Theory vs. reality in OKR

yeah I'm also happy to see that some people have already left because what I'll be talking about today is not the benefits of OPR but the actual pain that you'll have when you get started with opioids in your organization we've seen the theory and theory have okay our is great but when you really want to roll it out your organization you run into all sorts of troubles now quick show of hands who here is already working with opioids in the organization and for who has the implementation been an overnight success okay that's my point my other point is that most of the speakers here today are OPR consultants and so this is all service industry with all respect that has been created around it because organizations need help to implement OPR now I'm gonna know PR consultant but I am part of a team and that is build an OPR software and that's being used by hundreds of organizations and with the majority of them we have a good relationship and from them we have learned what are actually the challenges that they face so I'll be sharing them with you today there are three mistakes that I've observed myself and there are four complaints that I hear most from customers and I'll try to keep it as short as as possible and as simple as possible I also give you very simple solutions for how to overcome these challenges all with the objective to make your OPR program a success yeah so I need to click twice I have presented notes because otherwise I lose track introduce OPR as a silver bullet and the CEOs and executives they go away they read a book about OPR and now everything is great in these books and so they come back from a summer holiday and they go back in the company and they say this is great it's gonna solve all the problems that we have this is amazing let's do it and then they also communicated like that to the organization and then those are also the expectations that the organization will have now if you are the one driving the implementation of OPR your company and you will overcome these challenges you are not the problem but the problem is that the majority of employees they will give up if you promise them all these great things and after one month of working with opers they realize is just difficult and just create sex or work for them so the solution that I have for you is to introduce OPR as a vegetable so when you explain vegetables as a parent to your kids you say okay yeah you may not like it but it's important that you do it because if you don't do it you get ill and so you should explain opr to your organization yes you may not like it but it's very important for the company otherwise the company will get ill I'm glad that Philippe likes it the other problem is rushing the process of setting OPRS and this is what I see the vast majority of organizations do and I don't get it because for me 90% of the value of opr is taking some time out each quarter or however often you want to set OPRS to look up look around breathe some air and start thinking about what are the major problems that we need to solve in the upcoming quarter what are the problems that we want to take on the emissions that we want to realize so if you rush that process you lose something that in my opinion is the major benefit of okay are now the reason why organization may the reason why organization may rush it is because it's hard to identify what are the right okay arts to work on and the reason it's so hard is because key results or what are good key results is subjective so imagine that it's my objective today to give a good present to give a presentation at the OPR forum right then my cue results will be okay I need to design a presentation I need to maybe I want to test the presentation maybe I should have done that and then I need to deliver the actual presentation right and then I've achieved my objective to give a presentation at the OPR forum however if I want to give an awesome presentation at the OPR forum then my cue results will be different then I would have key results that say okay I want to have the loudest applause of all speakers and I want to have I want to be asked to speak again next year these would then be good cute these would then be good measures of success so it's very different so it's um actually what I want to say is forget about everything that you read key results and outcomes versus outputs was absolutely important is that you use your okay are what matters to you and that is subjective however what I was trying to say what my example is that it also depends a lot on the objective so if your objective is just to give a good presentation then it's all about completing certain tasks but if your objective is to give it also presentation then the key results are very very different so this is a process that takes time to figure out what matters to you what matters to the business and it's something that I would definitely not rush so that's my very simple solution take time to figure out what matters take a week in the beginning of every quarter the next one using okay ours to measure everything this is something that I totally do not get I see people talking on the internet about switching from KPIs to ok ours which i think is absolutely nonsense and maybe this has a lot to do for the use case that you have for OPR I think ok ours are primarily a growth or tool to help you implement the strategy a tool to help you translate the longer term strategy into shorter term goals that employees and teams will actually be working on and if you take that example then ok ours are ok ours are a great tool to to measure the progress that you want to make within your organization but to implement your strategy you need two types of goals and the analogy that I use a lot is the one of a road map and so I'll show you what a real man would look like and we always start with the ultimate goal of a company and then based on that ultimate goal you can develop what is your strategy in every strategy you can easily convert into strategic OPRS and these strategic ok yards you can translate to annual OPRS and then the quarterly ok ours the teams and individuals will actually work on and but the analogy that I use a lot is that over current so if you will be driving a car towards a certain destination and that car is your organization and a destination is ultimately your or the ultimate goal of your business then ok ours are a great tool to help you map out your path towards that point in some way you can work your way backwards towards implementing the strategy towards implementing guilt on the goal of your organization but as you're driving that car you also need to keep an eye on your car's dashboard to make sure that the engine doesn't overheat and to make sure that you don't run out of guests and these things that you find on a car's dashboard these things that you constantly have to watch that will be the business-as-usual of your company and that is simply best measured by KPIs so to implement strategy in summary you need KPIs and you need ok ours and the two of them are the only goals you need to effectively implement your strategy yeah now we're switching to the complaints that I hear a lot from from organizations that we work with and also the ones that we don't work with and then they say oh my god ok ours I'm not taking off as expected and yeah it has come up a little bit already but my solution for this is don't put HR in charge is there anyone from HR here ok well I don't want to offend anyone and but in in my view and the person that has the most to benefit from OPR is the CEO of the organization the CEO is responsible for to grow the business and to grow the business you need a strategy that strategy needs to be designed and that strategy needs to be implemented and that eventually or ultimately is the responsibility of the CEO if the CEO will fail to do so you can be sure that the owners of the company will start looking for a different person and and I think that ok ours will help him implement the strategy I think he as he or she is the person that has most a benefit from it and