{"id":1316,"date":"2018-01-05T12:06:34","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T19:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/?p=1316"},"modified":"2018-01-05T12:06:34","modified_gmt":"2018-01-05T19:06:34","slug":"notes-about-okrs-goals-and-pitfalls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/notes-about-okrs-goals-and-pitfalls\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes about OKRs, goals and pitfalls"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At work, I&#8217;ve been asked to know our team OKRs and set some of my own. I&#8217;m new to this, and so I decide to google for information about them. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, and the idea is to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>make aspirational, easy-to-remember goals (objectives) that stretch the company, the team, and optionally, the individual, then write them down.\n<ul>\n<li>I.e. we&#8217;re trying to answer the question, &#8220;what strategic (big) things should we do next?&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>determine key results &#8212; notice the plural &#8212; a set of actions and measurements that will indicate how close we came to meeting the big goal\n<ul>\n<li>indicated in numeric form. This is said to be the &#8220;secret sauce&#8221; that makes OKRs better than other forms of strategic goal setting. We aren&#8217;t aiming for a perfect score. In fact, a perfect score is indicative of problems.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>share the goals and key results widely within a company and team because it helps get people aligned (unified) and makes them accountable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>OKRs are a tool meant to help us, and as with any process, we aren&#8217;t meant to become a slave of the tool. Adapt it to make it work, or find a better tool when it doesn&#8217;t work.<\/p>\n<p>Setting objectives and defining key results takes <em>time<\/em> and <em>thought<\/em>. Otherwise, it may not yield value.<\/p>\n<p>OKRs remind me of S.M.A.R.T. goal setting. So why do we need OKRs? Again, I googled for an answer, and it&#8217;s approximately this: With SMART goal setting, organizations and teams tend to forget to&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>stretch &#8212; make aspirational, strategic goals<\/li>\n<li><em>act<\/em> and pursue their goal &#8212; accountability is important<\/li>\n<li><em>align<\/em> teams and individuals with the aspirational goals<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Among the many helpful things I read, I found <a href=\"https:\/\/www.perdoo.com\/blog\/goals-vs-okrs\/\">this from perdoo.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Why should I split my goals into Objectives and Key Results?<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;it helps to increase company-wide transparency as everyone should be able to understand the Objective. Key Results are often more technical and don\u2019t appeal to, or aren\u2019t understood by, everyone.<\/p>\n<p>Objectives also represent key focus points for an organization or team. They should, therefore, be inspiring and easy to remember.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The same article linked to a Harvard Business School article titled <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hbs.edu\/faculty\/Publication%20Files\/09-083.pdf\">&#8220;Goals Gone Wild&#8221;<\/a>, which warn of the dangers of goal setting. OKRs are supposed to have safeguards against these pitfalls. Standard pitfalls of goals include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>focusing too narrowly or specifically &#8212; lose sight of other valuable things such as <em>emergent opportunities<\/em> and <em>ethical behavior<\/em><\/li>\n<li>not enough time given to achieve the goal, or a reporting period that is too long\n<ul>\n<li>yearly measuring is too long, that&#8217;s why the key results in OKRs are measured quarterly or more frequently.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>overly challenging goals may encourage\n<ul>\n<li>lying about performance<\/li>\n<li>cheating to attain the goal<\/li>\n<li>taking unacceptable risks <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>creating a culture of competition rather than cooperation<\/li>\n<li>the goals themselves killing motivation\n<ul>\n<li>I.e. a goal (a key result) for a CEO doesn&#8217;t necessarily make sense for an engineer<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Ten years ago, my wife and I bought a Hyundai Sonata. Upon completing the purchase, the salesman asked us to give him a perfect score on Hyundai&#8217;s evaluation of the sales experience. He said anything besides a perfect score was unacceptable. My wife and I raised our eyebrows, knowing that he was gaming the system. I went along with it, knowing that Hyundai wasn&#8217;t getting an accurate measurement. I regret my decision, and I hope that Hyundai realized that perfect scores were indicative of problems in their measuring.<\/p>\n<p>References:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>https:\/\/medium.com\/startup-tools\/okrs-5afdc298bc28<\/li>\n<li>https:\/\/www.wrike.com\/blog\/okrs-quarterly-planning\/<\/li>\n<li>https:\/\/www.betterworks.com\/articles\/the-value-of-shifting-from-s-m-a-r-t-goals-to-okrs\/<\/li>\n<li>https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/pulse\/goal-setting-grow-smart-okr-diana-horn<\/li>\n<li>https:\/\/www.atiim.com\/blog\/2-reasons-why-okr-goal-setting-is-better-than-any-other-approach\/<\/li>\n<li>https:\/\/www.perdoo.com\/blog\/goals-vs-okrs\/<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At work, I&#8217;ve been asked to know our team OKRs and set some of my own. I&#8217;m new to this, and so I decide to google for information about them. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, and the idea is to: make aspirational, easy-to-remember goals (objectives) that stretch the company, the team, and optionally, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/notes-about-okrs-goals-and-pitfalls\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Notes about OKRs, goals and pitfalls&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1316"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1324,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions\/1324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jaredrobinson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}