OKRs Guide Your Actions

OKRs Guide Your Actions

Many organizations try to skip from strategy straight to action plans. That’s like playing a game of “Telephone” with your entire organization. The idea gets broken into hundreds of projects, and there’s no process to make sure it adds up to the outcome you’re looking for.

Meanwhile, every team is competing for time and resources to get all of their respective projects done – at once. While it can seem like an impressive amount of activity, it doesn’t always lead to meaningful progress. Instead, use OKRs to declare and draw attention to what matters most right now.

OKRs can help uncover and resolve competing priorities. They can be a tool to shift conversations from “my goals” to “our goals.”

Setting goals with OKRs

For example, let’s say there’s a football team: the Sand Hill Unicorns. They’re a good team, but they’ve never made it to the Super Bowl. And you’ve got two leaders on the team – the General Manager and the Coach – and they’ve got different goals.

The General Manager wants to focus on improving the performance of the current roster. Last year, she signed several new sponsors and set a franchise record for new season ticket holders. And she wants to sustain their support with another year of consistent performance, because that’s going to help with ticket sales, sponsorships, and merchandise.

The Coach wants to win the Super Bowl – and he wants to do it sooner than later. Before his contract runs out. It’s a big risk, because it means trading younger players with potential and future draft picks for established talent who might or might not mesh with the team. If this strategy backfires, it could mean fewer wins this year, putting ticket sales and sponsorship at risk.

This is a classic tradeoff between short-term success and long-term success. Both perspectives are valid, but it’s almost impossible to commit to both strategies at the same time. The General Manager and Coach need to get on the same page about which results they’re going to focus on. Once the leaders have a shared definition of success, it will help each member of the team understand why they’re doing some things and not others.

This is where OKRs come in.

The General Manager and the Coach each propose an Objective.

• The GM’s Objective: Invest in a stable team.
• The Coach’s Objective: Invest in a Super Bowl-ready team.

These two goals conflict.

If the two leaders agree on the first goal, that stable roster, then they’re going to prioritize the development of existing players who may not yet be ready to excel at the highest level. The Coach understands that he’s going to need to wait a year or longer to have a Super Bowl-contending team. If they choose the second goal, then scouting and trading for top-level players is going to take priority. The General Manager knows she’ll need new ways to market a team with new players – and to keep sponsors on board if things go south.

In Measure What Matters, Bill Davidow describes how Andy Grove first introduced OKRs at Intel:

“We wrote our top-level goals with Andy in our executive staff meetings. We sat around the table and decided: ‘This is it.’ As a division manager, I adopted any relevant company Key Results as my Objectives. I brought them to my executive team, and we’d spend the next week talking about what we would do that quarter. What made the system so strong is that Andy would say, ‘This is what the corporation is going to do,’ and everybody would go all out to support the effort. We were part of a winning team, and we wanted to keep winning.”

We all love that feeling of winning! But you can’t be a winning team without agreeing on what winning means.

With the Sand Hill Unicorns, either Objective has its pros and cons. But by committing as a team to one or the other Objective, they’re better prepared to face the ups and downs of the season together.

Prioritizing goals with OKRs

OKRs force teams to focus and prioritize. They demand that you communicate the core goal. Even with a shared strategy, plans can change. When things don’t go according to plan, OKRs help teams know what to do next.

Football teams understand this really well on the field! If there’s just one minute left in the game and the Sand Hill Unicorns are six points behind, they’re going to try a bold play. But if there are four minutes on the clock and they’re barely ahead, they’ll be more cautious to avoid risking a turnover. They all have a clear, shared goal in the moment: Keep their lead over the other team.

And they have a clear way to measure that progress and it looks like those yard markers on the ground, as well as that scoreboard. If the ball is 10 yards from the goal, they’re going to use a different play – and maybe different players – than if it’s 40 yards away.

Strengthening project plans with OKRs

In most organizations, the goals and measures aren‘t as clear as in a football game. That’s why it’s important to state our goals and quantitative metrics clearly and often. It can be hard to look at a complicated project plan or a list of action items and know if they’ll get you to your goal.

Project plans – they make sure you don’t miss any steps. OKRs, on the other hand, make sure your steps lead to the goal you want.

OKRs help your teams pressure test their project plans. They help us answer a simple question: Does this project move the needle far enough for us to succeed? If not, what do we need to do differently?

Our action plans add up to our OKRs. Our OKRs add up to our strategies. And our strategies add up to our mission.

That’s how we bridge the gap between ideas and execution.