Thank you for reading Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes. I publish weekly and have an archive of over 150 posts, each packed with valuable insights on various topics relevant to CTOs and the issues they face, distilled from my career experience.

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Martin Chesbrough wrote an insightful post recently about some of the risks and issues of using OKRs, which is worth a read. He highlights, in particular, an issue when leaders highlight the desired output or outcome, as they might do in the form of an OKR, without engaging their team on how they might achieve that.

His conclusion is not to use OKRs, which differs from mine as evidenced by the fact that I’ve used them in multiple work contexts, which is his prerogative. As I’ve stated several times on this blog, OKRs are not the only way to solve the alignment challenges they were conceived to address, nor are they the best available goal-setting approach; they are merely the most popular (and only of the formal and semi-formal goal-setting systems i.e. if you ignore the generic use of SMART goals, ad hoc goals, or not using a goal-setting approach at all which I am sure are all more popular still).

For me, the interest in OKRs has been because that was where we started, and it was a stepping stone towards ideas such as, and because their relative popularity helps with accessibility and familiarity for the audience:

The concerns he raises are part of why I suggest OKRs should respond to a particular need and not a universally relevant practice for all companies at all times. This should not surprise any of you who have read my various posts on the importance of context. They are also why I feel that OKRs alone are insufficient to help an organisation and why I was motivated to write the post Improving OKRs. I would never suggest they are always a good thing to do as context-free advice for companies. They should be a response to a problem and tested to see if they help address the issue and either be adapted until they address it or abandoned in favor of something else.

Martin was responding to Noah Cantor’s post: OKRs Are Management Malpractice and my series of response posts, which challenged Noah’s quite definitive take on the subject:

I wrote a long comment in response to Martin’s post, which I thought the audience of this blog, especially those of you who were drawn to this publication because of the exploration of goal-setting I’ve covered. I also encourage you to check out Martin's comments in other posts' comment sections, such as the thread at the bottom of this post:

Enjoy!

Hi Martin, it's a nice post. I agree that ‘outcomes over output’ is reductive—it's not a phrase I like to use. It can't be one or the other.

Leaders who fail to discuss how something will be achieved would be derelict of duty.

You seem to suggest that because a team wrote down their agreement of what a desirable effect of their work was, they won't engage in the means of achieving it, and neither will any leader who may be supporting them.

That's not behavior I've observed.

I wholeheartedly agree that leaders tend to copy and paste what worked in a previous situation or what they perceived worked. They tend to focus on the final form of where they evolved, addressing needs as they developed.

Look at all those applications of the Spotify model or SAFE, etc. These are context-free solutions applied to unexamined problems. OKRs could easily be misapplied using the same flawed thinking. Dr Jabe Bloom's Ideal Present Design is a very accessible introduction to Ackhoff's ideas in Idealized Design and Gap Thinking vs Present Thinking, which I've found helpful in helping others spot the same error.

Google used OKRs and was successful. People copied OKRs initially because they wanted to be as successful as Google, failing to notice that many factors were at play in Google, including many invisible factors that contributed to their success. That might be like thinking the horse symbol on a Ferrari is what makes the car fast.

A more helpful reason to adopt any goal-setting method is that you observe energy wasted on pushing towards divergent outcomes. The desired result is implicit, and because of this, there was a lack of awareness of the differences in views. This issue led to adoption at a team level.

Another scenario was that teams that seldom but very occasionally have interactions that can contribute to an effect were unaware because, absent of any summary of intent, they would have needed to consume a lot of every team's modelling, plans, etc. This led to the public sharing of goals.

In Seek's example, teams with consumer-facing products could sometimes operate independently. Other times, they would collaborate or coordinate with teams updating AI models shared across interfaces (mobile apps, email, and push notifications) or operate on changes that affected both sides of the employment market—e.g., a change that affects how candidates interact with hirers.

Being aware of those intents, often before any work had occurred, was very helpful in triggering those teams to reach out and identify how they might need to interact—coordinate, collaborate, self-service, etc. Leaders also helped with this, but there were so many teams and potential interactions that it helped if this could be something everyone could participate in.

OKRs was only one of many things we and most teams felt was helping. We also modelled everyday interactions between teams, relationships between goals (i.e. the logic of why we thought interventions would have the effects they might have - theory), "TEAM APIs", etc.

My purpose in writing about OKRs is not to advocate for them. I have written in great detail about my experiences. Hopefully, by accessing the details, people who opt to try OKRs can see why we tried them, what worked and didn't, and what it may have been about our environment that might explain that. The examples above might illustrate how I differentiate alignment with management.

You also mentioned tampering with just part of a system—that it's an issue we were aware of and why we mapped relationships and systems rather than using OKRs with teams in isolation. It's a valid concern, and we expect teams not to get it initially, but that was a nice on-ramp into systems thinking for everyone.

Similarly, when adopting OKRs as a solution to an issue—I don't advocate starting by applying them across the board—we started incrementally and experimentally and monitored whether it was helping.

Hope that's helpful insight into your line of inquiry.

Note 1: I’ve edited my writing further, improving it for clarity but hopefully without changing its substance too substantially.

Note 2: I was fortunate to catch up with Martin on a video call recently after posting this last comment, and we had a good chat. Martin shared some of his career experience, in which he’d seen firsthand leaders who were very focused on sharing an outcome but less interested in engaging teams to understand how they might support them in achieving the goal. I explained the distinction between using OKRs for managing teams and using OKRs to address alignment and a bit more about what led us to choose OKRs as a solution in a few different contexts (a corporate with 20+ teams and a startup with effectively a single team) and the very different implementations that applied to those very different contexts.

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Where do you stand regarding the usefulness of approaches such as OKRs? Do you share the concerns covered in the post I am responding to? Have you experienced these challenges? Did you persist with OKRs? Let us know in the comments.

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Hi everyone,

Thank you for reading Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes. I publish weekly and have an archive of over 150 posts, each packed with valuable insights on various topics relevant to CTOs and the issues they face, distilled from my career experience.

I strive to make each post a helpful resource on the topic it focuses on so that when a CTO has a need, they can reference an atomic nugget of insight. To this end, I regularly revisit and refine posts, ensuring you always receive the best and most up-to-date information with the most clarity.

- Daniel Walters, Founder Great CTO & writer of Great CTO blog.

If you’d like to support the growth of this resource, consider upgrading to paid and take advantage of the other ways I can help you.

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I have written many posts on goal-setting, focusing mainly on OKRs, one of the most popular methods. What interests me about goal-setting approaches is the involvement of people who are aligned and have a common understanding of what they strive to achieve together.

One of the most notable features of OKRs is their division of information into a goal, the objective, and typically two or more key results. PuMP, a performance measurement framework, has a similar approach to representing goals—it refers to the objective as a result, while its equivalent of Key Results is known as ‘measures’.

A survey of other similar frameworks would likely reveal a similar separation of concerns between the goal and the evidence of achieving the goal. It seems like an innocuous design choice, but it is powerful. Let me explain why.

Static Equilibrium: an Analogy for the Effect of Separating Goal from Evidence of Achieving the Goal.

The goal of these systems articulates what we are trying to achieve, separate from how we will know we’ve achieved it or measure progress. Some goal systems have encouraged conflating all of this information, so a clear separation has some vital utility.

When we separate these, the goal can be more plainly expressed, making it easier to assess whether we agree on what is trying to be achieved. Of course, as goals try to be succinct, there is still the potential for misalignment. Some of the recommendations I made in this post are designed to increase the likelihood of alignment.

When I think about this, I often think of the ‘impossible’ floating plant bots, which use three or more ropes to anchor them in space or the Jakob rope suspension installations like the one pictured at the top of this post. You also see this concept used in sailing contexts. It is known as static equilibrium, and these examples are often called ‘triangulated suspension’ or ‘triangulated guying systems’.

All of these have an object secured in position in 3D space. This thing that’s secured in space is analogous to the goal. Ropes and an equilibrium of suspension force secure them in place. These are analogous to the evidence, i.e., the measures in PuMP or the key results in OKRs.

As I shared in my companion piece to the one above, which shares how to write good key results for an outcome, key results may be evidence of achieving the goal or can be the inverse, indicative of heading in the wrong direction.

In this way, the measures can be used together to help interpret whether we are progressing toward achieving the goal or heading off-track.

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Points of Agreement as Inbuilt Alignment Test

Having multiple correlating bits of evidence that more specifically describe a goal and what changes if you achieve it provides more opportunities to detect when there is misalignment.

You can ask for clarification when Key Results are suggested that don’t align with your understanding of the goal. These may indicate areas of departure or reveal nuances of the goal that may be clear to some but not others.

Whether you identify areas of conflict that need debate or uncover things that need to be more explicit, you are improving the clarity of the goal and the shared understanding for all who will be engaging with it.

I cover using Objectives and Key Results as an alignment test in this post:

If you combine this with an explicit articulation of your rationale for the goal, the WHY, in addition to the WHAT, and the goal itself, then you have another opportunity to test alignment. It’s entirely possible to have defined what you want to achieve the same as someone else and yet still have different motives for wanting to achieve that. Why you want to achieve something can change what it means to achieve it successfully. More on this idea here:

Working through the different correlation points for a shared goal will help you find the static equilibrium, confirming that all parties understand what will be achieved. It will also help hold the goal concept firmly in place as each potentially confounding misalignment is identified and debated to resolution. The likelihood that you have a goal that’s understood in the same way increases.

This may seem like it's costly in time and effort to do upfront, but what might take an hour or two then will certainly save many hours later, as the misalignment creates friction and leads to misguided effort. This reduces wasted energy and time caused by misalignment among team members or leadership operating with different interpretations of the goals.

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Have you noticed this property of goals articulated with the goal and the evidence that supports it? What approaches have you taken to test alignment? Do you have examples where misalignment led to confusion and conflict? Please share your experiences in the comments.

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In my earlier post, I explored whether ‘OKRs are Management Malpractice’, as Noah Cantor posits, or whether some disconnects make it difficult to draw a conclusion.

My theories about the disconnect are as follows:

1. It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.

2. The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.

3. It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.

4. How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

5. There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.

An interesting observation from the discussion that Noah’s post generated was the lower awareness of shifts in how OKRs are recommended to be practised. It makes sense; if you are not actively involved in practising OKRs because your prior experiences were poor or they didn’t address your organisation's needs, then you are unlikely to be closely following any changes in approach. You aren’t actively monitoring these changes because you don’t need to.

