This article feels very "business book of the week" to me. It's a laundry list of changes you can make so you as a manager can feel like you're doing something but there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that any of them will improve anything. It's just "here's what the leading thinkers on OKRs are doing". What makes them the leading thinkers? Why is this good? What's the evidence that works?
Here's the number one thing I've seen at every institution that I've been at that uses OKRs (or V2MOMs which is salesforces method which I'm even less of a fan of for various reasons). You do a bunch of work planning, getting everyone on the same page on the OKRs for the quarter and within a week or two something comes along and changes everything deus ex machina and your plan is basically irrelevant and you're doing the new thing working on the hoof with no real plan. Mike Tyson's famous words "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth" really resonate with anyone who's worked in a startup.
Then you get to your quarterly retro and you've done at least one maybe two reorgs/pivots since the OKRs and you look back on them and they all fall into three buckets:
- About a third "yeah we did that"
- About a third "everything changed so that wasn't relevant any more"
- About a third "what on earth were we thinking?"
The reason for this is you aren't doing something where the scope of effort and the domain are really well understood. You're not digging a trench or making plastic spoons. You're trying to build a software business in response to a shifting marketplace and an ambiguous and often hard problem.
The activity of planning is useful for getting everyone on the same page, taking some time to think about what's important etc, but the plan itself ends up victim to circumstances every single time. It's just an example of the Eisenhower maxim that plans are worthless but planning is everything.[1] As such it just seems pretty pointless to focus on optimising the OKRs themselves in any meaningful way. The process is the valuable part.
Here's the number one thing I've seen at every institution that I've been at that uses OKRs (or V2MOMs which is salesforces method which I'm even less of a fan of for various reasons). You do a bunch of work planning, getting everyone on the same page on the OKRs for the quarter and within a week or two something comes along and changes everything deus ex machina and your plan is basically irrelevant and you're doing the new thing working on the hoof with no real plan. Mike Tyson's famous words "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth" really resonate with anyone who's worked in a startup.
Then you get to your quarterly retro and you've done at least one maybe two reorgs/pivots since the OKRs and you look back on them and they all fall into three buckets:
- About a third "yeah we did that"
- About a third "everything changed so that wasn't relevant any more"
- About a third "what on earth were we thinking?"
The reason for this is you aren't doing something where the scope of effort and the domain are really well understood. You're not digging a trench or making plastic spoons. You're trying to build a software business in response to a shifting marketplace and an ambiguous and often hard problem.
The activity of planning is useful for getting everyone on the same page, taking some time to think about what's important etc, but the plan itself ends up victim to circumstances every single time. It's just an example of the Eisenhower maxim that plans are worthless but planning is everything.[1] As such it just seems pretty pointless to focus on optimising the OKRs themselves in any meaningful way. The process is the valuable part.
[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/