How OKRs and DLT Can Restore Public Trust in Global Platforms and Establish a New Economic Unit
Why We’re Bringing OKRs to TAP
by Adam Dorfman
and William Hughes
As anyone involved in startups knows, there’s much more to a successful venture than a great idea. In the startup world, we know ideas are easy. Execution, however, is hard. Fortunately, we uncovered a management system that makes the execution part a lot less hard. The system is “Objectives and Key Results” (OKRs) developed by John Doerr and former Intel CEO Andy Grove.
Today, OKRs are the backbone of Google, Amazon, Tesla, YouTube, Airbnb, Uber, you name it — these successes have all deployed OKRs. What makes this management system so powerful is that it makes all strategic and team goals transparent to everyone in the organization. And what does transparency have to do with execution, you ask? Transparency that is unstructured is not very informative — but when structured in the context of why a project exists, transparency can help everyone in the organization work towards common goals.
When OKRs started at Intel in the 1970’s, the concept of sharing strategic goals internally, at all levels of the organization, was a radical thought. But now OKRs have propelled many of the world’s largest companies to be more collaborative and innovative. Countless organizations have begun adopting this practice.
Of course, greater internal organizational goal alignments have generated huge returns for companies. But they’ve also created unintended consequences. There is a growing feeling that many companies in every industry are deceptive about their goals and how they might impact society.
Global B2B and B2C companies have behaved poorly in how they’ve gathered and used information about customers in pursuit of short-term profits, without concern for civic responsibilities. While companies continue to accumulate massive amounts of data, some believe the ownership of the data should be given back to users with a new innovation called distributed ledger technology (“DLT”), which is more commonly known as blockchain.
Distributed Ledger Technology
The nature of DLT can make records public, accessible, and unchangeable. However, many leaders in this new field of study profess that by simply decentralizing user data, an organization would become more honest and purposeful. We’ve all seen the hundreds of decentralized applications (Dapps) raise incredible amounts of capital and fall short of this promise themselves. People have begun to lose trust in decentralized applications. In turns out that decentralizing data is not enough. It’s how the data is structured that matters.
We’ve been asking ourselves even more radical questions: How can we present the data that matters most? What if TAP’s data were structured in an OKR format, making our strategic Objectives and Key Results public so we can report our progress regularly to our community of followers?
After several months of design and implementation, we’ve realized that combining OKRs with distributed ledger technology could produce a mechanism to restore public trust in all types of organizations. This mechanism leans on the most important feature of OKRs and DLT (yet is also what’s missing in many DLT projects): transparency.
If you’ve been following our project, you know we’ve spent an incredible amount of time defining our mission, vision, and strategic OKRs. Adopting OKRs is a journey, not an event.
We did this to ensure we establish a solid foundation, thereby simplifying the relationship people will have with our company. When we launch the beta version of our platform (Q3/2019), we intend to share our strategic goals and key results.
A Vision of the Future
In small ways, network transparency is starting to happen. On Dapp.com and DappRadar.com you can find thousands of decentralized companies broadcasting network information. It is still mostly unstructured, but it’s just a matter of time before operators learn to share the metrics that matter. DLT companies will be similar to sharing economies, but instead of sharing things, decentralized companies share information about the networks themselves. It’s the beginning of a new era when a company’s words lead directly to actions.
It should be clear that our proposal is not mainly about revenue and profits. Using DLT in this innovative way is for building a culture of leadership that is focused and courageous to create a new economic unit.
It can bring a new sense of vulnerability and transparency to support brave new entrepreneurs. In this new world, the companies that use our mechanism — and prove they can execute and deliver on a mission — will benefit from the public’s trust and outperform in the marketplace.
Let’s explore the method we used to identify our metrics that matter.
Sharing the Core Value Transfer
Distributed Ledger Technology is the next step in the evolution of the internet. P2P networks will manage the supply of data, but also how data is distributed.
One of many distributed ledger technology features is how recorded data is immutable, readable, and accessible to everyone. This, to us, is DLT’s greatest potential. However, its power goes far beyond simply decentralizing network information. It’s how we structure this information that matters most.
The metrics that matter most in this new economy can be defined by first looking at the core value transfer of a networked economy. Without going into great detail, all platforms have a repeatable core interaction driving platform value. In Platform Revolution and Platform Scale, Sangeet Paul Choudary argues that the “core interaction” is fundamental to all successful networks. Without it, the network is worthless. It is always defined as a core value transfer between supply and demand. Digital platforms facilitate these exchanges:
The transfer itself is important, but how it is transferred matters most.
