'Are OKRs Management Malpractice?' Part 3: The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.
'Are OKRs Management Malpractice?' Part 3: The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.
The growth in OKR's popularity attracts the certification industrial complex and tool vendors keen to cash in on the interest. Bad managers reach for easy fixes, a recipe for disaster.
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:
It’s hard to know which flavour of OKRs we are talking about.
The worst forms of OKRs may be the most popular.
It strongly depends on what you hire OKRs for—management vs alignment.
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 The care to follow to see what people and teams using OKRs are learning, and, as such, outdated advice is regurgitated and sometimes mutated.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:
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.