Back to Basics: Working with Evolutionary OKRs

This is the second in our series of Back to Basics posts to help catch you up with the evolution of Red Currant Collective and Evolutionary OKRs. I missed last week because it was deadline week for the Evolutionary OKRs Playbook and I am very, very excited to tell you that the first full draft of the book is in my editor's hands as we speak.

I'm going to be honest: I'm really proud of myself for getting through that first full draft -- and, it was encouragement and helpful feedback from my newsletter readers who helped me keep at it when I hit roadblocks. I can't wait to share the preview eBook with you later this year if all goes well in edit and production!

A reminder, for wayfinding:

• This list here that you're reading right now is the Evolutionary OKRs Newsletter by Red Currant Collective.

  • This is where I share resources about OKRs for organizational leaders, team members, and OKR core team members and coaches who work with OKRs (and our adjacent leadership topics within organizations.

• On Thursdays, I share resources for ​Thinkydoers ​over on the Thinkydoers email list.

  • Thinkydoers is my podcast, but it's also the content universe through which my individual (1:1) coaching programs, and group programs for individuals outside of the organizational or workplace context, will reside. (If you're interested, you can ​join the Thinkydoers list here​).

Some content crosses over, but from here on out the newsletters will be distinct -- so if you subscribe to both, it'll be a solid reader experience with our Tuesdays focused on our organizational lives; and our Thursdays focused on our individual work-lives.

Today, here's a quick re-introduction to working with Evolutionary OKRs!

The video version is on YouTube:

And, here is the transcript if you prefer reading to video!

All right, we're continuing our back-to-basics videos today, and this one's an unscripted introduction to Evolutionary objectives and key results.

Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, hit the mainstream thanks to the book Measure What Matters by John Doerr, which described the OKR implementation at Google, as well as some other early adopters of the OKR methodology.

Measure What Matters creates a lot of excitement about OKRs, especially among executives, but it doesn't really help us implement OKRs, especially at scale.

There are a handful of other great books that have sprung up to fill the gap. Paul Nivens and Ben LaMorte, Objectives and Key Results is a great comprehensive treatise. Ben LaMorte also has great resources for OKR coaches in his books.

And then stay tuned because the Evolutionary OKR Playbook is going into final edit and will be released hopefully in a preliminary eBook in time to help with your 2024 reset.

In a conventional approach to OKRs, we'd create OKRs at the company level and then either cascade or localize them down through the organization. So, it becomes like a nested set of goals with usually cross functional company level goals at the top, sometimes set for the year, sometimes with some quarterly targets, and then usually functional OKRs by discipline at L2, although we do sometimes see cross functional OKRs at that second level as well.

And then some organizations go deeper than that to level three or level four, or even beyond.

The benefit of this nested approach to goals is that if done well, it helps people in the organization have a clearer understanding of what's most important and what's expected of them.

A well implemented OKR implementation also gives our leaders better objective data to make decisions based on, instead of relying as heavily on subjective estimations of progress or success.

OKRs can help increase alignment, both up and down, side to side, across, in a matrix of an organization because we're externalizing our goals in an ideally pretty consistent way around the organization.

And the unique feature of OKRs is key results. In a lot of strategic implementation stacks, we might be clear about our long-range strategy or even our near-term strategy. And then we step right to planning what we're going to do to try to achieve it.

Implementing OKRs as an alignment layer between our strategic plans and our plans about what we're going to do help us fill in gaps with really important answers to questions.

Like, how will we know objectively that we're making progress on our strategic priorities? Do the activities that we have identified and planned, if we do those excellently, will that add up to achievement of our most important outcomes or our strategic imperatives.

We can also use key results outside of just what we think of as standard business measures. So, we work with clients a lot to identify what metrics or measures they actually need to build and instrument a model for, to have the information they need to make decisions in their business.

We also work with clients around designing what we call behavioral or low-fidelity key results that let us look around and look at the world around us and ask the question, when we're making progress, what behavior will we see more of? What feedback will we hear more often? So even if we're in a data poor part of the business, we can still develop theories about what we might want to see become different as a result of our work.

OKRs don't have to be complicated, and they don't have to be a time suck. In a lot of implementations. They're overly complicated and a huge time suck and people have an awful experience with them. So, it is definitely possible to implement OKRs in ways that are not helpful for your organization. The Evolutionary OKR approach that I've developed over the last few years, working with thousands of people in hundreds of organizations implementing or re-implementing OKRs evolved by looking at what wasn't working in organizations in their OKR implementations and then figuring out how to fix what wasn't working. So instead of making all those mistakes yourself in order to learn and have to troubleshoot your OKR implementation, we can fast forward the progress, and helps you start with an approach to the methodology that actually addresses a lot of the pitfalls that organizations run into and answers a lot of the questions with a lot of confidence about how and why and what we should be doing when implementing our OKRs. Implementing OKRs without an expert can be really stressful for everyone involved.

The approach that we work with clients is designed to build internal expertise as quickly as possible. We can work with clients on a long-term basis. We do have some enterprise clients where we're working at great scale where we embed for a period of time, but we also do a lot of work with clients that's just in and out. We get in. We assess their situation. We help the OKR practitioners in that organization put together a playbook or a toolkit that's going to work for their organization. We often work with senior leadership to help senior leadership learn how to model the best practices so that their organizations can learn faster.

And we train coaches and core teams so that they can confidently run their organization's OKR implementations.

If you have questions about Evolutionary OKRs or you'd like to hear more about my work with Red Currant Collective, drop me an email at hello@redcurrantco.com or subscribe to our Evolutionary OKR newsletter at findrc.co/subscribe.