When is it Okay to Change an OKR?

When is it Okay to Change an OKR?

Inevitably there will be a time when you ask, “Should I change my OKRs mid-cycle?” There are three main reasons that might prompt that question.

When to change an OKR

1. The world around you changes

One example we can all relate to is a global pandemic. That’s outside our control. It’s definitely going to change the way many organizations operate.

2. New information emerges

When new information emerges that is significant enough to fundamentally reshape priorities. For example, a competitor releases a new product that threatens your market share. Or you manufacture a product that suddenly faces a recall. Or you lose a major client or donor. Or maybe your organization faces a legal hurdle.

The timing almost never aligns neatly with your OKR cycle. These are the circumstances when you need to ask, “Are the priorities we started the cycle with still our top priorities today?”

The bar for changing OKRs should be high. A bright and shiny new idea may not be a good enough reason for a shift mid-cycle.

We all know what it’s like when a headstrong leader with a big title changes priorities. It might feel impossible to say no to them.

Our advice: Let OKRs help you navigate that scenario. If you’re asked to consider swapping one OKR for another, have a group conversation.

Can the team honestly say, “Yes, this OKR will get us closer to our North Star Objective than the one we had before”? If the answer is yes, change the OKR. If the answer is no, stay the course.

3. New information makes a Key Result irrelevant

The third reason that OKRs might change midstream is that you’ve learned something early in the cycle that makes a KR – or even an Objective – irrelevant.

Let’s say you have an Objective to improve the efficiency of a product’s codebase. One week into the cycle, you learn that due to a larger product release, there’s a code freeze. That’s going to keep us from making significant changes during the cycle. Because of this, we can’t make progress towards our Objective. Not only that, other teams are affected too, because they own KRs from our Objective.

It’s time to revisit the OKR and to get alignment and collective commitment around how the OKR should change.

Changing OKRs can be tricky business. It’s important to look up, down, and across the organization to see how the change affects other teams, and have two-way conversations about it.

When not to change an OKR

There’s one scenario where changing OKRs is discouraged, and that’s when an OKR is harder to achieve than you thought it would be.

Never change your OKRs because you’re afraid you’ll fall short of a goal. That’s sandbagging.

It’s important to set goals that are realistically aggressive. Even if you miss them by a lot, you’re still gaining some valuable learning. Use what you’ve learned about your real capacity to hone your goal-setting muscle.

So stick with those tough OKRs more often than you toss them out.

You’ll find yourself getting better at choosing the right measures and the right milestones with each cycle.