Furthermore, when you engage as Noah did, it’s hard to distinguish between the many variations of OKRs we highlighted in earlier posts in this series. As Noah did, you might see an old post from 2016 by Christina Wodtke advocating one position on cascading OKRs and another more recent post from Christina announcing a perspective shift to recommend aligning OKRs once she observed them applied in more contexts.

Dealing with all the noise

As I’ve also shared, the prevalent examples are often bad ones based on dated interpretations of OKRs, crystalised into tools and certified training for the consumption of companies seeking certain victories with the supposed silver bullet of OKRs. This creates an environment of a lot of noise.

I maintain a list of practitioners who actively apply OKRs in their organisations or help people in other organisations. Through those experiences, they expand what is known about what works in what context. They are also actively engaging in community dialogue and improving their approaches to goal-setting for alignment and connecting strategy with execution. This list helps me tune into the signal and diminish the noise, but it's an approach that suits someone like me who is actively involved in the conversation about evolving OKRs. It is a lot to ask someone who is interested in learning about OKRs but not necessarily studying or being part of the community that shapes how they evolve.

This raises the question of what the OKR community can do to help newcomers navigate the current thinking on OKRs. What can be done to make OKRs more accessible?

Clearly, OKR books are having an impact. I’d say mostly positive, as most of the popular published OKR books in recent years have been of decent quality, especially compared to the volume of lower-quality documentation of OKRs online by vendors and certification houses. As we have seen, however, over time, the influence of static sources can also be problematic, as books like Measure What Matters have helped anchor ideas that have been well-established to be outdated. We can conclude that the publications are good but not sufficient.

Should OKRs be formalised?

As I have highlighted, OKRs are not a formal method—no one owns the concept, and many have made refinements. A response to this could be to suggest that OKRs become more formalised either under a leading vendor or a community foundation that governs and documents their evolution.

I don’t think vendor-driven formalisation is the answer - the flexibility afforded by the lack of formality has helped competent organisations adapt OKRs to their context to match an appropriate level of scaffolding to suit the needs of the organisation and not be limited to suffering the side effects of being too light or too heavy. What a startup business may need from OKRs is not what an enterprise may need from OKRs. Incompetent organisations frequently hire heavy vendor-driven frameworks beyond their needs or overly informal approaches when they need more.

What are alternative ways to help newcomers navigate the state of OKRs more easily?

So what are the alternatives? Here are a few ideas that have been on my mind for a while now:

• A community-maintained body of knowledge that provides a negotiated reference for the current state of OKRs.

• I suggest a community-driven documentation of different OKR choices that can be made for various contexts. Rather than static documentation of a single way to do OKRs, I mean a more context-aware approach that maps everyday situations to common responses. This approach could also be supported by more explicit guiding principles to help more judgment in adapting OKRs to the context in which they are being applied.

• A rebranding of the currently accepted good OKR practices amongst leading OKR practitioners as something other than OKRs. This would reflect that the leap in the last decade for OKRs has been as significant as the shift between MBOs and iMBOs, between iMBOs and OKRs (as Google used them initially) and what has transpired in a decade of wider global use.

What other options do you see that could help address what is undoubtedly a confounding environment for those who seek to understand OKRs and how they are recommended to be applied?

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What was your experience of learning about OKRs like? Did you find it challenging to navigate the many variations and inconsistencies amongst OKR documentation? What is a good approach to addressing this?

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In my earlier post, I explored whether ‘OKRs are Management Malpractice’, as Noah Cantor posits, or whether some disconnects make it difficult to draw a conclusion:

My theories about the disconnect are as follows:

1. It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.

2. The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.

3. It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.

4. How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

5. There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.

Examining what' job' they hire OKRs for can be very helpful when seeking to understand how companies attempt to deploy OKRs.

Some companies are interested in hiring OKRs to help increase awareness of different teams’ intent and reduce friction from misalignment or wasted effort due to ignorance of relevant efforts elsewhere in the organisation. This reflects the primary benefit I associate with OKRs: a method to help synchronise planning that provides the opportunity to adjust goals to improve the degree to which teams pull in the same direction and have confidence that each is describing the same objective.

Others will describe a desire to reduce variance from the leadership’s plans or even a desire to exert more control over their teams’ choices. This is an understandable but destructive use of OKRs. It creates pressure towards managing outputs and for leaders to set goals on behalf of their teams, a disempowering approach that reduces teams to mere doers and shuts the organisation off from ideas from those most likely to know what is possible.

Why do companies ‘hire’ OKRs for the wrong reasons?

When I say ‘understandable’, I mean from what is incentivised in the average organisation and the biases that influence decision-making. The tendency to look for quick fixes and a framework that can be installed, which claims to increase effectiveness, looks appealing. It's even more appealing when packaged with a tool, certifications, and certified trainers assuring success.

Why do these types of solutions appeal to executives? I’ve written about how bias influences decision-making towards compromised options many times, such as here:

Are there good tool vendors? I am sure there are. I’ve had some reach out and agree with my recommendations of not starting with a tool but instead adopting one when it addresses material challenges that could increase your success. Unsurprisingly, such self-aware vendors also have significantly better documentation than the average vendor (OKR guides, HowTos, training videos, etc.).

Great OKR trainers and coaches are also actively working with companies, evolving the range of OKR practices relevant to different situations and improving goal-setting for better alignment.

And good certification factories? It’s unlikely, but we’ll save that topic for another day.

Unfortunately, for every good vendor, there are more who increase the chance that new people to OKRs begin from a poor starting point.

Where does that leave us?

It's not a great situation. By volume, most OKR documentation is outdated and of low quality. And the majority of companies that are reaching for OKRs are reaching for the wrong reasons. The offerings from the vendors speak directly to these reasons, and the net result is that most implementations of OKRs are likely bad, disempowering, and destructive.

You could find and replace OKR with agile, which describes the play in that adjacent field fairly well.

Fortunately, the leading voices in the OKR space are experienced practitioners of OKRs and continue to provide an evolving description of how to help address the challenges OKRs are best able to address, those of alignment.

You can see my list of people who are furthering what I describe as outcome-thinking for the point of alignment here:

X (Twitter) List of 'Outcome Thinkers'

What this suggests to me is ideally, an organisation embarking on the use of OKRs is:

1. Doing so in response to a need for improving alignment and reducing the friction that can come with scale, such as many teams contributing to a complex software ecosystem that serves a wide range of needs.

2. A competency is built internally for alignment through shared understanding encapsulated by goals and the relationships between goals.

3. If external expertise is needed to find a successful path to working with OKRs, it is done with a commitment to building internal competency.

Using goal-setting for alignment is not easy. It takes discipline and commitment. The benefits can be significant. Teams are not only empowered to set their goals and chart their path to achieving them but also have a natural rhythm that enables adjusting goals to align their respective contributions better and increase the likelihood of starting together.

The importance of starting together and timing I’ve covered before:

So, what may seem like a dire situation may be more par for the course. There may come a time when the OKR community needs to consider whether formalising OKRs would be beneficial. It may involve a different path than the tired certification industrial complex.

Still, someday, an open-source, collaborative effort to document variations of OKRs and references for the most relevant context variations may be most applicable. This might help people new to OKRs have a greater chance of following a path that positively serves their needs.

Bad bosses looking for quick fixes or instruments of control can choose vendors who know them well and have tailored their flawed offerings to call loudly to their tendencies.

Next, I will look at how all this noise and variety may be making things difficult for people to navigate OKRs and find what is the best current understanding for how they might work best in their context:

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Do you think it’s likely that poor implementations of OKRs represent the majority of cases? Are OKRs in use at your workplace? If so, what has the experience been like? Share your experiences in the comments.

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In my earlier post, I explored whether ‘OKRs are Management Malpractice’, as Noah Cantor posits, or whether some disconnects make it difficult to draw a conclusion:

My theories about the disconnect are as follows:

1. It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.

2. The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.

3. It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.

4. How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

5. There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.

With a growth in popularity, OKRs benefit from active sharing amongst practitioners, providing experience reports, and over time, as experiences and conclusions relating to their relevance converge, the concepts considered core to succeeding with OKRs in different concepts evolve.

As with any success, there is a downside. The growth in interest creates incentives that attract parties keen to capitalise. This is not bad per se; it comes with some contributions that will benefit those engaging with OKRs: more documentation, tools, and educational content. But for every good contribution, there are dozens more shallow, profiteering efforts that add noise and distraction instead of enrichment.

What contributes to growing confusion about OKRs?

What appears to be an inevitable path for any useful, applicable knowledge that aspires to be flexible and adaptable is that it will arrive at a period when its rise in appeal is coopted by certification and tool vendors.

OKR tool vendors are eager to provide a tool and their own OKR documentation for the masses, and the result is that they perpetuate Bad OKR practices. The care to follow to see what people and teams using OKRs are learning, and, as such, outdated advice is regurgitated and sometimes mutated.

The number of online OKR documentation sets constantly increases, causing additional confusion among people new to OKRs. The repetition of bad advice cements it as the dominant advice. Search engines and AI assistants guide people to this poor advice or repeat it as fact.

I’ve written about this before:

Even when a core of experienced practitioners who have contributed to sharing and synthesising knowledge about using OKRs is evolving, the even greater growth of low-quality documentation keeps the centre of the bell curve of adoption locked to a more dated interpretation, lacking much of what has been learned over the last decade.

Low-quality documentation uses older sources, such as descriptions of OKRs from Measure What Matters, the Google video (which has since been attempted to be taken out of circulation and updated with an evolved version), and other conventional wisdom sources as its reference.

Worse still, the documentation is skewed to self-perpetuate the use of the tool. My experience reports have highlighted the challenges that starting with an OKR can introduce to the successful adoption of OKRs:

As I have covered on this publication before the starting point for OKRs which catalyzed its popularity, namely the book Measure What Matters and the evangelism by Google shared some interesting but flawed ideas. The challenge is that these sources are prevalent available and most widely known and thus where the vendors most often crib from.

So, we have established that the popularity of OKRs has increased the propensity that people new to OKRs may start their journey with a poor information resource or compromised expert guiding them. The other side of the equation is people’s motivation to adopt OKRs.

In the next post, we will explore how the difference in motivation for adopting OKRs can have a significant impact on whether they will support or constrain the empowerment of teams:

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Do you think it’s likely that poor implementations of OKRs represent the majority of cases? Are OKRs in use at your workplace? If so, what has the experience been like? Share your experiences in the comments.

