Writing the goals is the easy part. The hard part is making them part of company life

The episode has one claim, and it runs against the way OKRs are often sold. Setting goals for an organisation is usually the easier part. The hard part is getting those goals to actually become part of company life and getting anyone to use them. That is where the blockers are, not in the writing itself. The biggest of them is not a lack of knowledge about the method, but not knowing what the next step is, and the discouragement that follows. A book about OKRs reads logically, and the blockers only appear when you try to do anything in your own company.

That is why the first block of an implementation is not writing goals, but sorting your own problems into two piles: those OKRs really address and those they won't touch. OKRs on their own won't turn micromanagement into managing for outcomes, they push in that direction and that is all. The second filter concerns language. I want to improve transparency and I want to improve alignment are sentences that mean a lot and nothing at all, and they are exactly where most implementations begin. Workshop participants get them back as homework, to make them concrete for their own company: what exactly is supposed to be visible, to whom and when. This is one of the more frequent moments when something surprises people.

The third point corrects a picture many people carry in their heads as the definition of the method. The cascade of objectives running from the company level through teams all the way down to personal objectives comes from a Google material from 2012, which Google itself later stepped back from. The material is still circulating and still shaping ideas, and a structure of objectives doesn't have to be multi-level to work. It is similar with communication: everyone knows it matters, so nobody plans it, and when an implementation isn't working, what is usually missing is communication in a specific place, not the goals themselves.

To be honest about the episode itself: it is promotional, and part of the material is a description of the programme rather than content in its own right. One thing from it is worth repeating, though, because it concerns our own mistake. The first edition of this workshop lasted one day, and only participants' feedback showed that this much material can't be absorbed in a single day. We split it into two, and the hours keep growing anyway.