Set better objectives by starting with WHY

Informal goal-setting approaches such as OKRs don't provide much guidance on how to identify or refine goals. Here are some questions that helped us.

Photo by Max Ravier from Pexels

As I have shared in earlier posts ‘Thinking in terms of outcomes’ and ‘Why are OKRs popular?‘ the ideas involved in OKRs as the most popular goal-setting approach have a lot of potential and traction as an approach because it's deceptively simple and yet powerful. The drawback of OKRs is that as a goal-setting methodology it’s incomplete in terms of a guidance on the steps to deploy it successfully. Secondly, it’s not formalised i.e. there’s significant diversity in how it’s described and documented.

These two problems create a lot of ambiguity and variance of application which can distract teams from focusing on the clarity of objectives because they need to patch for gaps in the framework as they go and when they look for examples they find significant divergence.

To keep a mix of practical ideas you can use immediately and theoretical underpinnings of goal setting for this post I will focus on some key questions which we have found consistently useful for refining our understanding of why we are tackling any given goal and creating a powerful compliment OKRs which describe the WHAT by accompanying it with the WHY.

Inspired by the practice of ‘5 Whys Analysis’ here is a version that is somewhat ‘5 Whys’ on rails — i.e. we provide some more specific WHY questions which can help explore the WHY of an objective.

Once we have a draft or an idea of an objective we can test it with the following questions — the bolded headings are primary questions and the other questions clarifying questions for those primary questions which help elicit further useful detail (really helpful to work through in a small group of people invested in achieving the outcome).

Why are we doing this?

Let’s first examine how clear we are on the why of the objective in question. Don’t panic if it's unclear at first — subsequent questions will help tease out details and raise key discussion points for the group to help find agreement on what reasons are important and which are not.

1. Why is this important to our customers? Why is this important to our business?
   Most investments an organisation makes are for an outcome or desirable effect external to the business but not all — there will be objectives which mitigate risks, ensure a healthy financial position etc. But even internal goals often have consequences externally so it’s a useful exercise to examine these effects; if an investment had no observable effect beyond the organisation was it worth doing? 
   Organisations are rife with initiatives which are delivering improvements in areas that are not constrained.

   
   Sometimes the outcome of an objective is very much internally focused such as investing in efficiency. But just as a ‘5 Whys’ would illuminate some additional cause in the chain it bears scrutiny of internal goals to be asking “what will achieving this goal enable you to achieve?” Efficiency gain to enable achieving what? So even with a seemingly internally-oriented goal, we should look for what would be a positive impact on the audience who is core to their purpose.
   

2. Which of these is our strongest reason for doing this?
   It's not uncommon after working through the above questions to have identified multiple potentially competing reasons why you may need to achieve the objective in question. You may have already refined the objective in question through the discussions and clarifications these questions unearthed.
   
   It’s tempting to put forward all the reasons — ‘look we really need to do this we have x number of reasons to’ however this is not helpful when comparing against other objectives. The single strongest reason should be the point of comparison. Prioritising for impact is not maximised by prioritising an objective with a single significant impact behind something that has multiple less significant impacts.
   

3. Is this objective an outcome or an activity?
   The questions will yield useful results either way but by this point, it will be helpful if it's clear you have been discussing an activity to make sure this is framed instead as an objective. This will feel very hard if you are finding it hard to justify the activity should it not be the most useful investment towards the outcome that the organisation needs.
   
   In our experience, it's probable the activity is not a clear causal link to the outcome desired — something that initially can be an ego bump given the confidence we may have felt when a solution was identified.

Why are we trying to achieve this now?

Just because we identified something important to do and a strong reason to do it does not yet solve all prioritisation challenges. It's very likely across our organisation or within a given team we have identified multiple such opportunities. It, therefore, helps to ask ‘why now?’ — this question can elucidate what is the reason we are choosing to prioritise this particular opportunity.

1. Does achieving this help us achieve an impactful outcome this quarter? Does this help us achieve an impactful outcome for the future?
   Again, to help identify specifics these additional clarifying questions help frame our thinking. Sometimes it may be that achieving the objective has a very immediate positive impact on our chosen audience — maybe it addresses a problem for a set of customers or helps them achieve the desired goal more often.
   
   Other times it may be addressing an important pre-requisite for a larger more significant objective in the future. In later posts, I will share other techniques for how to identify such relationships between goals at different scopes or quantum or timescales but it's not uncommon for such relationships to become apparent when answering these questions.
   

2. What other opportunities are we trading off to do this?
   There are always other opportunities competing for limited time and attention. Every choice to invest in something is a choice not to do something else. Let’s have an explicit conversation about the things that won’t be tackled and ensure we are comfortable that this opportunity deserves to be prioritised.
   

Is our logic for why we are doing this explicit?

There are many different methods proliferating for identifying and often visualising what we know about why we seeking to achieve our company and team objectives. These include impact maps, opportunity solution trees, result maps, bet boards and many other variations.

These visual diagrams of relationships (and possibly prose-based approaches to the same thing) are an important part of the techniques which are the emerging practices which are in use but not quite with the ubiquity of agile practices, use of goal frameworks such as OKRs and other previously pioneering but niche practices which have now captured broader adoption.

It can be very powerful to pair the common formats for sharing OKRs with a visual description of WHY. If we have already had the discipline of keeping our OKR as WHAT we are trying to achieve quite separate from HOW we will achieve it (we share a list of potential solutions but ensure these are distinct from the Objective and the Key Results) then in combination with WHY we have a complete and clearly defined accounting of WHY, WHAT and HOW.

1. Can we show the logic of why our potential solutions progress us towards achieving our objective?

2. Can we show why this fits into the bigger picture?

It’s likely some relationships have already become apparent. Were we able to link activities to an internal outcome we needed to achieve? Were we able to link internal outcomes to an external outcome important to our customers? Were there outcomes at different timescales?

For now, it can help to roughly order these ideas in the sequence of what causes what. We will examine this process in more detail in a future post on causal chains which is a simple method for cleanly stepping through our logic.

How these links of logic connect it higher-level organisational goals can further help people from various vantage points in the organisation comprehend how this opportunity fits into the bigger picture. This linkage and understanding also can make the effort of quarterly goal-setting far easier once established, but I will share more on that in future posts.

Hopefully, you have the opportunity to put these questions into practice. If there is interest I am happy to share templates and workshop slides which can further ease incorporating this into your own organisational practices. Follow me here on Medium and comment below with your feedback and experiences.