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In my earlier post, I explored whether ‘OKRs are Management Malpractice’, as Noah Cantor posits, or whether some disconnects make it difficult to draw a conclusion:

My theories about the disconnect are as follows:

1. It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.

2. The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.

3. It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.

4. How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

5. There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.

What can’t be argued in terms of scenarios where OKRs can go astray:

1. Some (most?) bodies of OKR documentation describe pernicious and flawed approaches to OKRs.

2. Many (most?) companies ‘hire’ OKRs for purposes other than those recommended by experienced OKR practitioners—alignment.

3. Many (most?) companies that deploy OKRs do so in ways that make them a chore/bureaucracy/expensive overhead, a management control method, or worse.

The responses to Noah’s question on LinkedIn demonstrated that the average software development professional is unaware of various approaches to implementing OKRs. That’s fair enough; OKRs are not a formal method. Everyone is free to describe the approach in their own way. I’ve covered this in various posts, such as this one:

More importantly, it makes OKRs difficult for people to explore for the first time and requires developing expertise in the field or finding someone to guide the organisation. For an organisation to become competent, it ultimately requires developing people proficient in using evidence for decision-making, OKRs, and other adjacent disciplines.

It makes a complicated topic moreso as it extends the surface area for critique. For instance, as a participant in the community who has used OKRs extensively, I am very familiar with where OKRs have evolved in 2024. Noah, newer to the topic, is discovering the full body of thinking, past and present, all at once. For instance, his post refers to a 2016 Christina Wodtke post suggesting OKRs should cascade. Having followed the work of influential voices in the OKR practitioners community, I know Christina shifted her perspective on this topic in 2020. More on this later.

Or in trying to understand what specific assumptions OKRs kept from MBOs when almost every aspect of MBOs changed as they evolved into OKRs—e.g., from individuals to teams, from private to public, from linked to reward; from activities to outcomes; from cascaded to aligned. If every part of a car is replaced, is it the same car? OKRs have changed in the decade since Measure What Matters was published.

The dissonance may be similar to a critic choosing to review popular software. It's at v4.5 after a decade of refinement, but then they install v0.1c and write a scathing review about its flaws.

OKRs have evolved substantially over the last decade since they entered the global zeitgeist. Practitioners write about their experiences and attitudes towards some of the practices associated with OKRs shift over time.

If applied today, I agree that many of the elements of previous iterations of OKRs (and their forbears, MBOs) are indeed Management Malpractice. OKRs have evolved a lot over the years, so let's take a short walk to see the evolution to help discern where various concepts came and left.

A Brief History of OKRs

The history of OKRs starts with MBOs, which evolved to OKRs at Intel, again as they were popularised at Google and then other Silicon Valley companies. They continue to evolve as they have been adopted globally.

Drucker and MBOs

It’s no secret that OKRs owe some of their history to MBOs attributed to Peter Drucker. However, Drucker was likely distilling practices that go back further still, no.

Management by Objectives (MBOs) is featured in Peter Drucker’s book The Practice of Management (1954) and later further developed in his student George Odiorne’s book Management Decisions by Objectives (1969). They build upon ideas presented in Mary Parker Follett's ominously titled 1926 essay, The Giving of Orders, which introduced the rather progressive idea of distinguishing between power-over and power-with and that together, managers and employees could discover the appropriate responses to a situation.

Management by Objectives has the following properties:

• Top-down goal-setting - start by identifying the organisational objectives.

• Managers set goals for individuals derived from the organisation’s objectives. These goals describe the change desired—‘the what. ‘ They were generally not visible, being 1:1 contracts between the Manager and Direct Report.

• Objectives were measurable, and progress was monitored. MBOs encourage using Targets, which introduces all the challenges of perverse incentives.

• MBOs are linked directly to remuneration and financial incentives.

• Is a management approach and is designed around the ethos of ‘what is measured is managed’.

Andy Grove and iMBOs (later renamed to OKRs)

Andy Grove sought to improve upon MBOs at Intel, first reformulating them as ‘IMBOs’ (“Intel MBOs”) and then as Objectives and Key Results (“OKRs”). Over this short retelling of OKR history, you will notice a steady evolution of this branch of goal-setting. The biggest changes from MBOs to OKRs were:

• Make them public — Andy Grove wanted to see change by moving away from MBOs, and a big part of this was improving transparency and increasing the opportunities for everyone in the organisation to participate in alignment rather than this being the domain of management.

• OKRs are team-based for aligning a group more than between a manager and an individual.

• Focused on change rather than measuring performance

• Not tied to individual performance incentives or directly to organisational incentives.

• The ambiguity of use as a management or alignment approach is introduced.

John Doerr brings OKRs to Google and Silicon Valley (and a diversion in cascading vs. aligning OKRs)

John Doerr, author of Measure What Matters, a book that helps popularise awareness of OKRs, was a student under Andy Grove at Intel and, after working with OKRs there, brought the concept to Google as a member of their board. The idea took off there, and later, as Google's use of OKRs became more public, OKR's popularity increased with adoption across many Silicon Valley companies and then adoption globally. OKRs continued to evolve with adjustments such as:

• Emphasis on objectives to be ambitious - the stated purpose of this is less about gamification or moonshots (although no doubt managers at Google experimented with both a mix of happy accidents and detriments) and more about encouraging lateral thinking. This is the primary benefit of stretch - there’s no consequence to falling short - but by starting with a goal which, to begin with, is not completely known how it may be achieved, there is an exploration of adjacent and lateral opportunities. How able and supported teams are to explore options should inform whether to apply this approach.

• Emphasis on focus—the guidance is for fewer objectives (2-4) and key results (2-4). As a constraint that encourages explicit agreement on what will and will not be the focus.

• Failure is acceptable and an opportunity to learn. OKRs are particularly popular among software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in highly competitive contexts. Teams in these companies hypothesise, generate options, choose a change to experiment with, make the change, observe the impact, and adjust.

• Achieving less than 100% is not a failure—usually, 60-70% would be considered a success.

• Focused on a mix of focus, motivation, and alignment.

• Most examples were not defined as outcomes but as activities.

• Most key results were also outputs or activities, rather than measuring leading indicators that may provide evidence of progress.

As I have written, the structure of John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters was brilliant in introducing the concepts and variations of how OKRs were being applied in various companies. In other ways, it set OKRs on a course that has caused countless company issues and contributed to confusing the application of them usefully. This post covers my complicated relationship with this book:

In my post, I reflect that the book's form of surveying practices across companies was good for introducing how OKRs may be relevant for your organisation. Still, it does not suggest that every example reflects how the author would recommend it be implemented. Of course, not to be completely exonerated, John also provides plenty of poor examples based on today’s standards.

Unfortunately, Measure What Matters also popularised various practices that don’t have heartfelt supporters today. The football team example captured the imagination of people intrigued by OKRs. You might have seen it do the rounds in various forms over the years. It's an example illustrating a cascading model using a purely synthesised example. No football team has worked this way.

From this excerpt, John raises some issues and risks with cascading in the book (2 of 4 are listed here). However, many reformulations of this example, such as this version below, mememetically caught fire across blogs and social media sans the calls for caution. Many shallow book readers will swear that this is how OKRs should be implemented despite the author providing 4 reasons why it will likely not work.

The simple promise of alignment must outweigh the mind’s usual defences because all it takes is one enthusiastic leader to see this example, even in otherwise deep-thinking organisations. One can find themselves on a futile quest for a few quarters to discover what can be gleaned from a little more consideration. So stubborn and sticky, this concept persists today despite consistent warnings of its folly, such as this post by Felipe Castro.

Noah quoted a Christina Wodtke post from 2016, referring to OKRs cascading. Christina Wodtke addressed and evolved her thinking on cascading, captured in a post she wrote in 2020. Christina still calls it ‘cascading’, but from the post, it’s clear that how this is approach is consistent with what Felipe described as ‘aligning’, and that is the terminology I prefer, given the implications of one approach to the other.

Itamar Gilad, former Google Product Manager on Gmail and Youtube, and author of OKRs Done Right and ‘Evidence-Guided: Creating High Impact Products in the Face of Uncertainty’ has shared that within Google (now Alphabet) over the years, the approach to using OKRs shifted from the fairly output and activity style examples that dominate Measure What Matters to more outcome-oriented objectives with evidence supporting an aligned understanding of what successful progress would be. It’s a massive organisation with many sub-companies, so I am sure there’s plenty of variance there, too.

All of these methods have some common risks.

• Employees become overly focused on quantitative measures.

• Forgoing other priorities that are important for the correct functioning of the organisation.

• Using the team's goals as reasons to not cooperate with other teams, even when doing so, may serve the organisation.

Investing in improving the organisational capabilities for decision-making and using evidence for decisions goes a long way toward addressing these issues in most instances. The benefits are a reduction in the highest-paid persons’ opinions prevailing (HiPPO) and other biases having outsized effects.

OKRs in 2024

Let’s move forward to the recent decade, and OKRs continue to evolve. People’s writing, sharing, experimentation and thinking of people (books, posts, videos and other formats), such as those I’ve collected on this list of people who I call ‘outcome thinkers’, many of whom have shaped and evolved OKRs in recent years. Many practitioners, coaches, or others who are in influential positions to guide organisations in OKR adoption, see what is working, and try to improve the approach.

This has seen the following shifts in thinking on OKRs and with a surprising degree of convergence. Hey, a surprising degree of convergence aside, I still write posts poking at continuing areas of divergence, such as my recent post:

The areas where OKRs have evolved in the last decade:

• Align, don’t cascade goals—think ‘eventual consistency’ over time rather than force fit within a single period. When leadership provides sufficient context to their teams, the teams are in the best position to assess when to align and when they may have other commitments that put organisational or critical service health at risk.

• Objectives are strictly outcomes—I’ve written extensively about this in this publication. Check out the ‘Goal-setting & OKRs’ section for more posts addressing objectives as outcomes. Note: most examples from MBOs and early examples of OKRs were not outcomes. They were mostly examples of outputs or activities.

• Key Results are leading indicators of success - think evidence of progress. Another topic I’ve covered extensively in this publication.

• Use in concert with KPIs / SLOs - OKRs are focused on change, but against what baseline and improving towards what? How do we know we are sustaining any positive change that was achieved? You can build a common understanding around both what you are changing and what you are sustaining.

