Revisiting OKRs: Setting Achievable Goals

In last week’s article, we talked about the damaging role that a quest for perfection can play in getting things done. A useful counter is to set achievable goals and therefore avoid the ‘out of reach’ aspirations that can keep us from achieving more. But how do we ensure that we don’t set goals that are too easy to achieve and miss out on our full potential?

To explore this, we thought it was a good time to revisit OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), our preferred approach for setting goals and objectives. OKRs are different to traditional goal and objective setting processes as 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).

The Objective

The objective is what you are trying to achieve and should be limited to three or four at any one time. This is what gives OKRs their power and grounds them in realism – by deliberately limiting their number, you are compelled to define a small number of important things that you want or need to get done, so you will have to think hard about what those things should be (and, perhaps more importantly, what they should not be). This isn’t just a wish-list, it’s a thinking process that will dramatically increase the clarity and focus needed to reach your destination.

All objectives have to be significant, concrete and action oriented. They describe outcomes rather than activities, so they have to be meaningful and not leave room for interpretation. This will help you to avoid fuzzy thinking and means there’s no room for poorly defined objectives.

Let’s look at how you might define and manage feeling stuck in your current job and wanting to progress. Weak objectives would be:

Advance my career

Improve my prospects

They are weak because they describe a vague notion of progress, not 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 mission or vision statements, but they are not great at the objective level. Here are two better examples:

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 more apparent.

OKRs should stretch you but, again, in a way that is grounded in realism. 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. 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, easily achievable objectives and therefore never realise your full potential.

The Key Results

The Key Results describe how you’re going to achieve 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.

What they are not is a list of vague activities, but achievable steps that should underpin the strength of the Objective: Here’s where I’m going (Objective), now how am I going to get there (Key Results)?

Good Key Results should be 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. In this way, they can be less fixed than the Objectives - 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 goals.

The OKR system is subtly, yet powerfully, different from typical objective-setting processes because they focus your time and attention on the most valuable and promising activities and help to move you forward in a much more strategic way.?