The gate to OKRs isn't your industry or company size. It's whether the boss will hand over the how

Let's start with what a key result is not. It is not a percentage of progress. It is not a number of tasks done. It is not an artefact, meaning documentation produced or an offer generated. It is a statement about what has changed. Five meetings held with a client don't tell you anything yet, so the question is what those meetings gave you and how you will know the advert worked. In the episode we set this out on one pair of examples. Widening the client base can be written as growth from 10 to 15 clients, or as 30 per cent more clients than in the previous quarter who used the support. Or as: roll out a tool, build a landing page.

The difference is not cosmetic, because the second version takes away your ability to assess the result honestly. With a metric that describes the work done, all that is left is a subjective feeling of whether we did it well, and if that is the case, someone has to have that feeling, and usually it is the person highest up the structure. That is also where painfully general objectives come from: I want a thriving company, I want a satisfied client, I want success in the market. Each of these sentences sounds sensible and none of them can be settled. What is interesting is something else: the process of writing metrics down is often worth more than its result, because only when they try to name how they will recognise success do companies reach the things that really matter to them.

And here the episode turns in a direction that isn't in its title. Whether OKRs are for us isn't decided by industry or company size. It is decided by whether the person in charge is ready to hand over the decision about the how. If you are a manager who knows best, including how a given thing should be done, this is probably not the tool for you, because there is nothing here to hand over. If you hire people who are better than you in their areas, the method starts to work, because it says what for and why, and leaves the how to them. Where the highest value is efficiency and full control, an implementation has nothing to hold on to, and the same goes for a board that isn't open to changing the way it manages. Because that is what this is, not adding one more tool.

That leaves the quarter, which has a specific job in this episode. Objectives and key results are hypotheses: we assume that if we do one thing, we will see the other, and the cadence is there to check whether that guess was right. So the real product of a quarter is conclusions, not a ticked-off list. A question from the chat came up in the episode, by the way, about how our metric differs from an indicator in an analytics tool, and the honest answer was: at the level of the definition itself, not at all. The difference lies in the way of working, in the cadence, in the whole team taking part and in drawing conclusions. An organisation that has practised this rhythm can change direction quickly, and in the episode we come back to a large company that did it during a crisis in its industry without freezing up.