A request for OKRs is usually a symptom, not a diagnosis

The split comes out sharper than we expected. OKRs help where the point is implementing and communicating strategy down through the organisation, cooperation and the flow of information between teams, clearly handing over responsibility, an objective answer to the question of where we are in delivering a goal, and organisational learning. They don't help, and sometimes do outright harm, where the point is daily reporting on people's work, managing the performance of individuals, running projects, building an organisational structure and developing management skills. Each of these rejected needs has its own tool, just not this one. It is also worth knowing how long it takes to reach a mature arrangement: one of the organisations described in the episode took 5 years to get to a model in which leaders work out the quarterly goals and the role of the chief operating officer comes down to checking whether the workshop is consistent with the annual goal and the strategy.

The sharpest verdict concerns control. Companies come to us wanting a daily report on their people's work, one hundred per cent transparent reporting of designers' work split into project and non-project time, and a wish to measure whether individual people have achieved their goals. That is not a need for OKRs but for a work planning tool and for performance management, and in this form it is micromanagement disguised as a modern method. We tell clients that plainly. It is similar with a young organisation that came for goals in order to build itself a stable structure: a structure organises functions, reporting lines, individual development and formal requirements, while goals organise people across departments, so here they are more likely to get in the way. Projects are managed with something else too. In this arrangement a goal is a filter that tells you whether a given initiative supports the strategy, and that is where its role ends.

That leaves the question of what an implementation gives you, then, if it doesn't take care of so many things. It works like an umbrella: it opens up the organisation's dysfunctions and lets you name them, but it doesn't fix them itself, so the holes are then patched with other techniques. The strongest example in this episode comes from the hosts' own back yard. Even before implementing goals, they laid out responsibilities in their own organisation with a role matrix, and something came out that nobody expected: it seemed the work was spread more or less evenly, and it turned out that individual people were wearing 5 or 6 hats at once and they were the bottleneck. Another organisation discovered on the same occasion that its teams, split into small groups working mechanically, each on its own, had simply stopped talking to one another. It only came out when the shared product was being put together and the whole thing didn't work.