Crisis management with global Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

This article is about one approach for getting unstuck to take small actions in the right direction in the time of Covid-19 and beyond. It’s also about spending energy on what is most necessary and important. This approach involves re-purposing one of the key organizational tools that helps companies like Intel, Google, and Amazon achieve unprecedented success in situations characterized by uncertainty and chaos. We can apply the Objective and Key Results (OKR) framework, to large-scale innovation and growth outside of the corporate structure.

I wrote previously about the 3 major challenges facing society during Covid-19 and 3 missions we can undertake in these areas:

1. Health: grow humanity’s Health IQ and build better health systems. (In the short run, this minimizes direct Covid-19 deaths.)
2. Societal flourishing: treat ourselves and others with more kindness while organizing better to solve bigger challenges. (In the short run, this minimizes riot-related deaths, domestic violence, etc.)
3. Economic: build economic systems that serve people and the planet better. (In the short run, this minimizes starvation and other resource-related deaths.)

The world has not faced a challenge of this magnitude in the globally-connected internet era, and we cannot rely on pre-internet means of organizing.

What are OKRs? And why this matters

OKRs are fairly simple: you have an inspiring sentence called an “Objective” and 2–5 measurable, time-bound outcomes called “Key Results.”

An OKR: this is an Objective with 4 (badly-formed) Key Results. After defining the KRs more clearly, we would want people to be able to attach tasks/activities/projects/initiatives to the Key Results to move them forward.

The OKR framework can allow us to set goals and make suggestions at the global level (collaboratively top-down), while the means of reaching those goals are customized for each local environment (collaboratively bottom-up). Individuals, teams, companies, and communities can all help make the situation better if we are given the right information, good targets, and an easy means of communicating best practices. Those best practices include tasks, projects, initiatives, etc that can help move the needle.

Spreading information allows us to create mental (and digital) maps of this new, Covid-19-era territory. However, maps are meaningless until we go somewhere (or discover we are happy where we are): so we need actions.

As many of us have seen in the internet-era, information overload is real. OKRs are a way of focusing a spotlight on only the information and actions that are most important.

Improving the Health OKR

A common way of testing OKRs to see if they make sense are to put the words “as measured by” between the Objective and each Key Result.

These are badly-formed OKRs, but they are a start. #growthmindset

I noted previously that Key Results should be measurable and time-bound. These are neither, which is part of why they’re badly-formed. We could change that, I just don’t have a good enough map to know how (yet).

Health Objective (O): grow health knowledge, health skills, and health infrastructure more quickly than anyone believes possible

As measured by:

Health Key Result (KR) 1: Increase health literacy among the human population. [How do you measure that? Badges on Wikonnect maybe? What are we aiming for?]

Health Key Result (KR) 2: Increase the flow of trained medical professionals to sick people. [How bad is the flow? How quickly do we want people to get help?]

Health Key Result (KR) 3: Maximize the availability of hospital beds, medical equipment, test kits, and medicine for the sick. [“Maximize” is extremely vague.]

Health Key Result (KR) 4: Minimize Ro, the rate of disease transmission. [“Minimize” technically means “go to zero” which is not a realistic target for a reasonable timeframe, such as Quarter 2 of 2020.]

To make these time-bound and measurable, we would need to do something like this:

Health Key Result (KR) 4: Decrease R0 from 5 to 0.9 by June 1st, 2020.

This would mean that the average sick person would infect 0.9 people rather than infecting 5. For the record, we don’t know what the current R0 of Covid-19 is — but it has to go below 1 for this pandemic to end. And it will decrease below 1. The important factors are a) how quickly and b) whether the decrease is due to humans practicing high Health IQ (KR1) or due to most people catching the virus and developing immunity while millions of people die from poor flow of trained medical professionals combined with a lack of hospital beds, medical equipment, test kits, and medicine (KR2 + KR3).

In summary

This article was to describe how one organizational tool which has driven innovation in fast-moving corporate situations can be applied to crisis situations at the societal level. For this to work outside the context of a corporation, people will need to be motivated in other ways than they are at Google, Amazon, or Intel. Likely through some form of scoreboard which shows people our progress and makes us feel connected to others.

In a future article, I’ll show how we can turn the OKR framework into scoreboards, define a very simple activity (which I’ll call a task), and generate points for individuals, teams, communities, and humanity by doing so.

If the OKR approach doesn’t work to create a better post-Covid-19 world, at least people will learn about a powerful, proven organizational tool which we can use to in our companies and organizations.

If you have any suggestions for how to improve the above OKRs, please share in the comments or email themission@anapanda.io.