Don’t start your OKR journey with an OKR tool
Many start their OKR journey by looking at OKR tools. STOP! OKR tools aren’t solving a problem you have yet. The most successful organisations using I’ve seen OKRs didn’t use an OKR tool, ever.
It’s natural to think one of the barriers to the adoption of OKRs is the chore of writing them and sharing them. If these were the major issues then an OKR tool might be a good solution for this problem. In practice, these are unlikely to be in your top 10 issues affecting your organisation’s adoption of OKRs. Let me share why and what the key problems to solve are.
A good analogy is in programming. It’s common for inexperienced coders to look for tools which aid in reducing the typing effort. The reality is that typing is not the bottleneck for coding productivity. The thinking and problem-solving aspects are. Another aspect of team development is the collaboration side of things another key factor — this is why the offline aspects of agile and lean practices have a bigger impact than the adoption of the associated tools such as digital boards.
What are the main constraints for successful OKR adoption?
Similarly, the typing and distribution of OKRs are not the biggest constraints to successful OKR adoption.
The key areas that need focus for an organisation to adopt OKRs are:
- Understanding how and why OKRs work
- Understanding how to write and use OKRs
- Discipline around the cycle of using OKRs — most importantly this is the internal commitment within each person to follow through.
- Reviewing and learning from OKRs each quarter and applying what has been learnt to future goals.
Why are OKR tools not a fix?
OKR tools solve for lowering the friction for coordinating the drafting, capturing in a consistent format and distributing OKRs.
Effort in drafting OKRs tends to be more importantly invested in the discussion and alignment between people. This can be in the time spent meeting and considering options. In ensuring alignment on the goal and that the OKR represents clarity amongst the team on what success looks like.
Successful OKR adoption also requires more investment in creating expertise internally for knowing what a good and bad objective looks like. For knowing what makes a useful measure.
How might OKR tools make adoption more difficult?
When people are investing effort to save time on important things before those important things have become a habit it’s highly indicative that they do not value making the effort. Most of us would like the result of losing weight. But many of us can be lured into the appealing idea of 7-minute abs. It’s the hook we’ll pay for but it also highly correlates with not following through to achieve the goal.
Worse still, in the same way, investing in a shortcut weight-loss solution can short-change our weight loss efforts, adopting an OKR tool can fool us into believing we have done what we need to, to address OKR adoption. That drafting an OKR for the next quarter is a 7-minute exercise a team can fit in around other things.
“Worse still, in the same way investing in a shortcut weight-loss solution can short-change our weight loss efforts, adopting an OKR tool can fool us into believing we have done what we need to, to address OKR adoption.”
If we truly believe that better clarity of the goal helps teams be more productive then we need our teams to believe this. To the point where they will down tools on development to invest the time necessary to always have meaningful goals which are collectively understood by them and the wider organisation. The effort required to achieve this belief is very different to purchasing another software tool. And worse still the software tool can in my experience actually work against the appropriate effort being made.
What is a useful alternative for documenting OKRs?
OKR tools also face the challenge of being yet another tool — which can increase the complicatedness of working in your organisation. Adopting a new tool should always be a serious decision. For this reason, I advocate starting with tools you already use.
If you have what is fast becoming a luxury in this day and age of working in a co-located environment then a physical board is a perfectly great place to start. You can quickly draft and redraft OKRs on cards and stick them up to be visible and easily referencable discussion points for decision-making. Combining this with a wall-walk cadence where leadership and other teams are regularly inspecting goals and progress on measures helps with alignment and coordination.
For the rest of us, more generic digital tools such as a Wiki (Confluence, Notion etc), pinned chat (Slack, MS Teams, Discord etc.) or collaborative spreadsheet, slides or documents (Google Workspaces, MS365 etc.) are perfectly fine solutions for collaborating on OKRs. Combining these with disciplined cadences for drafting, sharing and reviewing OKRs really helps address the purported problems OKR tools promise to solve. Showing that goal setting is important for the business translates into people making the time to set good goals much more effectively than trying to minimise the effort in setting goals will. For instance, setting an OKR day each quarter where results and new goals are reviewed and making a big deal of it can be a useful catalyst.
The take-away is that the adage of focusing on People over Process over Tools rings true for OKR adoption too. Focus first on what your people need to succeed with OKRs.
If you have used specialised OKR tools, what has your experience been? Do you notice the same patterns? Share your experiences in the comments.
Originally published at https://wioota.substack.com on June 29, 2022.
