Writing OKRs: How to write an objective focused on an outcome
It’s easy to fall into the trap of writing an objective describing an activity you wish to undertake rather than an outcome to achieve. These tips can help.
An important aspect of OKRs is that they are deceptively simple in structure. This is, I think, part of the appeal. Easy to draft, easy to consume. Of course, this simplicity is both true and also misleading.
It’s easy to write something in the form of an OKR and get some benefit from that. But it’s hard to write a good OKR that realises the real potential of making a team more productive from their strong common understanding of the goal. The challenge of writing a good OKR becomes apparent later in your OKR journey and hopefully by that time you’ve seen the potential of OKRs as a tool for alignment is obvious and that provides the drive to level up.
One of the most important aspects of the content of a goal is that it is focused on an outcome — part of the thesis for this publication. I make the case for why in many of my other posts. This post seeks to address the HOW of drafting a goal, and to provide you with some starting points for thinking about what attributes a good goal, focused on an outcome, should possess.
The pathway for how a potential objective gets to be considered can vary. Some pathways may lead a team towards an activity-oriented goal. For instance, sometimes it’s a leader coming to a team with an initiative or solution to tackle, sometimes it’s from research which has identified a customer problem, or it surfaces when reviewing other opportunities, maybe it is a solution that the team knows instinctively could provide value.
No matter where the inspiration for the direction came from, the task at hand is to draft an objective and key results and this process is part of the dialogue with the wider business; to negotiate a common understanding of what the team is seeking to achieve.
A quick aside: Some of the opportunities brought to the team are solutions or activities, and that may seem like a problem. This actually presents a great opportunity. It’s an opportunity to ask questions and try to understand the outcome that is trying to be achieved. This may lead you to be able to frame the goal in terms of an outcome and thus better understand what would represent real progress and what other options to pivot there are. Or it may uncover reasons to push on the proposed initiative because it may not have the effect the organisation is seeking.
If we have invested effort into exploring the WHY of the work you likely are in a good position to do this — to learn more about an approach to this read my post ‘ Set better objectives by starting with WHY ‘. Even better if you have built a causal chain or have linked your chain to a Result Map.
Here are several elements that can help with drafting an objective:
Objectives are Outcomes, not activities
Most important is the objective is describing an outcome — for reasons established in ‘ Thinking in terms of outcomes’ and ‘ Subtle aspects of OKRs and their effects’. An outcome is easiest to write as a short description that, if achieved, will be true.
An example we used in an OKR at one of my workplaces was ‘There are no critical security vulnerabilities outside of our Service Level Agreement’. Ideally, this would be a health measure for the business but the reality there were more than a few vulnerabilities that had been identified and a significant effort to get to a healthy state, as such we set it as an objective for the company which all teams would align to. At the team level, there were more specific goals that contributed to us achieving that organisation-level goal.
Objectives reflect a step-change
If we are elevating some objectives to focus on for a quarter, to be ambitious and to be transparently communicated broadly then it makes sense that we are choosing objectives which truly reflect a step-change from the current state.
There are of course always other things that we measure and improve more incrementally over longer periods but what we choose as OKRs should be focused on significant impact; this can be a helpful discriminator in choosing your objectives.
Objectives are ambitious
Teams in low-trust environments or who continue to find it difficult to conceptualise OKRs as being separate from an individual’s or team’s performance management will struggle with the idea of setting an ambitious target because of how they worry they may be perceived should they fail.
Getting past this — because the organisation truly supports the team and because the team has internalised the benefit of an ambitious goal in terms of stimulating lateral thinking — is to unlock an extra benefit of OKRs.
If the team is working with OKRs framed as activities this will also be challenging to grasp because it may be deemed a commitment to deliver to an estimate as opposed to a commitment to make progress towards achieving the objective.
Objectives are accessible
The most beneficial element of OKRs is the ability to create alignment across an organisation. Given this, it makes sense to make your objective as accessible to the layperson as possible. Avoid jargon, acronyms and anything else that may alienate different parts of your organisation.
The goal needs to be understood by the team working on it, other teams, leaders and other parts of the organisation alike. This is another important reason why goals should be outcomes. Most of the organisation will understand the broader purpose and its customers and their problems so talking in these terms is more accessible than in terms of HOW, implementation detail and aspects of what is done behind the scenes will be alienating, in addition to the drawbacks I shared in ‘ Thinking in terms of outcomes’.
It also helps to keep objectives as short, inspiring and memorable as possible. If the goal is something worth doing and impactful this will be half the battle already but important to remember that for organisations where OKRs are adopted throughout there can be a lot of competing for people’s attention so some effort to edit for clarity can go a long way.
Objectives are not measures
Don’t put your measure in the objective — you have key results for this. You can use the key results to qualify such specifics, to be the evidence that the objective is true. To mix these is to make it likely your objective is not an outcome but an output of an activity.
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Originally published at https://wioota.substack.com on July 19, 2022.
