I used to think that OKRs were not for everyone...

So my response to a post from BrittHarper90 got me thinking about how my/our method at TBG has evolved over the years regarding that perennial question: how many OKRs should we have?

 

I've worked with clients who called me in after having dived head-first into OKRs and mandated that everyone in the organisation should have their own.  This didn't go well for several reasons:

1. The amount of managerial effort needed to review & reset every quarter was huge, so the effort expended/benefit realised equation was way off in the negative
2. People felt "forced" to develop their own OKR that directly aligned with Exec OKRs.  The result: Over 1000 people tried to align with the CEO's OKRs.  These had next to no value and caused significant anxiety for those who's work was more "transactional" and so didn't have a direct contribution to make to the growth and transformational OKRs the Exec had.
3. The focus was on individual OKRs which did nothing to foster shared goals and stronger collaboration across the organisation.

It's worth mentioning that each time I've seen this, it's been HR who have been leading on the OKR implementation.  HR definitely have a huge role to play. Still, in my experience, implementations work best when led by those responsible for the strategic planning process across the organisation. If that specific function doesn't exist, then the COO or Chief of Staff are usually well-placed to lead.

 

Based on those experiences, my opinion has since been: have as few OKRs as possible and think of them as a spotlight to shine on what will generate the greatest value for the organisation.  

 

Makes sense, right?  I always thought so, and for a lot of clients, it works for them.  However, I've shifted on this and I'd like to share how and why.

 

Let me introduce to my concept of "hard" and "soft" alignment. 

 

Hard alignment is when you have a clear parent and child relationship between two OKRs.  You believe that the child OKR (eg. a 3 month OKR) can make a direct contribution towards the parent OKR (eg. often a 12 month OKR focussed on a strategic priority).  These are governed by a recognised cadence of check-in and reporting back up to Exec teams.

Soft alignment is when you have an OKR which you believe will have a less direct and more general contribution to a strategic priority or theme.  The governance around these is less formal and they don't need to be reported back up to Leadership.

 

By making this distinction, I've found that it helps open up OKRs to those teams who are not in a position to directly contribute towards a strategic priority but can still do their bit, albeit indirectly.  Lets look at an example:

 

If the organisation had a strategic priority to improve the quality of its service, it could have one or two specific transformational OKRs which will help to drive that (hard alignment).  Also, for a team who's work is more transactional like a logistics team, might still have their own ideas about how they could contribute and so could develop a team OKR to test out their ideas but these are in line with a strategic "theme" (big move I like to call them) rather than a specific parent OKR (soft alignment).

 

By making this distinction, I've found that OKRs can be for all, and not at the expense of creating a bureaucratic beast of a process that buckles under its own weight.