Todo-itis in New OKR Practitioners

How to recover from a todo mindset and move to OKR

Wong (not a real name) was a brilliant engineer. He was promoted to be a manager two years ago, after having demonstrated his superior technical skills. He usually gets his job done quickly, without breaking a sweat.

Clipart source: pngegg.com

Maybe today isn’t his day. He was asked to set his key results (KR) for his work. Sitting in front of his computer, staring at the JIRA web page, his mind is blank.

He thought to himself, “I have been completing project after project, task after task. No sweat.” He is so confident of his ability to check off every item in his “todo” list, without much fretting.

But today is different. Wong has to write his key results, not todos. He didn’t realize he is suffering from the most common problem faced by most new OKR comers — todoitis (pronounced /tuːduʌɪtɪs/).

No, you won’t find this “todoitis” word in the dictionary; I made it up. The suffix -itis is formally or informally added to words to describe it as a form of inflammation — as in urethritis and meningitis. So todoitis refers to the disease that makes us see everything in our work as “todo”.

Why we love todos and hate KRs?

One of the reasons why we see everything as todo is our tendency to crave the satisfaction of “getting things done” and have them out of our minds. I bet you can recall the blissful feeling you had when you last finished your exams. This sense of relief pushes us to want everything to be “finishable”, to have a “closure”. In other words, we are drawn to this “finishability”.

To Wong, it is this finishability that gives him his job satisfaction. Having finished a todo, he can move on — to something new, novel, and perhaps more exciting. Todos, tasks, actions, and projects are all predictable and finishable. He loves them.

On the other hand, key results — as the outcome of todos — may not be finishable. They are often unpredictable, therefore we are uncomfortable with them, and we even hate them. The unpredictability comes from external factors, such as the change of requirements, shortage of raw material, COVID-19, etc.

When Wong and his team are developing a new product; they feel good, and they feel motivated. They enjoy the process. Some of them even enjoy the bliss that comes with the state of being “in the zone” or what Csikszentmihalyi calls the “flow”[1]. But if you try to look at the results — things like time-to-market, product cost, reliability, market acceptance, defects, complaints — they are so “heavy”, burdensome, and loaded with responsibilities. Wong’s team dreads the need to measure those results, report them, justify them, and explain why we can’t do better. In essence, engaging in results discussion often feels like being “judged”.

No one taught Wong about time-to-market, product cost, reliability, market acceptance in his engineering faculty. This lingo wasn’t in his vocabulary from the day he joined the company. So far, his success has nothing to do with those “indicators”. Now, two years after having been promoted as a manager, he is told that he has to own these indicators. He feels extremely uncomfortable.

Moving beyond the comfort zone

Start seeing results instead of merely the actions is a baptism of fire for many new managers. This is especially tough for Wong and those with a purely technical background. Some scholars put it quite bluntly: they have been promoted to their “level of incompetence”[2].

The only way forward for Wong is to get out of his comfort zone and face OKRs squarely. In fact, after some careful consideration, he has decided and determined to not let OKR ruin his life.

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he takes a deep breath and affirms himself.

It turned out that there is a simpler-than-you-think way. First, we need to divide and conquer. With a bit of research, Wong found that the “goal-setting” literature and provide plenty of effective approaches to dividing the types of results. The most useful and ready-to-use is the Balanced Scorecard[3]. In essence, Balanced Scorecard asks us to consider four perspectives in our works:

1. Customer perspective: refers to the outcomes that matter to our internal and external customers. We won’t miss this perspective because our superiors have already been nagging us on this. Any successful company has already been focusing on the customer’s needs. Almost all KRs wanted by customers can be categorized in one of these domains: cheaper, better, and faster. There are myriad examples of customer-related KRs. Just Google something like: “examples of KPIs in software development.”
2. The internal process perspective refers to the internal capability that enables us to work effectively and efficiently. The easiest way to start with internal process improvement is to read up the “best practices” in your domain. Best practices are the proven and optimized ways of doing your work. For instance, IT departments have long adopted ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). Successful software teams have been doing an agile project management method (called SCRUM). New product introduction (NPI) managers have long jumped on the integrated product development (IPD) wagon. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Just decide on what best practice to adopt, implement it, and don’t look back.
3. Financial perspective asks us to look into how we can contribute better to the cash flow and bottom lines. If you are involved in sales, this would be the first thing in your mind. You constantly think about how to build a larger and loyal customer base that will buy more products with higher values. If you are not in the sales department, you probably need to think about how to minimize your costs.
4. Learning and growth perspective pushes us to continually improve ourselves. Senge [4] has already informed us of the critical importance of having everyone in the organization to learn and grow. Simply set some KRs in the number of books to read, the number of hours of online or face-to-face classes to attend, sharing and teaching to conduct, articles to write, etc.

Once we have the initial set of areas to work on, set specific metrics for each KR.

Professional enough?

Most of the time, managers like Wong find themselves not being able to move beyond seeing works as todos.

Wong wants to have a user manual ready for his product launch before the end of this quarter. So he writes this KR:

Get the user manual ready.

This is a typical symptom of todoitis — getting the user manual ready is a todo.

When we look beyond the symptom, see can see that this is a classic case not thinking deep and professional enough.

If you see how the world-class user manuals are written, you will find that writing a user manual requires a rigorous process.

Here is an example that I have come across:

1. To start the manual planning, the list of key features to be included must be confirmed.
2. The writer then curates content from the source owners: Screen captures, figures, charts are taken. The list of references obtained. Installation steps are obtained. Step-by-step procedure obtained. Cautions warning messages obtained. Troubleshooting procedure obtained. Warranty messages obtained.
3. The first draft of the manual is ready.
4. Layout draft ready.
5. Style check: redundancy, word order, terminology, ambiguity, translation accuracy, punctuation, heading appropriateness, capitalization.
6. Final layout
7. Final proofreading

As you can see, once you have broken down the process carefully, you can set many KRs based on the process steps above, such as:

1. time taken (hours or days) for each step,
2. the number of follow-ups required with contents providers (usually the engineers) before getting the complete contents.
3. the number of errors found (or corrections required) in style check and/or proofreading,
4. overall time-to-completion of the entire manual,
5. the number of reviews before final acceptance by the business units,
6. etc.

You can easily construct 3–5 meaningful KRs.

But here is the catch: only professional manual writer can tell you the professional process of writing a user manual. Consequently, you will not be able to write meaningful KRs without doing things more professionally. In the final analysis, unprofessionalism, or semi-professionalism, is the main cause of todoitis. With the root-cause of todoitis established, the cure is straightforward: we just need to be more professional.

Using divide and conquer (with Balanced Scorecard) and some level of professionalism, people like Wong are able to get past the pain of todoitis and get to the level of KRs.

Recovering from todoitis is effortful, though. Wong realizes and anticipates the arduous journey ahead, but he is ready to climb the steep learning curve of being more professional in the domains that are beyond the stronghold of his technical world.

References

[1] Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Csikzentmihaly, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience (Vol. 1990). New York: Harper & Row.

[2] Peter, Laurence J., Hull, Raymond (1969): The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. New York: William Morrow & Co.

[3] Norton, D. P., & Kaplan, R. (1999). The Balanced Scorecard: translating strategy into action. London, UK: Institute for International Research.

[4] Senge, M. Peter. (1990). The Fifth Discipline–The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization.