Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

OKRs are the practice of defining ambitious objectives to prioritize for a time bound interval, like 3 months. The objectives go along with key results, which are measurable. Importantly, the key results don’t need to capture the full richness or complexity of a project. They just need to be good enough –  like taking someone’s temperature rather than running a full diagnostic. One clear sign that something’s off, or on track.

For example, a group may say “we want to improve our customer support,” The key results might be: “Customer wait times reduced by 30%” which can be measured and tracked.
Critics are turned off by metrics because they fear that they flatten complexity. I don’t think that is necessarily so as long as we’re fully aware that we’re using a reductionist (but meaningful) metric that is part of a bigger set of patterns. It’s like measuring the blood pressure to gauge overall vitality, and that can be a simple and useful shorthand.

OKRs can increase coherence in many ways:

• We have to have enough common ground and shared reality to agree on an objective. This objective then, as a model of our shared desire, can align our attention, aiding collaboration in that direction 
• We have to have enough common ground to agree on what a meaningful metric is in our context. That means we need to have a conversation about what data means to us. 
• We need to have the systems in place to regularly track and look back at our OKRs. There’s a rhythm to it.

Sure, if objectives are declared top-down and connected to arbitrary metrics we have no systems in place to track, that’s not great. But that’s just OKRs badly done. 

As I’ve laid out in this book, we can’t operate without some reductionism. And as long as we’re aware of the good-enough nature of doing so and pay attention to its limitations, it’s a wonderful way to create alignment around an objective. And sure, if the other systems and patterns aren’t aligned with the objective we declare, then we’ve just detached the objective from our other actions and realms and turned our OKRs into meaningless chatter, disconnected from the real context of the organization.