRs, it’s important to regularly step out of the kind of very narrow metric that you’re looking at and seeing, okay?

Is the wider hypothesis still holding true? And you’ll find sometimes that, yeah, we thought that moving this needle would achieve this goal. It doesn’t. Yeah.

I think when you find that, it’s hard again because some cost fallacy comes in again. You’ve got to say, stop. This isn’t the right thing right thing to be working on. And then that’s one example.

Another example would be that we thought we could influence this metric. We’ve tried three or four different ways, including short feedback loops. However, this isn’t something that we can actually influence.

You need to recognize when that’s the case, and yeah, that can be a strategic change at some level. But it all comes back to this. You know? Some don’t throw good money after bad. When you realize something’s not working at whatever level, stop and rethink.

Yep.

We’ve gone quite deep. Certainly spent more time than we expected to talk about, okay.

OKR maturity is such an important idea, and it’s taken us both a long time to realize that and, obviously, be able to help people get up that curve.

And we get to see a number of failed implementations. I think that’s fair to say without wanting to put people off trying to embrace OKRs. But, obviously, we’re very passionate about that.

We see that I’ve been I’m guessing seventy—eighty percent of our work comes from an implementation that we’ve been asked to optimize.

It’s obviously great to get in there before that happens. I thought we would spend five minutes talking through the implementation process if anyone’s listening to this and thinking they might want to do it.

And if I kick off by sort of just saying, well, you know, let’s say we’d like to know kind of where you are now, which is a one-on-one planning step, right? Mhmm.

You know, trying to agree what success criteria is, you know, who’s who’s gonna be involved, what’s the strategy, what goals or KPIs are kind of in existence now and getting under the skin of the individual in the business. And I think what’s hopefully good about what we do, and that’s certainly I think it’s probably the bedrock of our success, is that you and I then go into this big sort of preparation mode where we kind of work out how do we train this company, not a generic company. How do we train these people, not a, you know, the kind of vanilla management team in a nondescript industry? And for me, that’s, like, sort of lays the foundations for us to succeed. I’m guessing that’s true of any company. They’ve got to know where they’re starting from, and they’ve got to know what success looks like.

Yeah. And this is, you know, this is one of the things that I think frustrates people most.

You look at social media, and it’s full of blueprints.

Just do this in your context, and it will succeed. Yeah.

If you follow the NVIDIA model or if you follow the Spotify model Yeah.

You will achieve the same goals. It’s just really a complete illusion.

You need to know what your strengths and weaknesses are, and what your capabilities are, and you usually need to know what success is. Mhmm. Okay. Ultimately, it’s gonna come down to business is about making a profit, but your strategy is about, okay, how are you gonna get there?

So have an honest reflection about where you are, how mature you are at writing a strategy, how good is your narrative, how good you are we communicating a strategy, do we have the right kind of culture to make this succeed. You’re never gonna come from the same place twice. Yeah. So, you know, as consultants, our job is to understand that context and to ask the right questions, to understand, you know, where they’re pretty good already, what they do well, what they don’t do so well, what gaps need filling.

Yeah.

So, yeah, context is absolutely everything for most change, but even more so when you’re looking at something so fundamental as strategy and OKRs.

And I think that sort of brings us on to kind of there are lots of courses out there. There are lots of books you can read in the generic sense about this, and you can get so far.

The thing that I know to be true is we are way more successful at coaching and teaching OKRs. So the point as defined by people just get it and can do it, and we’ll keep it as a kind of management skill or capability for life. When we work on their business, on their priorities, on the things they want to achieve, on the outcomes they want to achieve, without ever really calling it OKRs along that journey, what amazes me is how late on in our workshops we get into OKR theory.

And they’ve pretty much done OKRs by the time we’re talking about the the format, the acronym, etcetera. Yet they realize they’ve been doing it all along, and they can do it.

Yeah, yeah, a hundred per cent. I mean, it very neatly explains why OKOs are actually small jigsaw pieces and big, complex puzzles.