• Multi-directional alignment rather than top-down setting - the reality that a lot of information in organisations is far clearer when the work or the interactions with customers are happening than where senior leadership are positioned. Aggregation and movement of information have a natural dampening effect. There’s a lot to be gained by effort across the organisation to be clear about what teams are striving to achieve and to sense-check this is understood, not only between management and team but between every team.

• Teams write their own goals but evolve in response to other teams’ goals. Write Shared Goals between teams if it helps with alignment, agreement, and cooperation. Form a virtual team if needed. Have a committee adopt an OKR if that’s where the leverage is.

• Scrap/update goals when you learn they are wrong - there were quite a few references to being locked into OKRs. Most influential OKR bodies of knowledge by experienced practitioners will encourage abandoning OKRs when learning informs they are irrelevant or impractical to achieve. Sure, there’s the potential for sunk-cost fallacies, but that’s true regardless of the approach to work. How often that happens is more a function of culture.

• Use a persistent model to see where the current goal applies leverage in a causal tree of relationships (see Results Maps, Bet trees, Goal Trees, Current Reality Trees/Future Reality Trees, Opportunity Solution Trees, and many more variations. One could even argue some of the same information is contained within Hoshin Kanri) and update the persistent model with what you learn. Use the persistent model for faster goal-setting.

• Coherent higher-level goals - organisational and team goals, departmental or other organising factors in larger organisations.

In the next post, I will address the next potential reason for the disconnect:

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My former colleague, current co-host, and collaborator on the CTO Life Line monthly livestream discussion show, Noah Cantor, is learning about OKRs. As part of his learning quest, he asked the LinkedIn community whether his concerns with OKRs were warranted. This led to a wide and varied response from the LinkedIn software product development community and beyond.

You can read Noah’s conclusions based on what he has learned thus far about OKRs. Oof, it doesn’t sound good for OKRs. Is he right?

In short, Noah applies a systems thinking lens to OKRs. From what he has learned about OKRs, he feels they are incompatible with systems thinking principles, and conflicts with those principles cause destructive conflicts in the organisations implementing OKRs.

I find this position hard to reconcile with my own experiences working in and with companies using OKRs, and I have some theories about why this is. I expect this will be a more civil disagreement than the recent diss track arms race between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. This is not a defence of OKRs. There is plenty of bad in the history of OKRs and in how many companies deploy them today. OKRs are not the best approach to goal-setting and performance measurement; they are just the most popular. You will find significant criticism of OKR aspects in this publication and coverage of how these are evolving.

My theories about the disconnect are as follows:

1. It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.

2. The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.

3. It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.

4. How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

5. There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.

For my extensive experience with OKRs, I used OKRs as a starting point for goal-setting and performance measurement in organisations where I’ve worked because there was awareness of and interest in OKRs and because some properties of the format of writing goals separate from their evidence of being satisfied appealed to me. I have detailed some of the changes and enhancements that were necessary to make OKRs useful in our context in this post:

Who knows—maybe these changes are so significant they should be called something else? OKRs not being a formal standard is quite neat because there’s less friction in adjusting and improving them as needed, much like other agile practices.

I’d say I am more influenced by concepts from the PUMP performance measurement framework and even ideas from the Theory of Constraints than from the chequered history of OKRs. Various improvements we applied were inspired by ideas from these and other sources and the work and experiences shared by the many people globally experimenting with OKRs. I’ve found it useful to understand the history of the choices in how different organisations apply various methods, frameworks, and other ways of working, so I will use that lens in this post. It also helps identify aspects of OKRs that are being criticised but may have fallen outside of what is generally considered good practice.

In terms of my experiences with OKRs, I’ve worked with coalitions in several organisations, where we adapted and evolved the approach in collaboration with the teams, creating valuable software products. I’ve also helped other organisations with their efforts to use OKRs. I am not an OKR coach, but plenty of good people can help you with OKRs, such as my friend Tim at OKRQuickstart (disclosure: I work with some of Tim’s clients as a CTO coach).

I have written a lot about OKRs, less about interest in the framework per se (I think there are better ones), but because I am interested in what it takes to have an understanding between two or more minds and what it takes for the mental models of those individuals to be aligned. That is, there’s no friction created because one or more parties didn’t know they were misaligned.

Plenty of organisations ‘hire’ OKRs for the wrong purpose. Some do so to manage the work, some to manage the people, and some to create strong ‘soft’ incentives. These are poor reasons to hire OKRs, and they would be ‘Management Malpractice’. The best use of OKRs is for multi-directional alignment.

Comparing notes with others on similar journeys, two things were obvious:

1. No two organisational situations were the same. The imperatives of the organisation and its shape influenced what it needed to do to address frictions of alignment - i.e. groups of people with agreement on what they were trying to achieve and understanding between groups on what each is trying to achieve.

2. There was some convergence of OKR practices, which emerged under similar conditions. Genuine cases of Multiple Discovery.

With an emphasis on agility and learning, we experimented and adapted to find a fit for what helped achieve the degree of alignment and sufficiently reduced the friction associated with misalignment. Similarly, I write about OKRs because I am interested in goal-setting and performance measurement, and OKRs are the most popular approach. Less popular, more consistent approaches may be superior (PUMP, 4DX, etc.)

I think I will learn more from this exchange with Noah about the potential implications and risks of OKRs and how they are applied, as well as a deeper understanding of systems thinking. Noah may learn more about the current state of OKRs, and it will be interesting to see whether doing so strengthens or weakens his conviction. We all may learn how to improve how we approach work, whether with OKRs or otherwise.

Making OKRs work

Noah included a great section in his post that suggested ways to make OKRs work. I agree with some of the suggestions here and highlight that some of these suggestions feature in most of the OKR Guides written by experienced practitioners.

I agree with his recommendation that using a Goal Tree is beneficial. This is one of the fairly strong consensus areas amongst the practitioners. You can find examples if you work through my list of outcome thinkers. Check out the list of influential group I’ve collected on this list of people who I call ‘outcome thinkers’

The details differ a little - but the core concepts are quite consistent:

• John Cutler talks about persistent models.

• I’ve also written about this a few times, including a quick survey of approaches I’ve observed in use to complement OKRs.

• Tom Kerwin describes use of the Multiverse Map and Adaptative Triggers.

• Daniel Schmidt writes about persistent models as CEO of a company who has implemented a tool supporting dynamic, data-linked persistent models.

Noah takes exception to goals at the organizational and team levels and the definition of multiple goals out of concern for conflict arising. I suspect this is more of a difference in terminology across different fields. OKRs are not particularly precise about what is defined as a goal, and most of the time, what is described as a goal at the team level might be more akin to necessary conditions one may find in a goal tree that contributes to the organisation’s higher-level goals. I wrote a bit about how this is approached here:

I am not convinced that organisations always have a single goal, but absolutely less is better, and if it can be one, it is best. But don’t reduce to less than what needs to be described in the environment. There are dynamics in businesses that can be articulated as enduring goals with relationships between them. For instance, attitudes toward regulatory requirements may shape an organisation’s choices, as might the intent to sell a business. The purpose or structure of an organisation can dramatically shape how it views success. Not-for-profit, purpose-driven organisations, subsistence-level family-run operations - these all have gravities that can be expressed as goals that relate to the other aspects of the business. Its attitudes to its employees, and so on.

So, as I covered, these factors make finding common ground difficult until we work through some of the following issues:

1. It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.

2. The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.

3. It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.

4. How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

5. There are terminology differences between disciplines, such as inconsistent definitions of goals, objectives, and outcomes.

With these addressed, we might still conclude that OKRs are Management Malpractice, but to conclude without addressing these will be difficult without discussing cross-purposes.

I will discuss each in a dedicated post over the next short while.

In the next post, I will explain why it’s:

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As I have covered in this publication, there is no formal standard for OKRs. I do not suggest that creating one would be an improvement; only to explain why there is significant variation in how OKRs are defined depending on which reference you review. The growth in popularity has seen an increase in OKR tools (or other task management tools adding on OKRs as a feature). As a result, tool vendors create versions of OKR documentation, and each varies in detail. I cover this more here:

On first inspection, the different documented versions of OKRs seemed fairly similar. If you examine the details closely, you will detect significant differences representing substantially different implementations.

The differences you will find across the popular OKR references include:

• The number of OKRs recommended to be set.

• The number of key results for each objective

• Whether they are set top-down by the leadership, bottom-up by the teams or collaboratively.

• The frequency they are set.

• Whether to set at multiple levels in the organisation.

• How publicly they are shared.

• To be cascaded or aligned

  • i.e. Are the objectives inherited from higher-level goals, with a team inheriting the key result of their department or organisation as their team-level goal within the same period?

  • Or is there more flexibility for teams to set their goals, informed by other goals in the organisation, but choosing to align with those organisational goals in the way and timing that make the most sense in their situation?

• Whether key results are activities or measures.

• Whether objectives should be outcomes or outputs.

One of the differences I will explore in this post is the recommendations for the number of OKRs for a team per period. A few years ago, I maintained a table of sets of OKR documentation and some of the key differences. Since then, the growth in tools and documentation sets has made this information asset difficult to maintain, and I eventually abandoned the effort.

So, instead, I asked a few AIs for the most common guidance. They all concluded that 3-5 Objectives were the recommended amount, consistent with my past research and what I recommend to teams I work with. I pair this with ‘less is better’. While this is the most common recommendation, you will see a variety among the many OKR documentation sets. 2-5 is also quite common. Other goal-setting approaches recommend less.

For instance, 4DX (The 4 Disciplines of Execution) recommends setting 1-3 ‘Wildly Important Goals’ (WIGs)—i.e., what must be done. If not achieved, these goals would make other successes matter less. 4DX also recommends starting with one WIG.

Depending on the context, I may also recommend starting with a single goal with teams. Suppose the team struggles with focus and the choices that must be made to ensure progress on the most important goal. In that case, I will likely recommend focusing on a single goal while establishing the habits and discipline needed to maintain focus. In other situations, teams may struggle with important tradeoffs or balance between important goals more than the discipline of acting on goals. In these situations, I recommend setting multiple goals representing the different outcomes they must satisfy.

What do OKR thought leaders advise on the number of objectives to set?

Some other thought leaders in the OKR community have made similar recommendations - here are a couple of examples:

In her post ‘One Objective to Rule Them All’, Christina Wodtke, author of ‘Radical Focus: Achieving your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results’, Christina goes well beyond recommending a single goal, instead going into why companies end up with too many goals and a strategy for moving beyond departmental goals to find the imperative for the whole organisation. It is a great read and is not dogmatic about setting a single goal but more strongly advocating ‘less is better.’

