[HN Gopher] OKRs masquerade as strategy
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OKRs masquerade as strategy
Author : asplake
Score : 91 points
Date : 2021-11-15 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rogermartin.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rogermartin.medium.com)
| [deleted]
| jph wrote:
| For strategy, the best quick start I've seen is a strategic
| balanced scorecard, and it leads directly to OKRs and KPIs.
|
| Describe what your organization/project will look like, at an
| agreed future date, such as one year from now. 1. What are the
| financial highlights such as sales and investments? 2. What are
| the external highlights such as customers and vendors? 3. What
| are the internal highlights such as processes and employees? 4.
| What are the learning and growth areas such as research and
| upskilling?
|
| https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/strategic-balanced-sc...
| fijiaarone wrote:
| That puts a point on why implementors can't stand that sort of
| business think.
|
| A boss says "I want you to make me more money!"
|
| When you ask "How?"
|
| His answer is "Your job is at stake."
| fijiaarone wrote:
| That leads to (and comes from?) unethical behavior.
| tibbetts wrote:
| Goals masquerading as strategy is an incredibly common problem.
| Good Strategy Bad Strategy is my favorite treatment of the
| problem. Unfortunately a lot of executives don't like to be told
| they are suppose to take responsibility for strategy. Here is an
| article length version from the author:
| https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-cor...
| motoxpro wrote:
| Such an incredible book
| aa_memon wrote:
| One of the best talks on the subject I've heard by Richard Rumelt
| author of "Good Strategy Bad Strategy"
| https://youtu.be/UZrTl16hZdk
| shoto_io wrote:
| Yes, I can confirm that has been the best book I have read
| about strategy so far.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Is there any evidence that the use of OKRs correlates with better
| results versus not using OKRs?
| papito wrote:
| OKR - "a way to make your team feel bad about themselves".
| hinkley wrote:
| Institutionalized negging is something I've become more aware
| of over time. Powerful if evil way to control costs.
|
| Once you see it happening to you or a friend you can begin to
| cast backward through your memory to identify other times when
| the same thing was happening but you just didn't have a name
| for it.
| ravenstine wrote:
| _" Always room for improvement!"_
|
| I'll throw quarterly & yearly performance reviews on to that
| pile.
| Kalanos wrote:
| It would be nice if there was a way to quantitatively tie
| objectives to competitive positioning and monetization
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Is that not what KPIs are for rather than OKRs?
| tibbetts wrote:
| It would be nice, but then you'd probably be in a pretty boring
| business.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| This is particularly timely for me, since we covered Measure What
| Matters, the book mentioned in the blog post on OKRs, on an
| episode of our podcast that came out last weekend.[0]
|
| I think you can sum up some of this blog post as discussing the
| difference between strategy and tactics. OKRs are tactical
| objectives that help you achieve your strategic goals. Is that a
| fair summary?
|
| [0]: https://pnc.st/s/business-books/f97e0afe/measure-what-
| matter...
| crdrost wrote:
| Yeah, that's roughly about the sum of it.
|
| Other observations about OKRs that I would have liked to see
| included are:
|
| - The article calls out how _Measure What Matters_ and OKRs
| only work if the key results are legitimate metrics, real
| numbers as opposed to boolean flags: continuous system outputs.
| But at scale, some subteams just put their tasklists into OKRs
| as boolean KRs, make up a nebulous objective to cover them, and
| reimplement the same flawed systems that OKRs were meant to
| replace.
|
| - Often OKRs are scoped beneath the team level to the personal
| level. This is very dangerous. The unit of production is not
| the individual but the team. You tend to create perverse
| incentives when you go one level lower, "I am an amazing
| employee because I didn't care about my struggling colleagues
| and ignored them and delivered 10 times as much work as them!"
|
| - OKRs need to be understood as a management back-off to be
| effective, but this culture shift is relatively uncommon. If
| you look up the literature on setting good OKRs, you will find
| blog articles about SMART goalsetting or whatever, but very
| little about "OKRs are about treating your employees as
| research scientists. You are going to give them a goal to do
| research on, that is the objective, and you're going to open up
| the pocketbook and just say, how much grant money do you need
| to solve this objective. So that's why it's important that the
| objective makes the business money, you need to know how open
| the pocketbook is. Meanwhile, the KRs are important because
| research projects have a sort of inertia, by themselves they do
| not respect the Pareto principle to do the 20% work that drives
| 80% of the result. So you have to tell your researchers when
| it's okay to stop, they won't know that unless you tell them
| and they will keep tweaking to get that last 2% efficiency out
| of the system." Tutorials just don't have this perspective!
|
| - OKRs probably only make sense in terms of a complex system,
| so required reading should probably be Donella Meadows'
| _Thinking in Systems._ In particular, you need to understand
| that for something to change often everything must change.
| People try to do these very tiny scoped OKRs and that 's kind
| of risky. To get a complex system to change, often you just
| need to hold the output at some desired level, and allow the
| internals to reconfigure to provide that output. Nobody talks
| about OKR-induced organizational chaos, but ideally you should
| have one or two OKRs a year that really rearrange the entire
| system because they happened to be located at a bottleneck and
| they had to twist the system around until something else became
| the bottleneck.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> OKRs are tactical objectives that help you achieve your
| strategic goals.
|
| While I agree that any distinction of strategy vs tactics was
| missing in the blog, I think the ORKs are too high level to
| qualify as tactics. Tactics are directly actionable. In that
| light, he may be wrong about OKRs not being strategy - they
| just need someone to figure out the HOW for each one and then
| it should all come together.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| I guess you could call the Key Results tactics.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think of Steven Covey's "Begin with the End in Mind".
|
| There really are some metrics that are strategic. But when your
| manager is asked to have 20 OKRs just because your manager has to
| have 20 OKRs and then you get asked to have 20 OKRs that is a
| distraction.
|
| (In terms of strategy there might be one thing or three things
| you REALLY need to do.)
|
| At one place I worked I was expected to create OKRs for my own
| personal and professional development and I felt offended by it
| because it was out of phase with my own needs.
|
| Today I do a lot for personal and professional development and it
| is highly strategic, it's motivated by being better at what I do
| for work but also about getting the social opportunities I want
| and where I think technology is going over the next ten years.
|
| Because it is strategic I am continuously finding that a project
| I started a year ago has given me exactly the resource I need
| right now for a situation I had no idea I'd be in.
|
| Like hell I need to fill out a form in some artificial format for
| my boss about it.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _I think of Steven Covey 's "Begin with the End in Mind"._
|
| This has been a point of struggle lately in my career; I know
| exactly the source you're quoting and it's paid dividends in my
| own ability to deliver and manage teams when I was an
| engineering manager
|
| _and yet_
|
| I'm finding a lot of frustration lately-having intentionally
| gone back to working as an individual contributor-with jobs
| where a leader takes on a massive undertaking of a task, or
| decides to start picking at a particularly nasty
| process/business/engineering scab, making it my priority, but
| giving no guidance on what "done" means or looks like (aka:
| acceptance criteria). Even when I blatantly, directly, and
| simply _ask_.
|
| It's difficult to know where you stand in terms of an OKR
| deliverable when you have a definition of "done", but
| stakeholders are preventing any kind of hand-offs or closure to
| the project when they have a different definition of "done" but
| are avoidant in sharing what it is and where your deliverable
| comes up short.
|
| Got an open-ear and open-mind on ways to better 'manage up' on
| this tangent.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You need a definition of done for your definition of done.
| (e.g. your requirements for the requirements they give you.)
|
| It's an essential part of integrating with a team that you
| are able to get good requirements. Maybe you can get them to
| express requirements in a way you like. In some cases I've
| gotten written requirements that were inadequate but
| developed some process like "ask a few questions", "write my
| own version of the requirements and send it back for
| approval")
| dvtrn wrote:
| Perhaps. My challenge probably lies in finding out what my
| requirements are, it sounds like.