What makes it even more challenging is that no two puzzles look exactly the same. Yep. And the OKR piece—you know, the definition of OKR may be the same everywhere, but that’s such a simple part to fix. And that’s why I think OKR is reductive: people read and measure what matters, for example.

Yeah, this is pretty easy. I can apply that to my context. Yep. And then, when they get there, the answers to many of my questions just don’t exist in the book.

They’re just not there. You get that from experience in various contexts. What do I need to change to make work here or to achieve the goals more importantly? Yeah.

What I also find is usually missing.

Is the planning necessary in order to move beyond the leadership team coming together and having a go at scaling that knowledge and capability throughout the company? Mhmm.

In a way that is consistent at a very high level and takes into account that people come into the organization possibly with different experiences and also leave the organization and get replaced.

So a large amount of planning goes into what is the management system here. How do we become or provide clarity on how OKRs are gonna be used in this business in the context of that business and how they will not only be used at the company and a team level, but how they will impact you as an individual? And what I’ve found is if you leave those question marks out there, people fill in the blanks. So by removing the blanks, then people understand the role OKRs will play inside the company.

And then that ability to train, coach, and, upskill on demand is really important too because, you know, the workforce is very fluid and dynamic inside most companies, and these skills can both bleed in and out. And what you want to do is maintain a very high level. So I think that’s kind of obviously a building block we’re we’re pretty proud of, but I think this kind of you mentioned it earlier, and then possibly the utmost underappreciated one is this in-cycle support where you, me, or the team will join, processes like check-ins and retrospectives and setting sessions in the early quarters in order to ensure that these new habits, rituals, stick, and they become normalized where you don’t like anything new. It’s it’s a bit alien at the beginning.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s I think what you get from an experience we’ve got is you start to recognize, you know, context and where people’s mental models are different, and we all come from different, you know, different backgrounds. It’s yeah. Even something which is quite prescriptive like Scrum.

Two people come from two different organizations and have completely different views of how it works. Now if you leave that, as you say, unwritten or unanswered, they both continue to work in the way that they previously had. Yep. When we help organizations make really key things explicit, people are much clearer on what their role is, you know, what good looks like.

Yeah, and we’re helping them get the experience of what a good check-in looks like. Many people have never been to one. They’ve never had those tough questions. I remember asking a CEO once who was a little bit blase about something, and he kind of stopped in his tracks, you know, and he said, yeah. You’re right.

I’m assuming something there, and I’ve made the point that that assumption is really critical.

Previously, no one had asked those tough questions. They kind of just took each other’s opinions as gospel. So, yeah, our experience is incredibly useful in those situations and sort of brings people into a shared understanding of what they’re trying to do and how they’re going to do it.

I’m guessing anyone listening to this has kinda realized we’re very passionate about this.

It’s a tool we, you know, very much believe in.

It has enormous potential. And when you feel the full force of, okay, as you’re really feeling the full force of strategy, teamwork, silo breaking, metricization, you know, predictive analytics amongst the many things that we’ve talked about today. And I think maybe that’s been the take home for for people listening and certainly was kind of one of the big learning moments for me on this journey has been it doesn’t sit in its own isolated bucket. It is way more than the acronym. Its implications of wanting to implement OKR successfully and reach that maturity level are far-reaching. And anyone going on that journey that doesn’t probably appreciate or address that, who is trying to approach it as a simple, you know, framework to, you know, set goals in different teams is probably missing out on the benefit. But as I stated earlier, there is some benefit to that for sure, But the, you know, the real secret sauce, the real superpowers come later.

Yeah, yeah. And I think the key thing I would take home from all this is that OKRs are a journey that is never over. You can always get better.

You can always improve. Yes. Your understanding of the world changes. Yep. You’ve got to evolve it.

Yeah. Great chat, mate. Thanks. And I hope everybody enjoyed that listening.

Great. Thanks, Matt. Enjoyed it.