The OKR Deception

OKRs and the Lies We Tell Ourselves

Many organizations struggle with alignment and focus.

Companies are working on too many different things at once. Everyone feels the pain and they decide there must be a better way.

Then someone has a brilliant idea. Let's introduce OKRs or some other goal-setting framework to help solve this problem.

Sounds sensible right?

The problem is that the struggle with alignment and focus is usually a symptom of something else.

The same culture, mindset and people that struggle with alignment and focus, will shoehorn those same inadequacies in their OKRs.

The end result?

We struggle with alignment and focus... While we're wasting our time crafting OKRs to create the illusion of alignment and focus.

And then when our OKRs invariably fail to produce alignment and focus, we blame the way we do OKRs.

We shift our attention to better OKRs and we get stuck in the 'OKR deception'.

As long as we approach the problem with the OKR frame of mind, then we end up being deceived. All hope is lost to ever fix the lack of alignment and focus.

Your problems are rarely (if ever), OKR problems. And if you believe they are OKR problems, it's pretty likely you're fooling yourself.

Because if you know your problems and how to fix them, they immediately stop being OKR problems.

Don’t limit your frame of reference to the OKR system you’re trying to adopt, because the whole point is the smooth interplay with your current organizational system.

That’s the hard part, because your current organizational system is usually where most of the problems reside, not the goal-setting framework you’ve recently decided to adopt.