Coffee with OKRs · 6 min read
The tool for goals is the least important implementation decision. Start with a spreadsheet
In a large organisation where we worked with goals, a dedicated tool was bought only after two years. Not to save money. For those two years people were learning a new habit, and one more new thing that has to be learned separately is, at a moment like that, a barrier rather than a help. This episode looks like a spreadsheet demo, and it is one, but what matters most in it is what goes into that spreadsheet.
From the episode · in Polish
A spreadsheet open on screen, from a blank tab to week twelve
In this episode we share the screen and go through the spreadsheet step by step: the tab with annual and quarterly objectives, the owners of the objective and of each key result, columns for the baseline, target and current values, a confidence field, organisational health metrics, and the weekly tab, which you duplicate instead of rewriting. All of it on the example of a private healthcare company, carried from the mission all the way down to individual actions. The part on exactly what to write down for the way of measuring is roughly halfway through the conversation. from 00:30:15
The recording is being edited. Leave your address and you'll get the link when it's ready.The thesis of this episode is uncomfortable for anyone who is choosing a system right now: the tool is the least important element of an implementation, and building habits matters more. That is why we start with the simplest cloud spreadsheet, one that puts up no barrier to entry. The only hard requirement concerns not features but access: goals can't sit locally on someone's drive, because then they aren't the company's goals. The moment for a dedicated tool comes later, and you recognise it by the fact that many working groups are already at work and the spreadsheet has stopped being simple.
Before the quarter starts, very little goes into it, and that is the whole art. The name of the objective and its owner. The key results, each with its own owner. For each key result, a baseline value and a target value, meaning from how much to how much we want to change it. And the third thing, which is forgotten most often: the way of measuring, meaning who collects the data, where they get it from and how often they update it. Organisational health metrics are defined separately, the things that shouldn't break while we work on growth, also with an owner and an agreed way of checking. Nothing else. The number of objectives: one to three per company, even in an organisation of several thousand people. Ten or fifteen objectives are a sign there will be no focus.
We write the quarterly objective itself as a hypothesis, in the form: if we do X, then Y will happen. This isn't wordplay. We don't know whether even the best feature will change clients' habits, so the objective is a bet to be tested, not a promise of a result, and the hypothesis is tested with the smallest and fastest action you can think of. In the example from the episode, that was ten in-depth interviews with users in the first weeks of the quarter, instead of a six-month roadmap and waiting for the app release, after which the point of the whole idea would only have been tested after three quarters. Then what remains is the rhythm: a new tab every week, with effects in it, not a task list, because the tasks stay in the tool the team uses every day. The values should be filled in before the meeting, not during it, and then the review takes no longer than half an hour. We look at the annual goal once a month, the quarterly objective ideally every week, and a gap of more than two or three weeks is already too long.
Takeaways
Four things that decide whether this spreadsheet is any use
- 01
Habit first, system second
A simple cloud spreadsheet accessible to the whole company is enough for a long time. A dedicated tool bought at the start adds a barrier to entry to something people are only just learning.
- 02
Write the quarterly objective as a hypothesis
If we do X, then Y will happen. The company doesn't know whether clients will respond, so writing the objective as a promise of a result shuts down the conversation that is the most interesting one at the end of the quarter.
- 03
Three fields for a key result, not two
Baseline value, target value and the way of measuring. A metric for which nobody has agreed who collects the data, from where and how often, falls apart at the first review, or after two months turns out to be unmeasurable.
- 04
Effects in the weekly tab, not tasks
Every small thing entered into the spreadsheet turns it into an ordinary to-do list that has nothing to do with goals. Updating the values before the meeting, in turn, saves the ten or fifteen minutes that go on hunting for numbers.
The whole topic in one place
How to talk about OKRs in your company?
The spreadsheet is where goals live once the company has learned about them. About the learning itself, meaning how and in what order to tell people about the goals they will then have to deliver, we have written separately and in much more detail. That text also gathers all the episodes in which we came back to communicating goals.
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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