'Are OKRs Management Malpractice?' Part 5: How practitioners and OKR experts recommend OKRs be practised is poorly understood outside those circles.

There's been an evolution of OKRs are recommended to be practiced over the last decade but this shift is more apparent within the OKR practitioner community than beyond.

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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?

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?