What are OKRs?

OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, are a goal-setting framework designed to help your organisation meet its goals with focus and agility. Annual and quarterly OKRs are the vehicle that you will use to communicate and implement your strategy for success while on the adapt way journey.

OKRs consist of two components:

• Objectives: clear, inspirational and timebound statements of what your organisation wants to achieve. Objectives are qualitative and clearly define your organisation’s top priorities in service of the vision and strategic goals. 
• Key Results: The specific, quantifiable measures of the progress and ultimate success of the objective’s outcomes. 

OKRs are about testing a strategic idea - something that will create leverage in your organisation, they are not about tracking “business as usual”. If an objective is successful it should have created change or a new advantage. Think: we’ve laid new track, not just kept the trains on time! 

How are OKRs different from KPIs?

Key Performance Indicators measure what you’re already doing and help you see things are on track. They are for “business as usual”. OKRs are about defining, testing, and measuring new strategic ideas or goals. KPIs and OKRs can work together in a complementary way. For example, you could use an OKR to improve an area of the business that a KPI highlighted needs attention.

Benefits of OKRs 

The adapt journey starts with the organisational leadership team setting organisational OKRs, but you can use OKRs across all teams to focus and engage everyone with your organisation’s strategy. You can read more about this here.  
Some of the benefits of using OKRs to implement your strategy are: 
 

• Communication: OKRs foster transparency and alignment, ensuring everyone works towards the same goals and has an understanding of the organisational leadership team’s overall strategy 
• Focus and alignment on priorities: OKRs direct energy towards outcomes rather than mere tasks. They create commitment and maintain focus, even when faced with distractions. This fosters a culture of high accountability, which is essential for effective and high-performing teams.
• Meaningful Progress & Engagement: Well-implemented OKRs help individuals align with the organisation’s vision and goals, keeping them engaged and providing a sense of progress. Understanding the broader purpose and reasons behind OKRs helps people understand what part their own team can play in achieving them. Ideally, teams begin to develop the autonomy to develop and drive their own OKRs in support of the organisation's strategy.
• Stretch: Ambitious goals are important! Teams should feel slightly uncomfortable as they strive to achieve them. Easy wins don't energise people or provide a sense of accomplishment. Stretch goals require effort and drive personal growth.
• Learning Framework: OKRs test ideas and support a culture of learning and continuous improvement.

How we use OKRs

OKRs are the vehicle you will use to implement your strategy. They ensure your strategy gets "off the page", and your ideas start to get tested and tracked. They are a powerful way to ensure alignment, focus, and measurable outcomes. OKRs translate your vision into actionable objectives with trackable results and are a key part of how a coach will work with the organisational leadership team to Keep Strategy on Track.

By now, your leadership team should be familiar with our seven questions. OKRs are the answer to: “What’s important now?” and “Who needs to do what?”. Your leadership team will create the first annual and quarterly OKRs in the Design Your Resilient Business Strategy session and then continue the discipline of setting new OKRs every quarter at offsites with your coach as part of Keep Strategy on Track. This sets a cadence to ensure you are responsive to an ever-changing operating environment and take time each quarter to make sure you are on track.

Your published OKRs will be visible to everyone in your organisation who has access to the platform. As your score and update them, over the course of the year, the updates will also be visible. You may want to consider what other context you give your people about the progress of the leadership team. Many of our customers give a whole team update each month on the OKRs after the monthly organisational leadership team meeting.

As part of your Keep Strategy on Track work with your coach, you will continually review the successes or failures of your OKRs, reflecting and learning from wins and misfires. This is an agile approach to planning and fosters a culture of learning and innovation in your organisation. 

Best practices for setting and writing OKRs

Once your leadership team is aligned on what your objectives will be and who will have the accountability for implementing them, you will go through a process designed to help you best communicate the OKR to the rest of the organisation and come up with meaningful key results. The platform takes you through the following questions: 
 

1. What are you trying to achieve?
2. Why is this important and why now?
3. How will we know we have been successful?

Some other suggestions and pitfalls for OKRs to consider:

• The capacity of the team and what's realistic about what you can achieve over the next 3 or 12 months. Fewer, well-executed, and implemented OKRs are preferable.
• Having one clear, laser-focused OKR might be the right strategy for your organisation and send a clear message about what's important right now.
• Our experience has shown more than five OKRs are difficult to implement. OKRs are about prioritising resources for the critical things that matter the most. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
• Do not confuse Key Results with actions or tasks. Actions (the "how" part) can be tracked on dedicated workboards and linked to the OKR in the platform. Key Results are measuring outcomes, not outputs.

What other resources are available for OKRs?

Introducing OKRs

Google article on OKRs

OKRs vs KPIs