Coffee with OKRs #38 · 5 min read
Goals take emotion out of management. For an owner that is the hardest part of the method, not the easiest
The owner comes back from a holiday where they read a book and tells the team: listen, we are doing this. The team puts aside what it was working on and starts again. Almost every company with a single decision-maker knows this scene. This episode is about what happens when an owner like that closes this road to themselves.
From the episode · in Polish
An implementation told by the client, with the emphasis on what chafes
Fifty-six minutes of conversation after the implementation: what changed in the company, what turned out to be hardest and what the owner had to unlearn. The part about how working with goals takes the emotional approach out of management, together with the quarter with the overestimated scope, starts at the twenty-fourth minute. The thread about why searching for uniqueness at the start of a services company is often a waste of time comes near the end, at around the fortieth minute. from 00:24:11
The recording is being edited. Leave your address and you'll get the link when it's ready.The conversation here comes from the other side of the table, with a client after the implementation, and the most interesting thing about it is that it isn't about the method. It is about its personal cost. It is worth adding where a conversation like this comes from in our case: we started out teaching companies the method and leaving the organisation right after everyone had been trained. It worked so-so, because a habit isn't built by theory, by goals worked out together, or even by a calendar, if nobody is with the company at the moment those activities have to be repeated. The claim that sounds strongest in the episode belongs to exactly this register: working with goals takes the emotional approach out of management, and for an owner with a chaotic working style that is the hardest part, not the easiest. You have to hold to a decision for a whole quarter once it has been made, and a quarter then feels very long. A new idea goes into the backlog and waits. Bringing it in mid-cycle is possible, but it means standing in front of the team with arguments for why it matters more than what you have already planned together. The gain on the other side is exactly the same size as the cost: the team stops being taken by surprise, because it knows what it is working on and by what rules.
The second axis of this conversation is uncomfortable, and that is why it is rarely talked about. An owner takes a missed goal with a score of 0.3 calmly, because they know the context, know why it turned out that way, and have drawn conclusions. The same score passed on to a team that gave the maximum of what was possible is a message that they did too little. The episode mentions a quarter in which, despite earlier conversations about feasibility, the scope turned out to be overestimated and the results came in at 0.3 to 0.4, and this is called plainly what it was: over-motivated planning. So the main source of demotivation is not an ambitious goal but an overplanned scope. Nor is it a lesson you learn once: after more than 2 years of working with the method, estimating a quarter can still be a problem.
The third thing is the most practical of all. Here the quarter works as a unit of testing, not of planning. After it, three things are decided openly: what goes permanently into the day-to-day work and the running metrics, what needs one more cycle of checking, and what we reject along with the lesson learned. Without that moment you can plan brilliantly, implement brilliantly and still go round in circles, repeating the same mistakes. A good retrospective also gets shorter over time, not longer, because the conclusions are formed during the quarter and the meeting is only the moment to lay them out and make decisions. It is worth asking there not only what we are fixing. You can often gain more from what works than from what didn't.
Takeaways
Four things this conversation says about the price of order
- 01
The backlog disciplines the owner, not the team
By default a new idea waits for the next quarter. If you bring it in mid-cycle, you stand in front of the team with arguments for why it matters more than what you have already planned together.
- 02
The same score means something different at the top and in the team
The owner reads a score of 0.3 together with its context and conclusions, while the team reads it as information that it did too little. Calibrate the quarter's scope with the person leading the team before you approve it.
- 03
A quarter is a unit of testing, not of planning
After it, decide openly: what goes permanently into the day-to-day work and the running metrics, what needs one more cycle, and what you reject along with the lesson learned. Otherwise planning and implementation go round in circles.
- 04
Focus is a risk, and that is why companies avoid it
Doing many things at once is psychologically cheaper, because failure is spread across all of them. The price is that you never find out whether any of them would have worked with full commitment.
The whole topic in one place
OKRs in a manufacturing company? A TechRamps case study
Here we look at an implementation from the angle of what it costs the person who orders it for their own company. If you are looking for the mechanics, that is where it starts, how to get from a list of a hundred goals down to four and what roles have to be created so that it doesn't fall apart, the whole route is described in the text on the implementation in a manufacturing company. That is also where we have gathered the other conversations with clients who talk about it from their own perspective.
Author
Lena Zhukova
founder; strategy workshops, quarterly sessions
Founder of OKR Poland. For twenty years she has worked with boards of companies from 30 to a few thousand people; she wrote dozens of strategies with them and helped implement them in more than 40 organisations.
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