The trouble with OKRs

 A lot of companies define themselves through their goals from one year to the next, and so OKRs become central to the work culture from one year to the next.  Who doesn’t love a good OKR! They can be clarifying, ambitious, seductive and investors and boards can’t get enough of them.

Once you have committed to OKRs, you need to stay super consistent, message them relentlessly to the team and constantly be tying the activities of the company back to the OKRs.  Without this habitual reinforcement,  the OKRs stop making sense to people; making the company feel rudderless and their work feel meaningless. It can take months for OKRs to achieve momentum and be accepted by people as part of how they view their work. 

 But many leaders I know express a certain lack of confidence that their OKRs are having the effect they want.  The drum beat set by the OKR never seems to mesh with reality. The business you want to have and the business you currently have simply don’t behave the same way.

For most companies, the journey towards their goals is not a steady march.  It's usually more like a gauntlet of frustrating obstacles that need to be overcome.   Getting past obstacles is what management and leadership in companies spend a lot of their time doing.  For the most part, OKRs don't help much here  because they are not things that lend themselves to any rapid changes in immediate priorities.  

I always wanted the OKRs that we designed to have deep meaning and I found joy in engineering them so that they elegantly added value to the company on multiple levels.   But obstacles facing the business  came in many forms and most didn’t ask for permission; they simply landed in my way and demanded attention.  Perhaps we needed to change something in our positioning,  or perhaps we needed to respond to a competitive threat,  perhaps the product release was inexplicably failing to impress the market etc. Suddenly it seems disingenuous to continue to bang on about the growth OKR or the customer facing OKR when 70% of my attention was hijacked by some obstacle,  often existential in nature.

I have been here many times. And as it turns out, so have a lot of leaders. I have heard it said that leaders committed to OKRs should not be distracted by obstacles the way I sometimes am;  that is what the team is for.  In my opinion this idea is wrong. Keeping your eyes fixed on the horizon while your ship is running into rocks and being attacked by sea monsters and pirates may sound heroic, but usually it’s just plane insane.

I believe in measurement, and I think that you can’t truly know you are doing anything valuable unless you are obsessed with the right way to measure it. Growth companies hit snags all the time, it’s part of the game. When this happens  the OKR mantras can suddenly seem naive, low resolution and generally unhelpful to staff. If you have not felt this conflict between theory and reality of running a company then you are lucky. I have always found it quite challenging.

My view on this comes back to something I like to talk about a lot: core corporate capabilities.  These are things like: the ability to prototype, the ability to productize, the ability to reach your market etc.  Collectively they define what your company “is “ by defining the things you are really good at.  When you encounter obstacles, it is these core capabilities you harness and bring to the fight. Perhaps it makes more sense to build OKRs around the continuous improvement of your core capabilities - and stop trying to use them as way to define and communicate mission critical objectives like growth.  If you continue to refine your core capabilities and measure their progress against obstacles, you are in fact continuously getting better at simply being better. You build a machine that eats obstacles for breakfast - all you have to do then, is point it at a worthy goal.

Ships in Distress off a Rocky Coast, 1667, Ludolf Backhuysen