Measure What Matters

Goals cannot be attained in a vacuum. Like sound waves, they require a medium. For OKRs and CFRs, the medium is an organization’s culture, the living expression of its most cherished values and beliefs.

What business leaders have learned, very painfully, is that individuals cannot be reduced to numbers... Even Peter Drucker, the champion of well-measured goals, understood the limits of calibration.

In an OKR system, the most junior staff can look at everyone’s goals, on up to the CEO. Critiques and corrections are out in public view. Contributors have carte blanche to weigh in, even on flaws in the goal-setting process itself… Organizational poisons—suspicion, sandbagging, politicking—lose their toxic power.

Measuring what matters begins with the question: What is most important for the next three (or six, or twelve) months? Successful organizations focus on the handful of initiatives that can make a real difference, deferring less urgent ones.

Be patient. It’s next to impossible to fully understand the mechanism of the system in one cycle. You may need up to five quarterly cycles to see how this actually works.

A tool, not a weapon. OKRs are not legal documents according to which you’re expected to measure your performance.

Dare to fail. Some OKRs should be uncomfortable, even unattainable, which means you’d need to be ready to fail.

Stay flexible. In a fast-changing environment, objectives can stop being relevant, so it should always be easy to modify them, together with the key results.

No dictating. OKRs are “a cooperative social contract”, so there should always be space for debating and negotiations.

Less is more. Each objective should be tied to no more than five key results.

Set goals from the bottom up. When teams and individuals set their own OKRs, they tend to stay more motivated.

An effective goal management system—an OKR system—links goals to a team’s broader mission. It respects targets and deadlines while adapting to circumstances. It promotes feedback and celebrates wins, large and small. Most importantly, it expands our limits.