Get Things Done Like Google

Google is one of the most valuable brands in the world. In 2020 it passed the $1 trillion value mark and a staggering 140,000 people currently work for the company and its parent company, Alphabet. Google is responsible for some of the most widely used and popular products on the internet like Search, Chrome, Gmail, Docs and Maps. Despite their size, they are able to maintain a strong culture of innovation which keeps them at the very top of their game.

In contrast, many large companies reach a point where their management systems are so complex and bureaucratic that the entire organisation begins to stagnate. The result is that innovation grinds to a halt and the company lurches from crisis to crisis and gradually becomes less relevant. If the company is large enough and has enough cash, this slow death can take decades. However, working there will not be much fun! Your life will be a constant treadmill of high-pressure sales targets, complex approval workflows, committees and micro-management. You’ll be living in a real-life Dilbert cartoon!

So what do Google do that’s different? How do they control all that chaos and complexity and still achieve greatness? The good news is that the answer is ridiculously simple. The great news is that it’s a technique that everyone can use in any part of their life in order to achieve more and be the best version of themselves.

Since the early days, Google has used a process of structured goal setting called OKRs which stands for Objectives and Key Results. They didn’t invent this process - it was first used by a manager called Andy Grove at Intel in the 1970s and was later brought to Google by one of his Intel protégés, a very successful investor called John Doerr.

You may have come across different types of goal and objective setting processes, like SMART objectives before, but OKRs are a different approach and have proven so successful that companies like Google put them right at the core of the entire organisation. The difference with OKRs is that they take the bigger picture into account by creating a bridge between strategy (the general direction) and execution (how you’re going to get there). Here’s how they are structured.

The Objective

The objective is WHAT you are trying to achieve. Typically, at any one time, you should aim to have only three or four objectives on the go. This is what gives OKRs their first superpower – by deliberately limiting the number you allow yourself to have you are compelled to define a small number of really important things that you want (or need) to get done or improve upon. As part of this process you will have to think really hard about what those things should be (and, perhaps more importantly, what they should NOT be), because you aren’t allowed to just make a big wish-list under the OKR system. It is this thinking process that will dramatically increase the clarity and focus needed to reach your destination.

The second superpower of OKRs is that all objectives have to be significant, concrete and action oriented. They describe OUTCOMEs rather than merely ACTIVITIES, so they have to be meaningful and not leave room for interpretation. This will really help you to avoid fuzzy thinking and means there’s no room for woolly, poorly defined objectives under the OKR system. Let’s say you’re feeling stuck in your current job and want to progress - here are two examples of relatively weak objectives that you might write down.

·??????Advance my career

·??????Improve my prospects

They are weak because they describe a vague notion of progress and do not describe a concrete, action-led outcome. How would you act on these objectives, and how would you know if you had achieved them? They might make good missions or visions….but they are not great at the objective level. Here are two better examples for comparison.

·??????Achieve promotion this year

·??????Secure a job at a higher-grade in a new company that values career development

With these examples, the concrete actions that you need to take will become much more apparent.

The third superpower of OKRs is that they should be quite hard. We sometimes call these “stretch goals” and they are somewhat counter-intuitive. The idea is that you describe an objective that you know might be possible, but that you also know is some way beyond what is comfortable. The act of doing this will sharpen your thinking on the activities and milestones that are the most likely to move you towards the goal. Now, there is a catch with stretch goals under the OKR system – you have to be mentally prepared to fail sometimes. But, without this acceptance of potential failure as part of your thought process, you will only ever set safe objectives and never realise your full potential. So, for example, you might set an objective around promotion where you set a deadline. It is the deadline that creates the stretch element and it will force you to focus on the most important actions right away. For example, compare the following two objectives and you should start to get the idea.

·??????Work towards promotion

·??????Achieve promotion this year

Which one do you think is better?

The Key Results

The Key Results simply describe how you’re going to get to the Objective. They are the actions, steps or milestones that you will undertake and you might have somewhere between, say, 3 and 6 Key Results per-objective. But be warned, this isn’t just a list of vague activities because there is one very important characteristic of a set of Key Results that underpins the strength of the OKR approach. The twist is that the collective set of Key Results MUST be the set that will lead to the accomplishment of the objective. Again, this is designed to avoid fuzzy thinking, marginal activities and procrastination.

You can think of Key Results as a sort of “reverse-engineering” of the Objective as-in, “Here’s where I’m going, now how am I going to get there?” Good Key Results should be very concrete and action-led and where possible they should be quantified. Whether you have achieved a Key Result should be a binary thing – either you did….or you didn’t. The Key Results can be less fixed than the Objectives though. So, if you find part way through the process that you chose a poor Key Result that isn’t moving you towards the Objective, you should change it to a better activity or metric. Here’s an example of possible set of Key Results for the “Achieve promotion this year” Objective from earlier.

·??????Learn what the process and any deadlines are

·??????Review the promotion criteria and benchmark myself against these, with input from my manager, to reveal areas for improvement

·??????Learn two new in-demand skills identified by the gap analysis

·??????Take on additional management responsibility in two key projects

·??????Make two process improvements for my department that save money for the business

Of course, this is just one example. Yours could (and should) be different and reflect your own aspirations and the processes, values and priorities of your employer. But it illustrates the structure.

Why Bother?

Hopefully you can begin to see that the OKR system is subtly, yet powerfully, different from typical objective-setting processes. This is because they focus your time and attention on the most valuable and promising activities and steps and help to move you forward in a much more strategic way. Plus, they aren’t just useful for work and business – you can equally well apply them to areas like health, family and personal finances. And if it’s good enough for Google, then there must be something in it!

So, why not give OKRs a try? If you’re interested to learn more and to see some good examples, the What Matters website is a great place to start.

www.whatmatters.com