Allan Kelly, author of ‘Succeeding with OKRs in Agile: How to create & deliver objectives & key results for teams’ in his post ‘How many OKRs should a team have? ‘ gives a range of 1-5 and a good rationale for why ‘less is better’. He shares that the usual is probably 3 or 4, and 6 is probably too many (“You should be able to count the number of OKRs on the fingers [of] one hand”).

As a confounding example, Ben Lamorte’s post ‘How Many OKRs Should You REALLY Have?‘ surveys several approaches to the number of OKRs, including references to Christina Wodtke. Then he settles on 2-6 Objectives and 1-20 key results! (the larger number of Key Results comes about if you apply the idea of Milestone Key Results).

What are the benefits of a single objective?

The most significant benefit of setting a single objective within a period is focus. Multiple goals add more decisions about what to prioritise, which is already a challenge as OKRs represent a change that teams are trying to bring about for the organisation. A change can be seen to compete against the work operating the organisation as it is.

With each additional goal, the challenge of prioritisation increases. Time is sliced thinner to account for each additional goal. There is a natural pressure as organisations begin their goal-setting journey to add more goals. This is often driven by the fear of individuals and departments not having the work most pertinent to them represented by the prioritised goals. There is often a push for a fair spread of goals for all departments, which can lead to an explosion of goals and a loss of the desired focus.

For teams newer to managing work with goal-setting, it can be helpful to reduce this challenge by setting the least amount possible, where possible, a single goal.

What are the benefits of having multiple objectives?

Whether it's new teams or teams experienced with goal-setting, fewer goals are better if they adequately represent the organisation's imperatives. The challenge with limiting to a single goal is that there are often scenarios where it is inadequate to describe what the organisation must achieve.

This can be for a few reasons.

It may be possible to consolidate multiple goals into one goal; however, this can lead to a few challenges:

• Goals become less clear or even complicated.

• The goals may end up as a conjunction, i.e., we must achieve [A] AND [B]—in this case, these would be better as separate goals, each with its evidence of progress towards achieving (Key Results).

Another more nuanced challenge is the value multiple goals can have in interacting with each other. The relationship between goals can communicate something even more meaningful and can help teams consider tradeoffs or identify solutions that meet the needs of more than one goal.

An example may be team goals, which may look to introduce a change in how they deliver. They may also need to improve their protection against cyber risks. In some situations, these two goals may lead to conflict where certain paths for achieving efficiency may increase cyber risk, and some options for addressing cyber risk may introduce more inefficiency.

Having explicit goals allows teams to discuss and identify options that address both. Rather than trade one against the other, it involves considering options that could satisfy both.

In summary, if you can define a single goal that adequately describes the imperative for an organisation or a team, then do so. If doing so compromises accurately representing the organisation's needs, then consider multiple goals. However, remember that ‘less is better’, and the drive for more may not come from organisational imperatives but from a fear of missing out.

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Welcome to new subscribers to ‘Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes’ who may have discovered this publication by way of Hacker News where this post featured for a day or so:

Improving OKRs

In this post, I cover a variety of adjustments and other complementary practices that can enhance the results you can achieve with OKRs.

This is my most popular post on OKRs but by no means my only post on OKRs. Readers who came here via this post, I assume your experiences with OKRs is why it caught your attention.

It may be helpful to provide you with a summary of what I have covered in terms of OKRs.

Avoiding common pitfalls with OKRs

For many organisations, their journey with OKRs started with someone reading the book or, at the very least, excerpts from ‘Measure What Matters’, the first popular book on OKRs and a very influential tome to this day.

What is important to note is while this book does a great job introducing people to the concepts of OKRs and shares how they have been adopted across a variety of companies, it also managed to popularise several practices that are now widely agreed to be OKR anti-patterns. It's worth reading to avoid these pitfalls.

Following a similar theme, the next most popular post goes deeper into crucial differences in the implementation of OKRs. These differences may appear subtle but can have enormous ramifications for the effectiveness of OKRs.

In the haste to get OKRs in place, it can be tempting to apply OKRs as a process layer over the top of what is already in place. This can sometimes make OKRs more of a bureaucratic chore than an enabling alignment tool.

In addition to the posts focused on identifying and avoiding pitfalls with OKRs, I have also described the practices we found most compelling.

For instance, as organisations often use OKRs to improve alignment (i.e., less friction because people are pulling in the same direction at the same time), the ideas in this post can be applied in the place where alignment begins: at the leadership level.

Much of the variation in how OKRs are approached is due to OKRs being an informal practice that each reference documents differently. There’s a proliferation of references as the gold rush of OKR tool providers led to each providing their documentation for OKRs. The quality varies greatly, and harmful practices, against which there is ample evidence, are perpetuated.

It may seem I am against OKR tool providers, but I am not. They have their place in helping organisations scale OKRs.

I do not recommend companies start with an OKR tool. To do so encourages spreading OKRs wider before succeeding with a pilot first and also solves a problem the organisation doesn’t have yet.

If teams using OKRs don’t value alignment, spend time on it - installing a tool to optimise further doing OKRs sends a reinforcement suggesting the organisation doesn’t value this time either.

Thinking in terms of Outcomes

Of all the ways to address the pitfalls covered in the posts above, one of the most impactful is to focus on defining objectives as outcomes and key results as evidence.

To do the opposite is to allow objectives and key results to be activities, i.e., your project plan is just in a new format. I cover what we lose when we take this approach here.

Writing goals that improve alignment

Organisations use OKRs to address a range of challenges. Of these, the most helpful problem OKRs can help address is alignment on common goals, which helps people be available and focused on making progress together.

If the inputs into OKRs come from a misaligned leadership team, any use of OKRs is off to a dreadful start and will show up quickly as issues. This post starts with the alignment of this critical group.

A method to test a leadership group's alignment is to test their thinking on the existing initiatives that are already running. This post covers how you can run such a session and is well-tested with executive teams.

To do this well it helps to have good fundamentals. Writing a well-formed goal is a good skill to establish with anyone adopting OKRs.

To extend this thinking to key results involves considering each key result as evidence of progress to achieving or not achieving the goal.

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I saw this tweet earlier this month, and whilst I think there’s an element of seeking some Twitter clout from the polarising framing, it is undoubtedly based on his experiences. I’ve witnessed similar bureaucratisation of OKRs, business canvases and other popularised practices that seek clarity on what is to be achieved.

https://x.com/ChrisJBakke/status/1724835226000539666?s=20

It’s common for things that either work well once or even seem like a good idea to be suggested to become part of the process. Some work environments overuse processes as the primary means of achieving consistency. There are many alternatives to using a process.

What are OKRs for?

OKRs are, in the first instance, just a format for describing an outcome along with some measurable ‘points of agreement’ that can help with alignment by giving concrete examples of what is believed to represent progress towards achieving the goal.

For an organisation or a team, it is an expression of the current goals and a means for alignment—an agreement amongst a group of people and a concerted effort to agree in writing.

By being explicit about the focus, there is an opportunity to use this focus as a filter, a discussion point on whether a given activity is likely to help progress towards the goal. It’s a discussion as a few goals may not cover all possible work that needs doing, but it’s an excellent lens to use, especially given how common it is for a team to have more work than it has the capacity to do.

Writing and tracking OKRs is a process of sorts but can be a model describing what they aspire to achieve over the longer term. I say model because its not there to function as mandatory steps to follow but as an artifact that is known to be valuable and can help trigger the right discussion and decisions.

The act of setting and tracking OKRs might be a handful of hours per month; this might be enough to consider it an overhead, but when used well it can save that team tens or hundreds of hours:

1. through the work, it helped them deprioritise to remain focused.

2. by having a way to track progress towards achieving the goal and the faster pivots, understanding progress sooner.

If a team has an equally effective method to achieve the same, then the redundant OKR process of the organisation may seem like overhead. That’s a valid concern and a good debate to be had about whether, for the organisation’s context, there’s value in the consistency or not. The answer can differ for different organisational contexts.

Where might OKRs become a bureaucratic process?

Many organisations use OKRs in a less strict form, describing an action and a few related measures. It is not many steps from here to start to suppose that any significant activity might need an OKR drafted as a condition to meet to be allowed to proceed.

And this is precisely what happens. Sometimes formally or sometimes through assumption or imprinting of behaviour. People start to expect that a new OKR needs to be drafted. Sometimes, it’s mandated in the process itself. For instance, it becomes mandated in the project initiation process or as part of a prioritisation process. This seems to echo the experience cited in the tweet above. People may gain political capital over time by doling out this seemingly sensible advice.

By entwining OKRs in the activity layer of getting work done rather than in the investment in alignment and orientation, it becomes just another process step and ceases to provide most of the benefit.

How OKRs can be leveraged as directional context

If OKRs represent a present focus and describe an outcome, then any activity can be considered in the context of the current set of OKRs. If the activity represents a path to achieving the goal the friction for considering commencing in this direction should be low, especially if it represents the agreed best path for reaching the goal. Suppose an activity addresses a vital hygiene factor that needs correction to help the business maintain its standards. In that case, this is work that is a candidate to proceed with. Making someone draft a new OKR for this would be unnecessary red tape.

If the work represents a vital change of strategy, then it would be worth discussing amongst the team whether it is so vital that it is worth abandoning the current goals and shifting to the new focus. It’s probably worth spending time aligning on this new work to ensure the team is aligned on what needs to be achieved. Depending on the urgency and how well the goal is understood, this might be done via writing a new OKR. Very urgent and well understood might use a more expedient method. For instance, a significant incident might already be captured clearly - there’s little value in shifting this to an OKR format.

At their heart, OKRs are a simple method of synthesising a collective view of a goal. They are a summation of conversations and also a reference point for conversations. You might achieve something similar with a memo or other long-form prose. You might achieve it by having a conversation or documenting requirements. Some approaches will suit some contexts and situations better than others.

If the goal has changed because of some event or something you learned then you can discuss what has changed and then encapsulate how it has changed by how you update the goal.

If you find the OKR approach is not valuable in a situation, it's again worth a conversation amongst the team about what might be a better alternative. That might be simply talking about what is required to be done and then doing it.

