Bottom-Up OKRs (Laddering)

Bottom-Up OKRs (Laddering)

What’s amazing about John’s story is that Intel’s rapid realignment happened before Slack. It happened before Google Docs. It happened before the Internet. One person raised a flag and created a spark around an OKR that focused an entire organization. This truly showed the power of a strong cascade.

Now, let’s talk about laddering and learn how OKRs can be either top-down or bottom-up. As we’ve seen, cascading is the way goals flow down from the top of an organization. Laddering is how goals work their way up from the bottom to the top.

As soon as a top-level OKR is communicated across an organization, don’t wait for your direct managers to cascade it down to you. That could take weeks or even a month – way too long for effective alignment. Get to work immediately by crafting your own OKRs that align with a top-level OKR.

In laddering, you align with an OKR from somewhere else in the organization. It doesn’t have to be a top-level one. A team can ladder to any other team’s priority in the organization – vertically, horizontally, even diagonally. This bottom-up approach to goal-setting can be inspired by an OKR one layer or even five layers above.

OKR example: Laddering

Let’s return to our educational technology company for two examples of laddering. The Tutor Team has taken on a cascaded Key Result to reduce the wait time to less than 5 minutes. And they see another way to help. It’s not explicitly listed in the top-level OKR, but it’s how the Tutoring team thinks it can reach more students.

They write a second Objective: Offer tutoring in Spanish and Mandarin.

This is an example of a ‘laddered’ Objective. And just like the cascaded Objective, the team will write their own set of KRs.

Let’s share another example of laddering so we can demonstrate how bold, top-level goals empower teams. You’ll remember that their top-level Objective is to provide 1:1 tutoring for every child. And they have these KRs:

KR1: Make tutoring accessible to anyone on desktop or mobile.
KR2: Insure wait times are less than 5 minutes.
KR3: A 1-hour session costs less than $50.

The software team is extra inspired by the first KR
KR1: Make tutoring accessible to anyone on desktop or mobile.

This software team thinks an AI-powered chat bot could help more students learn math, science, and reading concepts. AI might not be as high fidelity as a human tutor, but there are many tasks it can do well enough. That would help the company provide tutoring at a fraction of the cost, so they can afford to offer assistance to more parts of the world. So they craft a laddered Objective: Make tutoring accessible to anyone through a chat bot.

And they pair it with this set of Key Results:
KR1: Chatbot can answer the most popular questions for K-9 educational topics.
KR2: Chat bot receives more than 4.5 stars after each session.
KR3: Each session is less than $2 in compute costs.

This is a pretty bold idea. It wasn’t dictated from the top, but everyone can see how well it aligns with the company’s goals.

You want to write OKRs that empower teams to set goals that they deem important, while aligning with the top level goals. Laddering is one critical tool for achieving both.

So here’s the big takeaway for this lesson: Leaders are responsible for the quality of the cascade. And the rest of the organization is responsible for the quality of the ladder.