OKRs Shift Outputs to Outcomes
There’s something really sneaky about OKRs. They are easy to learn but deceptively complex. But, there is an important organizational and cultural shift that happens when you start using them.
I just read a great blog post by Jeff Gothelf from his newsletter, “OKRs are hard. They’re supposed to be.” where he does a fantastic job describing this shift that happens.
Just because they are easy to learn but tricky to get good at doesn’t mean a company should hesitate to use OKRs. In fact, I encourage my teams and clients to start right away, even fail a few times trying.
Gothelf uses an analogy of a shaken up soda can. Once you pop the top and start using OKRs, there’s a lot to learn and deal with in your organization. And the sooner that shift starts, the better. Instead of the usual corporate goals that describe outputs and systems, like which product features to build and how they should perform, OKRs done right define desired outcomes and behaviors. And that’s the mindset shift. He says:
Reframing your goals as outcomes instead of outputs is a significant shift in your organization’s ways of working. It should be hard. It should force you to think about how you serve your customers, how you build products and services and how you measure success.
You may not feel like you’re ready yet. So, what should you do? Like everything in agile, why not try an experiment? To get good at anything, we need to practice.
Try your hand at writing an OKR. Select an Objective that’s not too big, and focused on what desired future state would benefit both the customer and your business. Then think about what behaviors need to change that will indicate success. Who needs to do what by how much? Read that post for two good examples and to learn more about making sure you are selecting behavior oriented Key Results instead of systems related ones.
The reason why this feels so cumbersome is because we’ve been trained to think in very real feeling things like Features and Systems and Gantt Charts… Outputs! Instead, when we write well-formed OKRs, we need to shift our thinking to outcomes and more indirect, abstract things. Oddly, a good OKR will not feel prescriptive. It will describe a desired future state. It does not give marching orders. In fact, it leaves a LOT of the thinking to the teams to figure out what to DO in order to accomplish the desired outcome.
And therein lies the magic.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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