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Measure What Matters introduced Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to the masses and should be lauded for this contribution. On the other hand, it also provides many examples of OKR practices that have since proven less effective than alternatives. The book’s popularity, combined with the assumption by many readers it is a ‘how-to’ guide, has led many astray when they follow examples from the book too closely. Thus to vilify or revere the book, it's a tricky question.

I became critical of the Measure What Matters book once I formed the opinion that Objectives should reflect Outcomes and not Outputs or Actions. This was a conclusion I reached after a significant period of working with our teams using OKRs and some inspired suggestions from some clever colleagues. I also experienced first-hand the benefits of aligning OKRs over cascading them.

I have softened my view on my second reading of the book much more recently. Not on the aforementioned principles but I am more sympathetic to the book's place in history and it's approach. Measure What Matters served a purpose, and the credibility and authority of its author, John Doerr, helped build the awareness of OKRs to where it is today.

The book's structure was mainly around how several well-known organisations were using OKRs, which influenced many of the examples. Given its popularity, it seems in part that structure resonated. People respond to learning what other successful organisations use.

As a 'how to', that structure is less helpful unless you carefully consider the book in this context. By this, what I mean is that you must look at each example to reflect where those organisations were in their journey at the time and not necessarily as examples of ‘best practice’. Personally, I've been more influenced by the writing of Wodtke, Castro, Cutler, Barr, McCarthy and others when it comes to the leading edge of OKR best practices.

The ease of implementing OKRs is impacted by the number of bad examples available for reference. I believe the volume of bad examples is partially a function of OKR tool companies and the content they produce as much as any other source. They may have been influenced by content in Measure What Matters, but they are mostly influenced by the vast majority of users of their tools who are looking for an easy path to ‘doing OKRs’ which, as I cover in the following post, is a decent indicator you aren’t up for the commitment needed to focus on outcomes:

The evolution in books on OKRs is a shift to addressing the practical concerns of implementation. For instance, Allan Kelly’s book ‘Succeeding With OKRs in Agile’ focuses on how OKRs are used with agile practices. The topic is focused and practical and addresses many questions about getting the most out of OKRs in their context.

I think it’s fair that some clear disclaimers be public and at suitable levels of awareness regarding the strengths and weaknesses of Measure What Matters fitness as a guide for implementing OKRs. But if it's a choice between criticising a work that helped bring awareness to a helpful approach to goal-setting or sharing what we have learned about using OKRs successfully, I choose the latter.

Suppose we want the awareness of what practices work best in each situation. In that case, we must put more, higher quality examples into the public domain and show the value of these more disciplined approaches.

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There’s a form of OKRs described in Measure What Matters which is often repeated in blog posts about OKRs and in the pulpy documentation found in the documentation OKR tool vendors publish. OKRs are not a formalised method so as I’ve written before, OKR documentation includes significant variation causing confusion. The positive side of this is there’s lots of experimentation on how to improve.

At its simplest, it’s 2-4 Objectives with 2-4 Key Results, often set quarterly by each team. Whilst the Objectives are often described as an outcome, the examples of OKRs that are provided usually indicate that what is meant by ‘Outcome’ is very loose and could mean ‘activity’, ‘output’ and very occasionally an actual outcome.

Quite often this approach to OKRs is paired with the nonsensical suggestion of cascading OKRs by using the key results of higher up in the organisation to be as the objectives of the next level down and so on for however many levels of hierarchy exist. I get the appeal, it feels like a neat path for alignment. It just stands up to more than a few moments of thought on what this actually translates to and whether that is valuable for the organisation.

So, what are the ways leading OKR thinkers are improving upon OKRs?

• Ensuring Objectives actually describe an outcome.

• Use a ‘truth statement’ approach to writing objectives, i.e., describe the goal as if it’s true in the future.

• The Objective should not have a numerical component.

• Define key results as symptoms or evidence of achieving the objective.

• Focus: Have as few OKRs as possible

• OKRs align rather than cascade.

• Pairing OKRs with a persistent model which includes longer-term goals linking up to the strategy and purpose of the organisation

• More explicitly reconcile work that brings about change and work that sustains an organisation.

Ensuring Objectives actually describe an outcome.

OKRs can support the empowerment of teams and allow them to take the responsibility of selecting the solutions which they believe may achieve the outcome.

Use a ‘truth statement’ approach to writing objectives, i.e., describe the goal as if it’s true in the future.

This format is inspired by examples of goals you often see in the Logical Thinking Process from the Theory of Constraints body of knowledge. It’s a simple-to-apply method for describing outcomes (often a tough challenge for those without practice) that’s easier to get the knack of.

The Objective should not have a numerical component.

Save these for the key results. This is becoming commonplace in most OKR documentation, but you still occasionally see bad examples which mix the goal and how it’s measured.

Define key results as symptoms or evidence of achieving the objective.

Examples of key results you see out in the wild can feature a broad range of measurable (and sometimes not really measurable) approaches to their definition.

A narrower approach which in my experience leads to more useful key results which are more likely to indicate real progress towards the goal is to think of key results as being symptomatic of achieving the objective or put another way, as evidence of making progress towards the goal. This again will suggest that putting activities as a key result such as completing some work or building something are bad key results and have the causal influence reversed.

Pairing OKRs with a persistent model which includes longer-term goals linking up to the strategy and purpose of the organisation.

The relationships represent the WHY behind the WHAT that the goals represent. They do this to provide their teams with more context and reduce the feeling of starting from a blank slate each quarter which can translate to lots of time wasted and less continuity. More sophisticated performance measurement frameworks such as PuMP use this approach (and many other improvements on how OKRs are typically implemented) and it’s an exceptional complement to any OKR implementation.

As Mallam Tamon puts it “Don’t brainstorm your OKRs”- work on being clear on the context. This work can be living documents which evolve as you learn through doing and be reflected in artefacts such as your Purpose, Vision, Strategy and the persistent model of relationships between enduring goals for your organisation which help articulate the rationale for why you believe achieving these will help realise your purpose.

Focus: Have as few OKRs as possible

Guidance for the number of objectives to define is often suggested as 2-4 or 2-5 for any given period. In my experience, an organisation’s ability to focus and still be effective can improve over time but to have success with OKRs, start as simple as possible. This can also inform how an organisation might adopt OKRs. Don’t start with all teams and lots of goals at different levels of resolution. You might evolve to that over time as you build up organisational competencies with OKRs but you are unlikely to have those competencies when you start.

When piloting it may help to focus on a single OKR to familiarise with the concepts and ways to instil OKRs as a practice into your organisation. I often suggest leaders ‘dogfood’ OKRs themselves and know what is involved before introducing OKRs more broadly. Important to know what is being signed up for and the level of commitment required.

Defining at least two OKRs is often the suggestion and I believe a great reason for this is to help think about trade-offs within your organisation. There’s always more than one important thing to trade off against or reconcile with organisations of any size and using OKRs to help make these explicit is a great benefit of OKRs.

OKRs align rather than cascade.

There are many examples online and in Measure What Matters which show how OKRs could cascade from the top of an organisation through the ‘levels’ of the organisation. A common approach suggested is for the key results of a higher-level objective to become an objective for a lower level. Many of these examples are contrived, such as the oft-cited OKRs for an American Football team.

Felipe Castro makes a great case that OKRs do not cascade with his central argument being the time it takes. He suggests a better way for all teams to set goals in parallel, allowing for bi-directional influence, for instance, issues which may be important to the organisation but at the coalface get the opportunity to be highlighted and inform the strategy.

This approach leverages the socialisation of goals to enable alignment and adjustment - an approach that can be done in parallel in a much more compressed amount of time. Paired with a persistent model the degree of alignment with the organisation’s purpose and strategic direction remains strong.

This also provides the opportunity for more meaningful learning loops throughout the organisation as objectives can remain focused on outcomes at all levels rather than being converted to output measures after the leadership level which is the result of the cascading approach.

More explicitly reconcile work that brings about change and work that sustains an organisation.

OKRs are generally focused on what is changing so it’s typical for the OKR work to co-exist with the work that typically helps the organisation function at its desired level of performance. This is often described as operational work or Business As Usual (BAU). Operational work is important, it’s usually about the organisation delivering the products and services it provides. BAU is one of those minimising ways of describing work so it’s not a term I like to use.

This work is often managed with KPIs which often get confused with OKRs and because they also involve metrics, they sometimes look like key results. KPIs typically define a threshold and whilst the values of a given KPI fall within this range they will be considered healthy.

OKRs, given they typically focus on change are usually leading indicators focused on shorter time windows and KPIs, which represent the health of what the organisation seeks to sustain, are usually lagging indicators focused on longer timeframes.

With persistent models or driver trees or similar relationships which also show the relationships between metrics, you can reconcile these two types of measurement. You can think of the change an OKR is helping you achieve as moving a KPI to a new, better threshold. You can also use OKRs for managing corrective actions when a KPI has fallen below the threshold that has been set.

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What improvements have you seen applied to OKR implementations you’ve been a part of? Share your examples in the comments.

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This activity is great for helping build familiarity and a common approach to drafting OKRs. It also frequently has some surprises which will be eye-opening for the team! More on how we can use that at the end of each ‘Part’.

I walk through each step of this activity on how to run it and get the most out of it. This is a tried and tested activity applied with many teams including multiple Executive teams.

Overall Activity time: 30 mins.
Audience: excellent for C-level or other leadership groups who use or are embarking on using OKRs.

Part 1: Drafting an objective for an existing initiative

Break into 2 or more groups (allow approximately 5 mins to the overall running time for each additional group) so that there are 3-5 members in each group.

Each group:

1. Spend 5 mins discussing an existing strategic company objective or initiative (try to select something already ‘in-flight’)

2. write down the outcome trying to be achieved.

3. As a group, draft a single sentence using the OKR format

Come back together as the whole group to compare drafts
What is similar, and what is different?

For the facilitator: It is very likely that the objectives each group drafted are quite different. The reasons they think the ‘in-flight’ initiative is being conducted may differ significantly. This can be very eye-opening for some, as there’s generally an assumption that everyone is on the same page. Reflect aloud on what might be the impact of this inconsistency on their teams or other teams being aligned on the goal.

Final step: Synthesise a new draft of the outcome together as a whole group.

Use this opportunity to make choices based on the variations in the objective drafts you reviewed. Decide which options or what logic are the consensus. What does the whole group agree upon about why we are doing this initiative?

Part 2: Drafting the key results for that same objective

Return into the two groups:

1. Now, write what might be examples of measures or evidence that we are making successful progress towards achieving this outcome. What would a symptom of succeeding be?

