OKR & Spine Model
For effective communication, it will…
- let everyone know what is important to you
- establish indicators for measuring your own progress
- shows how far along we are
- everyone can look for opportunities to help everyone reach their objectives
By being intentional in our thinking and actions, it will…
- allow each of us to be more explicit about where we spend our energy
- allow major goals to emerge
- keep the parts of the organization in step with each other
- shows which people are doing things in which parts of the organization
By keeping a history of the organisation and the people in it that we can learn from, it will…
- everyone can see what is/has been worked on
- allow us a way of indexing the things we have each learned along the way
- new people can understand where we have been and who to connect with
Feedback from Candice Mesk regarding the Google Video
It was a long and interesting video and if you haven’t watched it yet, I recommend watching it at 1.5 x the speed to get through it a bit quicker.
There are all the benefits that Kevin mentioned and the speaker talks through how the adoption of OKRs positively impacted on what people were doing at google.
The things I liked:
- Intentionality as Janco mentioned is the biggest win for me.
- Specific, measurable things and aiming higher than what you know you can nail.
- Reviewing regularly enough to determine which things you want more of or less of.
- Not tying it in to how you measured your performance in the company, but looking back at OKRs can be useful when recalling what you worked on in the last quarter or year.
Things I don’t like:
- The admin of typing it up somewhere on a wiki or whatever. Prefer tactile experience and would rather write it on a card and put cards somewhere I can see them (my fridge). I guess to keep them visible to everyone maybe photos of cards can be uploaded to the wiki????
- The idea that someone could send a mail out to all the people who haven’t published their OKRs makes me feel extremely uncomfortable. I propose that this be an opt-in style of working towards goals, and nobody gets beaten with a public shaming should they fall off the wagon or decide not to participate. I know we don’t work this way, but apparently google does!
- I always feel concerned that making public announcements of what you want to do can lead to guilt if you lost interest. We need to have the guts to say at any point in time “This seemed like fun at the time, I don’t care for it anymore. Does anyone else?”
Additional Resources
Article on Google Using OKRs
How Google sets goals - how OKRs work
