“Utility Mode” OKRs

Since OKRs are meant to be used to drive change, I recently suggested not to do OKRs until your strategy is stuck. But now I’m reading Allan Kelly’s excellent book Succeeding with OKRs in Agile, and he offers an alternate perspective for companies that aren’t ready with OKRs — start in ‘Utility Mode’, which I think is an interesting option, if you do it intentionally.

Allan acknowledges that many companies don’t yet have the culture to drive ambitious change through OKRs; in fact, man y cultures push aspirational people out. One path to change he suggests in these cases is to start with OKRs in utility mode. Rather than starting with aspirational moonshots, you might work differently:

[In] utility mode…OKRS are used for team cohesion, shared understanding, and medium-term planning. Achieving the objectives and key results is important. (p155)

What’s meaningful to me in Allan’s approach is that he suggests making a conscious decision about where you are on a ten-point spectrum, where one end is totally utilitarian and the other end is totally aspirational.

From “Succeeding with OKRs in Agile” — Kelly 2021 p155

I’ve often encouraged execs to remember that OKRs are “supposed” to be aspirational; of course they always agree. I wish I had tried asking them, “Where do we want to be on this continuum?”