2. You can compare the options you have written in your group and select a final set (generally 2-4 key results) you are all happy with as a coherent set of Key Results to support the objective we wrote as the whole group in Part 1.

Come together as a whole group to compare and contrast each group’s drafts.

How similar or different are they?
For the facilitator: highlight contradictions and try to understand the root of these different perspectives.

Final step: Synthesise into a single set of key results that support the single outcome the whole group drafted.

Again, use this opportunity to use the whole group discussion to decide what is essential.

For the facilitator, it’s good to review the variance and the steps that were taken to reduce the conflicting understanding. The team should bring that veracity to setting the next set of objectives and key results.

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In an earlier post, I highlighted some key attributes for writing outcome-oriented objectives for your OKRs:

Today, I will focus on defining the properties of outcome-oriented Key Results to complement an outcome-oriented Objective.

Qualities of outcome-oriented key results

Here are some properties that can be useful to keep in mind when drafting the Key Results to support an outcome-focused Objective:

1. Key Results are symptoms or evidence of achievement of the Objective.

2. Key Results are leading indicators, where possible.

3. Key Results may build upon or qualify other Key Results.

4. Key Results help ‘triangulate’ the group’s shared understanding of the goal.

Key Results are symptoms or evidence of achievement of the objective.

The key results can enhance our understanding of the objective. We might be aligned if the key results stemmed from activities related to the objective. However, this leaves considerable room for misinterpretation, as the connection between the objective and these details is implicit. It is likely that achieving those outputs does not signify the achievement of the objective.

A great example often arises when a customer's (internal or external) satisfaction is low due to an issue with their experience. It’s usually easy to hypothesise a solution that might address the dissatisfaction, which may seem sufficient until you suggest measuring the improvement of customer satisfaction as the key result.

Measuring output based on a given solution leaves little room for adaptation—you’re likely a quarter away from realising you’ve failed. In contrast, using something more closely linked to the customer’s perception of their experience—the real impact you aim to achieve—allows you to test, iterate, and pivot your efforts throughout the quarter.

Key Results are leading indicators, where possible

It's harder to be definitive about this one as it depends on what you are doing to complement your approach to using OKRs.

Many organisations combine OKRs with longer-term goal-setting practices, sometimes implementing additional OKRs for extended periods, and at other times utilising KPIs or various organisational performance methods, such as the concept of Results from PUMP (a framework comprehensive enough to replace OKRs entirely), balanced scorecards, or a myriad of other options.

Assuming something like this is in place, you gain nothing by choosing leading indicators as measures. The advantage of leading indicators is that they can change quickly enough to provide meaningful signals during the quarter, which can help adjust your tactics and make better progress towards your objective.

Key Results may build upon or qualify other key results

A pattern I find helpful is to identify the most descriptive volumetric measure of achieving the objective. The ‘measure that matters’ is the thing that increases (or occasionally decreases) when you are making progress towards the goal.

Of course, most would be familiar with the potential for measures to lead to perverse behaviour, either gaming or making progress due to some other important aspect of the organisation. For instance, when sales are made that deliver low value for customers, just so a salesperson can reach their quota.

It’s helpful to establish additional key results that address qualitative elements reflecting both desirable and undesirable aspects of achieving the goal. For example, while sales are made, the value delivered remains high, and returns are either low or stable. Perhaps three complementary measures will help clarify what success is and isn’t.

Key Results help ‘triangulate’ the group’s shared understanding of the goal.

One characteristic that is entirely subjective but is good to keep in mind is to assess how well the combination of key results aids the group in triangulating their understanding of the goal. Are they providing enough specificity and perspectives for any member to accurately determine what constitutes (and does not) achieving the goal?

Those have been the four most helpful concepts for me and for teams I have coached when using OKRs to write Key Results for outcome-focused OKRs. Keeping these in mind will shift the types of measures you use and provide you with more useful things to monitor to assess if you are making good progress in achieving your goal.

Do you have any additional helpful tips you’ve used? Let me know in the comments.

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There are so many areas of our lives where we make the same faulty trade-off pictured above.

In our personal lives:

We’re too busy to do exercise today.

When we are healthy we are more productive.

I am sure there are many of us, including myself, who coach people on being aware of such trade-offs in the work situation only to struggle with similar trade-offs in our personal lives.

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In our work context:

We’re too busy to write unit tests.

We save time on every change now and into the future when we have a better automated test suite.

We’re too busy to talk to customers every week.

We are more productive when we build the right things because we know our customers well and waste less time building the wrong thing.

We’re too busy to write a better quality goal.

We spend more time during the quarter heading together in the right direction and can better course correct when we have a clear goal we all understand and smart ways to understand our progress.

And to be fair, more and more organisations have learned the above lessons. As a result, they addressed the imbalances that had led to poor quality, anaemic impact and the many other common consequences of compounded short-term decision-making.

An even smaller number of organisations have conquered this following frontier:

We’re too busy to do long-term planning.

We make winning choices when we consider the long-term. We can bring people on the journey when they can participate in the planning and understand the strategy.

When I say planning I mean alignment on the goals and the logic behind the ones we chose. How what we plan to do now links with where we want to be in the future and how we think we will get there ahead of the competition.

How this is currently manifesting in businesses which believe they are too busy to plan:

• They do plan, but they don’t address the strategy so they may execute successfully but still get routed but the competition.

• They plan their strategy but it’s not widely shared.

• They plan but they allocate negligently small amounts of time to it - “we’ve got 2 hours to get this year’s planning done”

• They don’t have approaches to co-create and evolve strategies with the “execution” teams.

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How is your organisation at long-term planning? How well is it communicated? Do any of the above scenarios apply to your business? Are there other scenarios I missed? Please share your examples in the comments.

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An essential aspect of OKRs is that they are deceptively simple in structure. This is part of the appeal: they are easy to draft and easy to consume. Of course, this simplicity is both accurate and misleading.

It’s easy to write something in the form of an OKR and get some benefit from it. However, crafting a good OKR that harnesses the potential to make a team more productive through their strong shared understanding of the goal is more challenging. The struggle of writing an effective OKR becomes evident later in your OKR journey. By that time, hopefully, you’ve recognised the potential of OKRs as a tool for alignment, which is clear and motivates you to elevate your approach.

One of the most important aspects of a goal's content is its focus on an outcome, which is part of the thesis for this publication. I argue this point in many of my other posts. This post explores how to draft a goal and offers some starting points for considering the attributes that a solid, outcome-focused goal should have.

How Do We Decide What to Set as an Objective?

This is a potentially massive topic and may become the subject of future posts. I would say that the pathway for how a potential objective is considered can vary. Some paths may lead a team toward an activity-oriented goal. For instance, sometimes it’s a leader approaching a team with an initiative or solution to tackle; sometimes it arises from research that has identified a customer problem, or it becomes evident when reviewing other opportunities; perhaps it's a solution that the team instinctively knows could provide value.

Regardless of where the inspiration for the direction originated, the task is to draft objectives and key results. This process involves engaging in dialogue with the broader business to negotiate a shared understanding of what the team aims to achieve.

Some of the opportunities brought to the team are solutions or activities, which may seem like a conflict, as we have already stated that the preference is for objectives to be described in terms of an outcome. Rather than viewing this as a problem, it offers us a fantastic opportunity. It provides a chance to ask questions and understand the outcome that is being pursued. This could help you frame the goal in terms of an outcome and better grasp what constitutes real progress and what other options for pivoting might exist. It may also reveal reasons to push for the proposed initiative if it doesn’t align with the organisation's desired effect.

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:

It is even better to build a causal chain or link it to a Results Map to see the complete set of connections and consider how you might test the key assumptions those connections imply. I cover these concepts in this post:

Attributes of outcome-oriented objectives

Here are several elements that can help with drafting an objective:

1. Objectives are Outcomes, not activities

2. Objectives represent a step-change

3. Objectives are ambitious

4. Objectives are accessible

5. Objectives are not measures

Objectives are Outcomes, not Activities.

Most importantly, the objective describes an outcome  for reasons established in ‘Thinking in terms of outcomes’ and ‘Subtle aspects of OKRs and their effects’. An outcome is most straightforward to write as a short description of something we desire to become a reality due to our work. You can think of it as the effects of our activity or the ends to our means.

An example we used in an OKR at one of my workplaces was ‘There are no critical security vulnerabilities’. Ideally, this would be a health measure for the business. Still, more than a few vulnerabilities had been identified, and it took a significant effort to get to a healthy state. As such, we set it as an objective for the company that all teams would align. At the team level, more specific goals contributed to us achieving that organisation-level goal.

Objectives represent a step-change

Suppose we are elevating some objectives to focus on for a quarter, to be ambitious, and to be transparently communicated broadly. In that case, it makes sense that we are choosing objectives that truly reflect a step-change from the current state.

Of course, there are always other things that we measure and improve 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. OKRs are not intended for managing all measurements in your business. If you are measuring something's health and whether it stays within a healthy threshold, consider using KPIs for managing this.

Objectives are ambitious

Teams in low-trust environments who continue to find it difficult to conceptualise OKRs as separate from an individual’s or team’s performance management will struggle with setting an ambitious target because they worry they may be perceived as failing.

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.

Suppose the team is working with OKRs framed as activities. In that case, this will also be challenging to grasp because it may be deemed a commitment to an estimate rather than 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 and other teams, leaders, and other parts of the organisation. This is another crucial 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 details 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. However, it is 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 and to provide evidence that the objective is true. Mixing these makes it likely that your objective is less likely to be an outcome and can introduce ambiguity between the purpose of the Objective and the Key Results.

Now you have an Outcome-focused Objective, You can Write the Key Results

There’s little point in discussing the key results until you are clear and aligned on the objective. Small shifts in the Objective could drastically affect what good key results for the objective would be.

If you’ve written an objective and followed the guidelines in this post, you are now in a great position to write some key results. You can find out how to do that in this post:

Follow me or this publication for more practical tips and tools for improving your organisational goal-setting and alignment efforts. In the comments, share your experiences and any feedback that could improve these posts.

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OKRs are quickly being adopted by many organisations and challenges are being quickly being discovered… or far worse, for some organisations, challenges are very slowly being discovered. Why is this happening?

OKRs are not a formalised framework.

