Experimenting, learning and unlearning with OKRs
By Sarah Boorman, Project X Partners
At Project X, we have been experimenting with OKRs - Objectives and Key Results - for a number of months now.
As a new start up, we chose them as our framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes for 3 main reasons:
Because we use Agile mindset and methodologies to enable the people side of change for our clients, and OKRs is a framework which supports Agile ways of working.
Because we can. As co-founders of a newly created People & Culture consultancy, we have the absolute freedom to decide all of the big things for ourselves, including how we set goals and measure our progress.
Because experimenting is fun! Who doesn’t love a good experiment?!
Over the next couple of minutes, I'd like to share what we learnt from using OKRs. I'll explain what they are and where they came from, why they are useful and how to use them. And then, by using our experiment as an example, hopefully help you understand why OKRs work and how to use the framework yourself.
What are OKRs?
OKRs are made up of an Objective - a clearly defined goal - and several associated Key Results - specific measures which are used to track the achievement of that goal. Key Results are supported by Initiatives which are activities that move forward the Key Results to help achieve the Objectives. Makes sense? It may be helpful to break it down a bit:
Objectives
Objectives are inspiring statements of intent. An objective is something your company or team wants to achieve, with an indication of the desired outcome. It should be action-orientated - think verbs - and use simple language so that everyone can understand. It should be something that is within your area of responsibility, and all objectives should connect to the higher company goals and vision.
And something that Objectives should not be - they should not be measurable. Yes, you heard right - and I know that this can be hard to believe for those of us who are children of the SMART framework era - you should not be able to measure the Objective, that is the job of the second part of the OKRs - the Key Results.
Key Results
Or “How will you know when you have got there?”
Under each Objective sits a series of Key Results. These are key success criteria which help you understand whether you’ve met your Objective.
Key Results should be challenging, and be quantifiable with clearly defined numeric measures - in other words, there must be a number in each Key Result that we can look at and say, ‘did we meet that target?’.
Key Results need to lead to the Objective. If they don’t, they need to be changed.
And finally, Key Results should be expressed as an outcome, rather than an activity. Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about the activities, they just come in the final part of the OKRs, which are called the initiatives.
Initiatives
A set of Initiatives sit under each Key Result. These are sometimes referred to as the ‘hypothesis, bets or experiments’ because each Initiative describes a specific activity or deliverable which is assumed to be required to successfully complete the Key Result.
When one initiative produces a positive result, it can be built upon and developed further in terms of budget, resources and/ or time.
On the other hand, initiatives that are not seen to be making an impact on the KRs progress can be stopped to allow us to focus on the ones that are.
Where do OKRs come from (and are they just a new fad?)
OKRs are not a new thing. In fact, they have been around for decades. A quick look for OKRs on Wikipedia tells us that ‘In 1975, John Doerr, at the time a salesperson working for Intel, attended a course within Intel taught by Andy Grove where he was introduced to the theory of OKRs’. Wiki goes on to say that John introduced OKRs to Google, the idea took hold and OKRs ‘quickly became central to Google’s culture as a “management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organisation”.
Following on from Google’s success with OKRs, it is well publicised that many organisations are using them such as Amazon, Facebook and Uber. So, not only are they not a new fad - OKRs have successfully lasted through four work generations and are still going strong - they have also been adopted by some of the biggest companies on the planet as the tool of choice for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes.
Why would you choose OKRs? What are the benefits (and how do you write one?)
As OKRs align with the company’s strategy, they link every teams’ objectives together for the greater good of the company. So, when you are developing yours you need to be clear of the goals for the company and ensure that they link up to them. And they are aspirational and ambitious, which enables the company to stretch and grow.
They are sometimes called ‘moonshots’ as such stretch goals are the building blocks of remarkable achievements in the long term.
They are easy to understand as they are written in simple language so that they can be understood by all - no management-speak required here.
Objectives should be developed as a team and made transparent to all employees. OKR owners are encouraged to publicly share their learnings and experiences. This gives all teams an understanding of what others are working on and flags potential opportunities to work on goals together. This ownership increases engagement as those who are accountable can see the direct impact that they are having on the company’s success.
OKRs are focused on outcomes and are measured regularly to review their success in moving the KRs forward. The Initiatives can be dialled up where they are showing success, or adapted if they are not having an impact.
OKRs enable flexibility as they are set for short timelines - 3-6 months rather than annually, and reviewed regularly to allow you to know if you are going off-course so that you can take action before problems arise.
They should be viewed as a learning tool, rather than a performance management tool as the results of each initiative are reviewed, recorded and learnt from to determine changes that need to be made.
And the challenges? What issues should you be aware of?
It is much harder than you think to write in simple language. We had to have a few tries to ensure that we had eliminated all management speak. For anyone who has been brought up on SMART objectives, it takes a lot of unlearning to write an objective that is aspirational rather than achievable!
Psychological safety is key, because the beauty of OKRs is that we learn from failing as well as from succeeding. It is important that any teams experimenting with OKRs are trained to understand their purpose and benefits so that they know it is safe to fail as failing leads to learning.
A Project X example
I thought that it may be useful to have an example of what an OKR looks like and how they are measured:
One Objective we created for Project X for Q1 2020 was ‘Create global awareness of Project X’. Inspiring, simple, action-oriented and gives an indication of the desired outcome, but does not contain a measure.
A KR that we identified to support our example Objective was ‘Hit 1,000 views on our website www.projectxparters.com’. This KR contains a number so can be measured, links to the Objective and was challenging to meet by the end of Q1 as the site was only due to go live midway through Q1.
And an initiative that supported our example KR was ‘Experiment with LinkedIn as a channel to create awareness of our website by posting, commenting and sharing ours and others’ content’.
We reviewed this LinkedIn experiment fortnightly to measure the progress we were making against our KRs and to understand where we needed to course correct. And at the end of March we gave it a score out of 100 to record our progress.
As it was a stretch target, we were aiming for a score of 60 or above, which we hit - and due to this success we have rolled this experiment over to Q2, however, we have increased the KR to 2,000 website views.
So, what did our OKR experiment show us!?
Now that the hard part of unlearning old habits is over, and we are seeing results from our efforts along with the learns of what not to do, we will continue to practise, experiment and shoot for the moon!
I would love your feedback, and to know whether you are tempted to experiment with OKRs too. If you already use OKRs, do you have any insights you could share to help improve our use of the framework? And if you don’t, but are interested in the framework, how easy would it be to try out OKRs in your company? Could you be the early adopter in your team and suggest an experiment? What’s the worst that could happen if you do?!
Originally published on LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/pulse/experimenting-learning-unlearning-okrs-sarah-boorman
