<story><title>OKRs masquerade as strategy</title><url>https://rogermartin.medium.com/stop-letting-okrs-masquerade-as-strategy-a57fc2cea915</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jawns</author><text>One of my issues with OKRs is the oft-repeated line that the goals should be so audacious that you should only expect to achieve about 70% of them.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re following this advice, you are either purposefully choosing goals that you do not know how to achieve, which is a problem, or purposefully choosing goals whose achievement relies on way too many externalities over which you have little control, which is a problem.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying external factors shouldn&amp;#x27;t be considered, or that we should only set goals that are within comfortable reach.&lt;p&gt;Rather, I&amp;#x27;m saying the uncertainty should be accounted for differently. It should be baked into our goals, not treated as if it only matters at the OKR level.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if you were to plan a sprint, and your story points did not factor in uncertainty at all. Then, you committed to a sprint size that also did not take into account uncertainty. But your stakeholders agreed that a 30% sprint failure rate was acceptable.&lt;p&gt;Now imagine baking in uncertainty into your estimates and then committing to a sprint size you can realistically hit. Add stretch goals if you want. Doesn&amp;#x27;t that seem more sensible?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sokoloff</author><text>&amp;gt; purposefully choosing goals that you do not know how to achieve, which is a problem&lt;p&gt;Purposefully choosing goals that you don’t yet know how to achieve is one of the powers of OKRs; they’re not meant to be limited to project plan-style marches towards a known outcome.&lt;p&gt;Take the classic YouTube “one billion hours in daily user watch time” by the end of 2016, which was about a 10x multiple over their 2012 stat. There’s no way they knew how to reach that goal, but the objective helped them to align and constantly make small decisions in support of that goal (instead of other conflicting goals, each of which could be argued to be good for Google in a different way).</text></comment>
<story><title>OKRs masquerade as strategy</title><url>https://rogermartin.medium.com/stop-letting-okrs-masquerade-as-strategy-a57fc2cea915</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jawns</author><text>One of my issues with OKRs is the oft-repeated line that the goals should be so audacious that you should only expect to achieve about 70% of them.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re following this advice, you are either purposefully choosing goals that you do not know how to achieve, which is a problem, or purposefully choosing goals whose achievement relies on way too many externalities over which you have little control, which is a problem.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not saying external factors shouldn&amp;#x27;t be considered, or that we should only set goals that are within comfortable reach.&lt;p&gt;Rather, I&amp;#x27;m saying the uncertainty should be accounted for differently. It should be baked into our goals, not treated as if it only matters at the OKR level.&lt;p&gt;Imagine if you were to plan a sprint, and your story points did not factor in uncertainty at all. Then, you committed to a sprint size that also did not take into account uncertainty. But your stakeholders agreed that a 30% sprint failure rate was acceptable.&lt;p&gt;Now imagine baking in uncertainty into your estimates and then committing to a sprint size you can realistically hit. Add stretch goals if you want. Doesn&amp;#x27;t that seem more sensible?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chockablock</author><text>I’ve heard that too, but for me it registered as a way of shaking people free of their fear of writing down their true objectives, lest they find themselves on the hook for missing it. Something along the lines of ‘What would you do if you were not afraid?’&lt;p&gt;I think the analogy to a sprint plan is perhaps misplaced: the point of an objective is not to break down the work for planning purposes but to capture the strategic imperative.</text></comment>