A Few Simple Hacks to Make Your OKR Journey a Success
4 Important Lessons Learned — Don’t Overlook the Simple Stuff
We implemented the Objectives and Key Results, OKR framework — sure, there is the value from tracking progress towards the intended outcomes. The big payoff was the insight gleaned during the OKR preparation exercise.
Vision
Leadership paints the big picture — where are we going. Call it the aspirational vision or BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). The team needs a point on the horizon to focus their thinking. Better still, we identified themes, for example, product innovation or customer intimacy. First attempts without a clearly communicated vision led to meandering objectives.
Setting the vision allows each team member to build a picture of how they contribute to the future state. It is the critical start to establishing personal commitment — achieving personal goals and the big organization goals.
Outcome vs. Outputs
Understanding and internalizing the difference between outcomes and outputs was a big win. Outcomes describe what you expect to achieve. Outcomes create significant change, the improvements that we want to see. Outputs are the result of projects or activities. Outputs lead to outcomes.
There is a big mind-shift we have to make:
Our project was completed on time and the budget but did it successfully contribute to achieving the outcome? We are trained to reward based on project success — but we must re-focus on the effectiveness of the work to signal success.
Start small and iterate — It takes practice.
Begin the OKR journey with a small scope. Engage a team (or department) open to learning and change. As the facilitator, ensure the group debates the clarity and effectiveness of the objectives in delivering the needed change. Is there agreement on how to measure the objectives — the key results? What are the projects (initiatives) critical for delivering change?
Help me understand — get out the crayons.
Drawing a picture is very helpful in visualizing the relationship between a project, the project’s output (e.g., deliverable), the objective, and the key result (outcome). A diagram like this was helpful.
While the OKR concept sounds simple, working through the specifics, including clearly (and succinctly) writing down the narrative, takes time (and patience) to build consensus.
Starting small does this:
- Provides you (the facilitator) and the team to control change easily,
- Provides the “laboratory” for creating learning and development content — the larger OKR rollout plan
- Provides a manageable scope to ensure a success story shareable with the organization
Starting small does have a drawback — it takes longer. You should run the OKR process for a few months to collect data and demonstrate the cause-and-effect relationship between the projects, key results, and objectives.
I remain a fan of strategy execution techniques, especially OKR. I find the team exercise of answering the two questions most valuable: Where are we going? How will we get there? The OKR exercise takes lofty, squishy, somewhere in the future topics and frames our thinking into distinct blocks. You can examine and debate each block, assemble and reassemble to define the OKR roadmap that best fits your organization. The lessons learned that I outlined should make your OKR journey easier and orientated to success.
Good luck, and share your lessons learned!