this is something that you cannot outsource to HR in fact I had a conversation with Peter just now and I think after that conversation that the organizations that do outsource ok are to HR for them it's kind of like a checklist feature so yeah we want to be a company also does a okay our HR please go ahead and make sure that everybody says okay ours every now and then um however HR I think is is great to run the operational part of the program so to make sure that you educate employees on how does OPR work in this business make sure everybody sets their okay ours on time and these type of things next one okay ours great too much overhead what I see some organizations do is they read books about OPR they go on the internet there's tons of content about OPRS on the internet then they read it they write down all these rules all these things that you have to do and that's what they throw into the organization and that simply doesn't make sense introducing OPR is essentially change management and if there's one thing that you want to do a change is that you want to introduce it gradually I'm not sure if you know the boiling frog story but if you throw a frog in boiling water it will jump out and if you throw it in cold water and they slowly cook the water then he won't notice it now not saying that you should boil your frogs but hey I mean the essence of OPR is super simple right like you take some time out of your quarter to start thinking about okay what is most important for the upcoming period and then the only things that you have to do is you need to make someone responsible you want that so you want someone to be looking after their go doesn't mean that that's the only person working on it that person can loop in other people and make sure that all the work from gets done by different parts of the company to achieve that OPR but someone will have to be looking after it if you make multiple people responsible no one is responsible and and then you need to keep that person accountable and to keep someone accountable that usually runs through reporting lines so everybody has a manager in a business and a manager should have a one on one and white weekly or bi-weekly with the people that report to them and in that meeting and you should review the OPRS it kind of like act like a coach for the people that report to you so hey this goes off track why is it off track do you have a plan to get it on track again and this is something that I or the organization can do to help you with that in my view those are the only steps that you have to take and yes you can do a lot more but especially in the beginning I will remove everything that could be a possible obstacle to implement okay are and you can always make it more complex later you can always add more things to it um yeah I'm not keeping pace with the slice but that's the message keep it simple and a few more staying well within the time okay are is too rigid for us and I don't think that ever happens I don't think OPRS too rigid I think you are too rigid okay are is I mean ever since the Peter Drucker launched management by objectives in the early 1950s objectives started playing a more important role within businesses and over the past seventy years we've learned a lot about what works what doesn't work and the way I look at OPR is there's not much more as a collection of best practices and you should pick out of that what works for your business so you should tailor the framework to your organization and don't do I mean some organizations that just tell us what to do and we'll do it then they implement it that way and then it doesn't work they gave up storage it doesn't work for us which i think is absolutely nonsense you should adapt the framework to works best for your business quick example of this Andrew Chen which is a very famous investor works for andreessen horowitz I saw him saying something or LinkedIn the other day where he said okay ours are nothing for for startups and we don't target start us with our company so I have no interest in what I'm gonna say now but the reason the only reason he thought that was the case was because you said okay ours quarterly and that's simply too long to long term for a start-up organization this day for me this is the symbol of how people approaches I think it's absolutely nonsense and we started working with OPRS from day one at Purdue and of course quarterly goals were too long for us what we did we started with monthly OPRS then doing that for a while we realized that we won't 25% of every month we - we were thinking about okay well already okay ours to work on and then we spend only three weeks working on it so then moved it up to six weeks and our it quarterly OPR so even such a core component of OPRS you can completely customize to what works best for your organization yeah only have one more my people hate ambitious targets and yeah I totally get that so just ditched it and I don't know why if you go on the internet that that some people seem to equate okay ours which stretch goals I mean first yeah as I said before for me the real value from of OPR is taking some time out to think about what you should be working on and if you want to stretch yourself go ahead but that is cultural it doesn't work for everybody we have custom 50% of our customers are in the u.s. 50% that are in Europe and in the u.s. we see that people feel very comfortable with stretch goals but in Europe and in Germany also you see that people are a bit more conservative so they don't like that they want to get to a hundred percent 110 or hundred twenty percent maybe even so and then I also think that especially okay ours are complex by the way because it's already difficult especially in the beginning to figure out what are the right things to work on and then you identify a key result and you think are we stretching ourselves right now should we stretch ourselves a little bit further I mean in the beginning that's completely not necessary you can always try stretch OPRS at a later point if you want to so yeah if it's up to me I would say just leave them out and ditch them and yeah that's that's everything I think so if you want my advice these are the seven tips that I have for you introduce OPR as a vegetable take time to figure out what actually matters I mean if you don't put in your Oakley arse what actually matters then why would you ever go through the pain of updating them closing them and do all these things I mean if do if you don't care about them no one's gonna look at them and then you're really doing it for nothing so take time to figure out what matters use okay ours to build improve innovate in other words use OPRS to break out of the status quo to solve problems to improve certain things within your organization but don't use it for your business as usual if you use it for your business as usual you'll have the same OPRS every quarter and then people are thinking why are we setting on TRS like they're the same every quarter it makes no sense keep it don't put HR in charge yeah still think that's the best thing to do okay keep it simple ditch stretch okay ours especially if you're in Europe and if you're new to them and tailor the framework to your organization now this was I try to keep it as simple as possible but I've also written recently an e-book that we published yesterday which is the growth handbook for CEOs this explains in more detail how you can use OPRS to grow your business and to implement your strategy and you can download a free copy and Purdue TOCOM slash Ford growth

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Keywords: okr, kpi, strategy, execution, goals, key results, objectives and key results, objectives & key results, common okr mistakes, okr mistakes, okrs mistakes, common okrs mistakes, objectives and key results (okrs), objectives and key results youtube, objectives and key results methodology, objectives and key results framework, objectives and key results measure what matters, free okr software, free okr tool

Id: 6lz_oN1jCTU

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 25 2019