|
| In the situation I'm dealing with presently, I don't
| necessarily need this stakeholder to take any action other
| than make a decision on two similar options with different
| outcomes only they have the business authorization to make.
|
| For my part, I've documented, and shared documentation with
| the stakeholder, and had multiple sessions with them about
| requirements and next steps to complete this project, and
| asked them repeatedly if there was anything that prevented
| us from moving to the next step. Each time the answer is
| no. By every measure I've tried so far, it seems there's no
| question marks or missing inputs from me on actually
| _executing_ the next phase of this work, and the
| stakeholder understands the options /risks/trade offs by
| their own admission...
|
| Yet when I ask "then what is your decision on these two
| options for the next step?", we end up going back to
| questions if the previous requirements have been met-which
| we already found a consensus that they were and the
| stakeholder suggesting we aren't ready until those are met.
|
| It feels...cyclical.
|
| --- a forced analogy: it's like you and your friend are
| working together to build a custom bike, your friend knows
| a little about bikes, but asked you for help because you
| _really_ know bikes, and after you finish putting the bike
| together, the last thing to do is wrap up the handle bars,
| so you ask your friend what color grip tape they want, but
| they start asking you if the tires have been inflated.
| verve_rat wrote:
| I know the relative power dynamic can complicate
| things... but, it sounds like you need to stand up for
| yourself more. Tell the stakeholder that no more work
| will be done until a decision is made. You have done your
| part, the stakeholder has the authority to make the
| decision so on their head be it.
|
| If that doesn't work then you have three options:
| escalate to their boss, live with it, or quit.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| I kind of reject the premise of this Professor's argument. I use
| OKRs extensively up, down and across my business and at no point
| have I felt they masquerade for strategy.
|
| You set a destination for the business through the creation of a
| vision and then create OKRs and KPIs to measure progress towards
| it and perhaps more importantly provide transparency.
|
| It's simple, it just works, and I think this guy is just trying
| to be contrary for the sake of it.
| Jare wrote:
| My short take: your vision is the what, and your OKRs/KPIs are
| the if/when. The strategy is the how.
| majormajor wrote:
| I've worked for a couple different places now that did _not_
| "set a destination through a vision." They picked a destination
| as a number ("more money" or "more users" or similar) and then
| built OKRs from that number. There was no real strategy, just
| local maximization.
|
| But then what does it mean if you didn't hit your numbers? Was
| your progress along the right path? Are you closer to being
| able to hit targets next year? Those execs couldn't tell you.
| Hell, even if you _did_ hit your numbers, it was hard to get
| any sort of answer about how that tied in to what the company
| wanted to do next.
| WJW wrote:
| Let me just inject some cynism into this: no executive ever
| thinks their strategic initiatives are anything other than the
| purest form of willpower given articulate form. At all the
| companies I've consulted for, OKRs inevitably run into either:
|
| - Non-SMART formulated key results anywhere in the chain allow
| opportunistic employees and/or managers to spin tales about how
| they're doing great regardless of actual results.
|
| - The executive team does not publish company-wide objectives
| in time for downstream teams to build their own objectives upon
| them, so the downstream teams just do what they've been wanting
| to do anyway and then spin a yarn about how it fits into the
| company-wide objectives when (and if) they arrive.
|
| - Lack of responsibility, nothing happens if you fail to meet
| your KRs. Also nothing happens if you beat your stretch goals
| btw.
|
| - Reorganizations every six months make a year-long planning
| cycle meaningless in the first place.
|
| - The whole company failed the planned OKRs for the year so
| badly that the executive team just decided to not mention them
| ever again "for morale reasons". (True story)
|
| - And many more.
|
| Don't get me wrong, OKRs _can_ be a powerful tool in small
| enough teams where the Principal-Agent problem is not yet
| rearing its head in force. But to say that it "just works" and
| has no problems is simply false.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > But to say that it "just works" and has no problems is
| simply false.
|
| It's also become a bit like "Agile". Take ten companies doing
| some sort of OKR process, and I bet most of the overlap is in
| name only.
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