Show the logic that underpins your goal
OKRs can communicate WHAT you want to achieve. Causal chains can show WHY you believe your strategy will work.
OKRs are already at that growth stage spawning cottage industries of consultants, books, tools and certifications. A niche which exists but has not yet hit the explosive growth stage is the evolving tools for communicating your strategy or why which supports the what you are communicating with your OKRs.
There’s not a single dominant approach but the most common ways organisations address this (beyond the classic strategy slide packs) are with tools which while different all seem to share fairly common traits.
The traits are:
- Predominantly visual
- Feature outcomes (i.e. outcome-oriented goals)
- Relationships between outcomes and other outcomes or relationships between outcomes and outputs or relationships between outcomes and measures or a combination of all of these.
As far as I can see — a lot of these evolved fairly independently but are evolving to address similar challenges.
Causal chains (our version)
Essentially at each level, there’s an outcome described — you could draft an OKR from any of these — you could take the Causal Chain node as the O, the objective, and then define the KR, the Key Results which further help clarify its meaning and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Results Map
Bet boards & North Star Metrics
Opportunity Solution Trees
Teresa Torres and Hope Gurion share the following tool, Opportunity Solution Trees in their training, books and publications:
Opportunity Solution Trees focus generally on one outcome and all the opportunities and the relationships between those opportunities through to the relationships with potential solutions and potential experiments.
Current Reality Trees and Future Reality Trees
Influential in some of our thinking is using and adapting tools such as Causal Chains and Results Maps was influenced by the Current Reality and Future Reality Trees from Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints. The evaporating cloud diagram, prerequisite tree and transition trees are other related tools applying similar concepts.
In a future post, I will cover other examples which evolved from here where we used elements from a number of these approaches to further aid clarity in people consuming these diagrams as a visual articulation of strategy. Share in the comments if you are using one of these approaches for the same purpose or any different ways you approach ensuring there’s the maximum clarity possible on what is to be achieved and why.
Originally published at https://wioota.substack.com on July 6, 2022.
