OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a welcome alternative to traditional tools such as leadership and performance management tools because they are better suited to mastering complex, novel tasks. By enabling managers and staff to collaborate on finding innovative solutions, OKRs foster consistent progress. This approach is especially valuable when navigating new, uncharted waters.
Objectives & Key Results – from personal experience to organisation
To illustrate how it works, our expert, Michael Kubiena, often shares a personal story in his workshops. He explains how the OKR method helped him overcome a significant challenge. Then, he shows how this experience can be applied in an organisational context.
Setting and Pursuing Personal Goals – A Bosphorus Swim Story
“Having moved to Istanbul 2 years earlier and having just turned 40, I decided to mark the occasion with a personal endeavour: to swim across the Bosphorus, the Istanbul waterway between Europe and Asia, in the annual competition. Something I obviously had never done before, nothing even remotely comparable.
While I am a decent swimmer, I dislike competitions, big events and large crowds. Furthermore, swimming 7 kilometres in 2 hours, albeit with the Bosphorus’ current, is no easy feat, even for swimmers much better trained than I was.
As the project started feeling rather overwhelming and overly ambitious, I tried to break it down into workable physical, logistical and mental challenges.
The physical preparation took practice and determination. Progress could even be quantified and measured (distances covered in a given time, endurance, speed,…).
The logistics were about completing a range of individual tasks: finding a practice pool, making time, registering for the event and the test-rehearsal swim, finding practice partners and other participants, getting a health check-up,…
The mental challenge was the toughest nut. Neither is crossing the Bosphorus for practice purposes an option, nor is open-water swimming in & around Istanbul easily done.
What could be done, though, is to learn mental exercises so as not to panic in stressful or scary circumstances.
In essence, I had found myself a highly ambitious objective, in an entirely novel territory for me, a proper personal moonshot. In order to render it obtainable, I divided it into tangible chunks, mid-range milestones and key results.
Did I do it in the end? Did I swim across the Bosphorus with hundreds of other competitors?
No, I did not. I did not even make it to the starting line. But I was well prepared, ready and in great shape at the right time.
In the end, life intervened with totally different plans and even more memorable developments which I would have never experienced were it not for that seemingly untenable objective I had set my sights on and the respective key results leading towards it.”
Why OKRs help you with complex challenges
What can OKRs contribute if your company is moving in an ambitious direction and on unfamiliar terrain?
When it comes to innovation and new business models, as in the case of many startups, old methods fall short. This is also true when a company moves in an environment of constant change. Old, rigid planning, goal-setting, and evaluation methods are of little help and often even a hindrance.
Comparative values from the past, such as KPIs and benchmarks, lose their meaning when the focus is on innovation or developing new markets. In such cases, the overall direction is clear, but specific quantitative goals are not. Therefore, key results—viewed as milestones—are better suited to measuring progress and guiding further development.
Shared responsibility (‘ownership’) via OKRs
OKRs are also particularly helpful in aligning priorities at the corporate level with those of teams and individuals. Vertically (i.e. along hierarchies) this was already possible with traditional approaches. However, horizontal synchronisation (i.e. between functions or functional teams) is much easier and better with OKRs. Joint and shared responsibility is essential to successfully tackle complex challenges such as growth, innovation, and sustainability. Common ownership among team members creates the foundation needed to manage these tasks effectively.Individualism and silo thinking are thus counteracted or stopped.
OKRs are a powerful participatory leadership instrument. Priorities are not simply cascaded rigidly from the top down. Instead, they are identified, agreed upon, and addressed through dialogue. Managers still provide guidance and feedback on progress and performance. However, this feedback is no longer limited to annual performance meetings that everyone dreads. Instead, it becomes an integral part of daily work and collaboration.
Ultimately, employees and teams take charge of their contribution and performance (Key Results) while managers guide (towards Objectives or in strategic directions), facilitate and provide feedback in a less formalised but still structured and transparent process.
OKRs and strategy implementation & communication
OKRs, when done right and really well, help to bring strategy into the organization. Even if it is neither explicit nor formalised, OKRs enable the translation of broad priorities into concrete action. Doing it right does not have to mean developing complicated tools (there are many off-the-shelf OKR tools) or processes. Rather, it is important to get started with simple but decisive steps and to learn by doing.
OKRs are neither a completely new nor a completely different way of working or planning and evaluating performance. What OKRs do, however, is to rethink more traditional performance management approaches and target systems, making them applicable to current management and organizational challenges.
The decisive contribution of OKRs is the broader scope of action: away from the strict focus on setting quantitative targets and their already only apparent objectivity, towards strategy communication and implementation.
Both as an instrument of participative leadership and as a structured approach to establishing clarity, transparency and ownership in the organisation, OKRs are particularly suitable for those companies that want to master significant growth, change or transformation.