OKRs and DLT: A Formula for Success
Once you know why you exist, it’s time to think about delivering what matters most. It all starts with a well-communicated mission and strategic objectives that not only motivates a team, but keeps everyone linked and moving in the right direction.
To get your team’s goals aligned, OKRs is the best management system.
In simple terms, OKRs define what (the network’s direction) and how it is reached within the context of the why the network exists. OKRs help an organization track and prioritize its most important goals. An objective is the goal (the what) or direction the organization intends to work toward, and the key results are the metrics (the how) used to determine how an objective is met. It’s a simple yet powerful tool.
OKRs demand that every what and how in the organization’s goals must align with the very important question: Why are we doing this work? You may want to build the governance structure first, but you shouldn’t. Great designers start, instead, with a well-defined purpose and measurable results to define success. The governance structure come afterwards and should always be adjusted to produce the results that matter most.
Measuring What Matters: Strategic Objectives
There is no single way to use OKRs. OKRs can be tailored to any organization, but adopting them takes time, a deep understanding of the company, and a commitment to share a handful of metrics. There are only a few metrics that matter. These metrics are distinctive to the network’s purpose and can be the basis of a new economic unit.
For example, Amazon’s core value transfer is the purchase of a retail item. How do companies find the few metrics that matter? Well, rather than focus on what might change in the future, Amazon focuses on strategic objectives that are unlikely to change, and from that Amazon builds on the needs driving demand.
Advice of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s Founder:
“….you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.
Providing Clarity of Purpose
If it does not have a number, it is not a key result. For each strategic objective, there are a set of 2 to 5 key results. OKRs mean that supporters should spend 98% of the time on what matters, and only a small amount of time on anything else. As you can imagine, getting clarity on the top five things and their order is critical to success and for everyone to understand the common goals.
This might remind you of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which are commonly used to track the health of an organization’s operations. OKRs are a little different, as they demand a greater sense of purpose, focus, and reason for existing. OKRs also provide deeper insights into what really matters, because they can quickly point to how productive you are and continuously improve. The right KPIs can also make great key results, and work together with OKRs.
The Talent Access Portal “TAP”
In the case of TAP, we transfer jobs between tech employers and school graduates. Our All In One CRM is specifically designed to build powerful career centers for tech and creative school to increases job placement outcomes.
Defining the core value transfer is where it all starts, as it justifies why the network exists. Our mission is to “empower employers to discover ICT talent anywhere in the world through non formal education.”
Today, tech employers are desperate for talent, and universities simply can’t fill the need. Skills are in more demand than degrees. Qualified ICT talent is distributed around the world among thousands of disruptive education programs and networks, which are hard to discover, access, and manage.
How effective we facilitate this exchange is what matters most to our stakeholders. Our progress will be recorded on the DLT network to reinforce our credibility and keep us focused. It’s why we’re bringing OKRs to TAP.
This new economic unit is our visible performance, the common outcome that is shared by everyone in our network. Of course, success will not be evenly distributed, but there’s a minimum value transfer that must be delivered for our network to be relevant.
The Proposal
We propose that Dapps make public their high level OKRs, i.e., only the few metrics that matter most. By using the OKR structure we can build a stronger culture of leadership that delivers on what matters, which is more important than increasing revenue and profits. This furthers Satoshi Nakamoto’s vision, and it’s why DLT is “readable” and “available” to everyone.
For companies, there are two types of OKRs we must consider, and they are connected through a nested cadence and time cycles: strategic and tactical.
Strategic OKRs set the organization direction and high level key results, while tactical OKRs refer to activities of teams and individuals. The cycles are shorter and priorities change more frequently.
In our view, tactical activities or strategic OKRs for decentralized applications that are still being tested for effectiveness should be kept internal. What’s important is that decentralized applications clearly identify its top 3 to 5 strategic OKRs so the intentions are understood and progress is shared.
Conclusion
We believe the world is at an important juncture. Centralized governance structures of all kinds have tested the limits of public trust. The temptation to maximize profits often works against society’s best interest because there’s a lack of external transparency. As network’s grow, the reason for existing, the why, eventually gets lost, and trust is broken.
In our opinion, decentralization is not about increasing revenue and profit, nor is it about decentralizing decision-making. It’s about building a culture of leadership that is more collaborative, informative, and focused.
It’s about creating a new economic unit where both profits and a shared purpose are considered.
If you have any questions, shoot us an email: adam@tapyournetwork.com
Check us out at https://tapyournetwork.com/
