What do we lose if an Objective or Key Result is an activity?
What do we lose if an Objective or Key Result is an activity?
Its tempting to start with the solutions we have in mind and make them the goal or measure of progress. What is wrong with this approach?
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 exists 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 with the approach that has popular attention and is most likely what is adopted at your organisation, OKRs.
The alignment an organisation achieves by being ‘triangulated’ on the same common understanding of the initiatives they plan to undertake may be a significant benefit already. Teams know what each other are doing, it enabled leadership to have established some understanding with teams and leadership has indicated what they would deem success. But this would be to miss the potential impact OKRs or similar approaches to ‘Thinking in terms of outcomes’ could have for your organisation.
This is a common situation for many organisations using OKRs because there is a lot of variance in the advice given on using OKRs and the differences can be subtle. The lack of formalisation and the variation in approaches taken in how OKRs are structured, however, can present a few significant shortcomings which could leave the organisation being less successful and slower to achieve its desired outcome.
One of the most common variations which are exemplified in the majority of OKR publications is the practice of writing Objectives as an activity and similarly the practice of writing Key Results as activities. I’ve summarised the variations here:
With initiatives, projects and task lists being the dominant form of work structures in the past century it’s unsurprising that this is the most natural way to express ourselves. It feels the most effortless because for any problem we can express the first idea of a solution as a goal or output to measure. To do so immediately involves some significant compromises which I will detail further on.
From our experience learning to express ideas in outcomes can with practice move from an unnatural feeling experience to a fluid effort which illuminates more substantive questions about what is to be achieved, what uncertainties maybe exist and more examination of the options that may be available. With complimentary practices, which I will share in later posts, it’s possible to further reduce the effort required for quarterly goal-setting through connectedness with longer-term goals, but I digress and first, we must establish why the effort of thinking in terms of outcomes is important at the axiomatic level of a single objective and key result.
Objectives and Key Results all as activities
If both the Objective and the Key results are activities we are getting very little of the potential benefit of OKRs. There’s some transparency from the practice of publishing this ‘OKR’ but the actual content is quite opaque as it’s mired in implementation detail which is going to be more accessible to those with more context of how the work would be approached. It’s likely less beneficial as an OKR than publishing a project plan.
The likelihood of finding the shortest path for the work is diminished because a potentially powerful opportunity to identify unnecessary activity has been removed.
Objectives as activities, key results as symptomatic of the objective
If our objective is expressed as an activity we have immediately reduced the opportunity to be discussing what our problem was and options for addressing it. Even if the initiative identified was first conceived in the context of outcomes thinking, that it is separated from that context and reduced to measuring the output of the activity removes the opportunity for those closest to addressing a problem to engage the problem itself or when executing be able to adapt to signals that may suggest the solution is an imperfect fit for the problem.
The key results may be following the pattern of being symptomatic of achieving the objective i.e. a consequence of fulfilling the goal but the structure of the OKR is not validating that the objective itself fulfils the need (at least at the level of the team who could best use this information for their decision-making).
How quickly will the organisation identify that work is or is not addressing the need? When will decisions to double-down, pivot or cancel be made?
Objective as an outcome, key results as activities
This is a combination which has some nuance. Firstly there are aspects of executing on OKRs which I will cover in subsequent posts which suggest we will benefit from measures which may be leading indicators to enable early adaptation.
If we have a clear understanding of the WHY, WHAT and HOW of what we are trying to achieve (how to achieve this confidently covered in future posts) then it’s possible measuring the output of activity which you know is itself the best leading indicator of progress towards achieving the objective then it will make sense for this to be a key result. This would be known as a process goal. An example might be that a salesperson makes enough calls to their leads list — the force of logic suggests that if they are not making those calls then other results will not be met.
These sorts of key results should not be the norm — a pre-requisite to using a process goal should be a thorough understanding of the causal relationships to be confident this is indeed a process goal and not simply a vanity measure.
Note: This combination often inverses the relationship between key results and objectives by suggesting ‘if we do these key results’ we will achieve the objective. Again this nuance can be subtle to detect but the effects significant as the opportunity for learning is squeezed out of the day-to-day to an after-the-fact activity. The lessons from agile thinking; that of short iterative cycles for learning and adaption are lost.
Recommended: Objectives as an outcome, key results as symptomatic of the objective.
As we have seen, activities do not make for good objectives and activities are in most cases a poor way of understanding progress towards an objective. In my experience there is no case where expressing an objective as an activity is helpful as it removes the possibility of adapting should your hypothesis be flawed or progress is not up to expectation.
The only exception for using activities in key results in my experience is where your choice of measure may make sense to be what is known in Performance Management circles as a ‘process goal’ — a measure of a part of a process such as ‘number of sales calls per week’ where there is a clear causal relationship established, in this case, that a sales call is a dependency to achieving a sales conversion (for our made-up example, anyway). This is a sensible option therefore only in the instance where you know clearly the chain of causality of the area you are seeking to improve and this would be the uncommon exception case.
From here on in we are going to assume Objectives as an outcome, key results as measuring the objective, either directly or through symptomatic effects of fulfilling the objective. This is not unique practice to this publication (for instance see the work by Felipe Castro) but is an important difference from what unfortunately is currently the majority of OKR documentation.
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