In some ways, this has helped the rate of adoption as the basic format is simple and accessible. Some of the primers available for OKRs are very simple and consumable. The challenge with those resources is that the inherent complexity in using OKRs is largely ignored. The result is you only discover these challenges too late and find yourself without the material to support you through challenges. The nature of the challenges you may face typically may affect the impact you are achieving with OKRs or the successful adoption of OKRs more broadly in the organisation.

Another challenge that results from the lack of formalisation of OKRs is that many resources for OKRs will contradict each other. It’s common to see poor OKR practices being reinforced by OKR online resources which share those poor practices as gospel. A classic example is the practice of using Key Results of higher-level objectives to be the objectives for teams contributing to that top-level objective. The number of times I’ve seen people cite examples of this practice from some post they found on the web as their reason to do the same is alarming. That such materials are prevalent and have a sort of appealing woolly truthiness can create stubborn adoption of practices which may actively work against your organisation’s goals for adopting OKRs in the first place.

Examples of Key Results OKR documentation are inconsistent in terms of approach, format and structure.

What is documented on how to use and approach OKRs is inconsistent. Not just across different publications but also, more alarmingly, within individual bodies of knowledge! One glaring example, many resources will describe objectives as being reflective of outcomes but then give many examples that show objectives as activities expressing HOW you will approach a problem with very little context of WHY they may help you achieve WHAT you are trying to achieve.

For instance, an example of a poor objective in these resources might be something like “Build widget X”. Building stuff is an output - it doesn’t communicate what the effect of building this thing will be.

Other resources do something similar with key results - “Improve retention for Y, as measured by Building widget Z” - in this example we may have a better-articulated objective but no explicit understanding from its key result of how building something actually represents meaningful progress towards that objective.

The very large variety of ways to draft and assess key results makes it very hard to assess if progress towards achieving them is meaningful. If an objective was an outcome it follows that key results would be most descriptive of achieving that outcome if they were symptomatic of the outcome being achieved.

Most examples you could find invert the causal relationship where key results are measuring the output of activities with the presumption that completion of those activities causes the objective to become true. The ability to learn and adapt to this form is far more challenging because assumptions about those activities are baked in — you could be successfully achieving the activities but not making any actual progress towards your objective.

Common challenges found in OKR reference materials

Here are a few of the broad challenges that are present in many of the OKR resources you can find online:

1. OKR frameworks often don’t separately address WHY.
   Better alignment to a common understanding can further be achieved by not just agreeing on WHAT but also by understanding and agreeing on the WHY. For instance, choices that are made in trying to achieve a goal can differ depending on a person’s understanding of the logic behind why the goal is presumed to have the right impact the organisation is looking for. We know this from our own personal interactions in the world “if you had just told me why you wanted to do that, maybe I could have helped you better!” and this issue scales up with organisations.
   
   Much of the publicly available resources don’t address how to communicate the logic behind the OKRs we are setting. There are however many great OKR coaches who have approaches to doing this. I will address and help build a public resource on how this can be achieved in this publication, Focus on outcomes.
   

2. OKR frameworks often don’t separately address HOW.
   More recently some resources for OKRs have been sharing templates which have a separate area for potential activities (some refer to these as OKRAs - Objectives, Key Results, Activities) that are being considered to try to make progress towards an objective. I personally found this approach very helpful with teams I have worked with. Most resources do not use this approach however and as mentioned above, mix activities with both objectives and key results.
   
   Having HOW addressed separately rather than conflated with the Objective or the Key Results ensures better clarity. When WHAT is distinct from HOW and the signals of true progress are unobscured. We can get carried away with the satisfyingly misleading doing. Doing is important but also important is our economy of movement. We want to know as quickly as possible when what we are doing is not actually worth doing. Understanding what represents actual progress is critical to the efficiency in which we reach our objectives.
   

3. OKR frameworks don’t address planning in terms of outcomes.
   Often the desire to break down goals into more manageable chunks or address dependencies might lead a team back to the activities. This is due to common approaches such as Work Breakdown Structures or Dependency mapping tending to be task-oriented and away from thinking in terms of outcomes.
   
   OKR reference materials don’t do a great job of providing alternative approaches which are compatible with outcome-oriented ways of thinking. E.g. How do you manage the goals of different granularity and timeframes? How do you think about dependencies and relationships through the lens of outcomes? How do you align goals across teams in a larger organisation beyond grossly inadequate football team analogies?

In laying out some of the potential and some of the gaps and challenges with the multitude of conflicting OKR resources this hopefully establishes a leaping point for adding some rigour and other tools which could support better working towards outcomes. Note: there is no one true way or universal theory to cover all, I will share a variety of practices in use in workplaces across the world that in various ways look to address or improve on the situation. I will also share the approaches we found valuable over time and what we learned along the way.

Follow me here on Focus on outcomes by subscribing for free to continue on this journey. Please share your own experiences or areas where I can improve the clarity and accuracy of what I am sharing in the comments.

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 could OKR tools actually make adoption harder?

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.”

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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.

As I covered in OKRs are a powerful but incomplete idea there is no formalisation of the approach to OKRs. There’s significant variance in some of the fundamental concepts from source to source. It’s not always easy to spot because the most obvious elements are consistent - the basic form is that there are ‘objectives’ represented by a short sentence and there are ‘key results’ which describe a measurement, normally numerical. Peer a little deeper and the differences become stark and important. In this post, I will start to provide you with what to look for when assessing resources, references and consultative support you might need to engage to support you on your OKR journey.

But first, how did we get here? How is it possible there are material differences in the fundamental concepts of OKRs between resources? Well, some frameworks have publishing and consulting businesses behind them. Others have foundations and board structures and review structures responsible for maintaining and evolving standards. And thus usually there is a single reference source that drives consistency even if there are many consultancies adding their own flavour. For OKRs however, the adoption has been fairly organic and whilst there’s definitely been books published and consultancies springing up focused on OKRs, none have the central authority or consolidation to have influenced the same sort of consistency.

Difference #1: Outcome-oriented vs faux-outcome-oriented

The most significant diversion in approach to OKRs is in whether they are outcome-focused or not. Unsurprisingly this is a key concern for this publication Focus on Outcomes. One of the purported selling points for OKRs is that they support an outcome-oriented approach. The reality is that many examples of using OKRs found online are not focused on outcomes. Many OKR coaches fall short of this yardstick and most OKR tool providers present the same problem.

I am not dogmatic about this issue - I will concede there are scenarios where it may make sense to make an exception where an objective might be closer to being an action rather than an outcome. For instance, it sometimes will make sense to set a process goal, for instance, a common one might be making a quota of calls for a sales team. The exception is acceptable because we know the causal relationship between the activity and achieving a higher-level goal such as making more sales. But most of the time this is not the situation so in most cases I advocate that goals should describe the outcome or effect we are trying to achieve.

The gravity of this is easy to overlook as organisations still may find OKRs even when defined mostly around outputs/actions are a step forward for their organisation. The introduction of more transparency and regular cadences to inspect and review progress may address key issues for them and an area for potential improvement. Additionally, some of the cultural aspects of OKRs such as those expressed in this excerpt from Measure What Matters can be a positive shift for organisations:

Ideas such as ‘set goals from the bottom up’, highlighting ‘collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement’, ‘Dare to fail’ by suggesting ambition over conservatism in goals and reminding that goals are ‘a tool, not a weapon’ are all important principles which can help with the success of using goals in an organisation.

This approach falls short though as it leaves on the table some of the biggest potential benefits an organisation can derive from using OKRs. Namely to provide the clarity that people in organisations are looking for to be best empowered and able to connect to what the organisation is trying to achieve. Objectives that are defined as outcomes can provide this much better than output-oriented as I cover in:

Focus on outcomes

How popular approaches to OKRs sacrifice impact

As covered in ‘Thinking in terms of outcomes’ OKRs are not a formalised framework and as such many informal documentation of how it works and how to use them exist on the internet and in publications. There are of course other frameworks that cover similar ground which I will cover in future posts but for now, let’s start…

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6 years ago · Daniel Walters

Important history and key aspects of the concepts behind OKRs are captured in Measure What Matters. One thing that may have contributed to this situation is that in Measure What Matters (MWM), still likely the most influential book on OKRs, has shared many output-focused OKR examples. A possible reason for this is many examples from the book are from other well-known organisations such as Google and Intuit with real-world examples of OKR implementations and with the purpose to illustrate specific principles of OKRs.

We need to recognise John (who is also very upfront he is passing on wisdom acquired from Andy Grove) is a part of the history of OKRs being used in organisations. No doubt these organisations achieved significant improvement by the introduction of the concepts of OKRs. For instance companies such as Google, one of the companies John is credited with introducing OKRs to companies and Intel where Andy Grove is credited with introducing OKRs (referred to as iMBOs at that time). The varying quality of examples in the book needs to be seen in that light.

Since then there’s been a growing shift towards more discipline around ensuring OKRs are defined to be outcome-oriented. Organisations including Google where Doerr had the most publicity around the use of OKRs have moved in this direction. These examples have become to be viewed in a negative light by the part of the community (of which I am one) who believes, that, where practical, objectives should describe outcomes to be achieved. It’s possible that this has been a barrier for the group behind MWM has not emerged as the overall steer for the formalisation of OKRs. Or possibly they hold the view that a more flexible approach can help provide a more gradual learning curve, improving adoption and the finer points around defining goals to be outcomes are something that can come later, sort of a crawl-walk-run if you will.

I am a believer in crawling, walking and then running as well but I also like to know if there are better first steps to be taken. In this series, I will provide you with some factors which can enable effective navigation of the options for adopting OKRs. In future posts, I will cover what to look for in supporting resources, whether or not to use OKR tools, how to approach communications, what cadences and supporting practices can help enable successful adoption, and how to pair the WHAT of OKRs with the WHY, how to select 3rd party coaching support and much more.

In this post, I list some articles which I have found useful references to shape our thinking and approach to OKRs. Note: As I highlight in ‘Not all approaches to OKRs are the same’ OKRs are not a formalised framework and therefore there are many inconsistencies some of which I cover in detail in ‘How popular approaches to OKRs sacrifice impact’ so you will find some inconsistencies across these posts as well.

• 18 Things Your OKRs Shouldn't Do...

• OKRs do not cascade - Felipe Castro - OKR Consulting

• Making OKRs Easier…

• How to write great key results

• What is the difference between OKRs and KPIs? Which one to use?

• OUTCOME BASED ROADMAPS : Unleash the Power of a Shared Vision and Purpose

I will continue to add to this list over time. Let me know if you have any to suggest!