I encounter many organizations that are trying to improve the alignment between strategy and execution with the OKRs framework (Objectives and Key Results). There’s good intent there, but more often than not I see anti-patterns like:
- OKRs that look more like tasks than strategic objectives — especially by the time they reach working teams
- OKRs used to micro-manage teams and individuals rather than empower and enable them.
- Too many OKRs that are set without any respect/consideration of the ability to actually deliver them in a sustainable way while dealing with other work happening in the organization
- Defining OKRs and then forgetting about them until its time to grade them. (Even worse, some organizations don’t even bother with a serious consideration of how they did on their OKRs…)
OKR Theater
These anti-patterns aren’t an inherent problem with OKRs. They are what you could call “OKR Theater”. They are what you get when you start to focus on the mechanics and forget the principles/spirit/reason you used the technique in the first place. OKR Theater has the potential to become a member of a big family — Scrum Theater, Agile Theater, SAFe Theater, and Lean Theater, Six Sigma Theater, you get the picture. It’s the sort of thing that happens when a good thing gets spread too thin and the people implementing it lack the depth and experience the original practitioners had. It’s what the late Jerry Weinberg called “The Law of Raspberry Jam” — “The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets.”
Dealing with the OKR Theater
This sort of theater is here to stay. What can we do though? One step that seems to help is to try to recall Why we are doing something — in this case, OKRs — and whether they are achieving the expected outcomes for us. To feed this snake its head — what was the Objective that we set out to achieve with OKRs, what were the expected Key Results, and are we seeing indications that this is heading in the right direction?
OKRs (and Scrum…) thrive in the Complex Domain
Next, we need to reflect on what kind of environment we’re operating in. Some of our work happens in a simple or…
