How to Set OKRs
This article aims to help you plan and run an OKR setting session.
Meetings are expensive and one of the most significant sources of wasted time. They're also the point where we make some of our most critical decisions.
Good meetings are a little like a product. Good planning, design and execution are rewarded.
The decision-making approach in a goal-setting session highly depends on your context. I present an outline for reaching decisions and engaging people, but you need to tailor it for your context.
My aim with these sessions is to agree on goals for the next period. That's our primary output. We want to create goals representing the most critical focal point for the organisation or team. Secondly, we want people to embrace these goals.
This second point guides the flow of our meeting. We want engagement and for people to feel heard. My overriding guidance is for everybody to be present and to listen actively when another person shares a perspective.
An inclusive meeting will encourage everybody to contribute; we design our sessions with this in mind.
I encourage the facilitator to go to the heat and embrace and hear out dissenting voices. Try to bring the conversation around to a discussion of evidence.
The facilitator's art is to encourage this discussion but keep the time in mind. Time can be a useful forcing function, but curtailing conversations can build resentment.
As the facilitator, you are not there to make decisions. Give everybody a chance to speak, but let the group decide. Voting helps if consensus doesn't materialise.
With this in mind, here is the pre-work for a goal-setting session:
Review your strategy. OKR is a strategic execution framework, and goal-setting time is a crucial moment to check your strategic assertions. You should arrive at the session knowing how to measure your strategic hypothesis.
Have the attendees review your strategy. We must enter the session Informed. We don't have time to build people's foundational knowledge during the meeting.
Ask them to think about a fantastic next period in terms of that strategy. What outcomes will they observe? Have them answer the question, why this outcome and why now?
Encourage everybody to document their ideas and share them freely.
Once we get to the meeting, we will need different facilitation approaches depending on the number of attendees. This example is for a group of up to 8 people. For larger groups, I recommend a method such as 1-2-4-All to engage everybody.
At the meeting
Start with ten minutes of quiet time where everybody reads the set of ideas.
Each person summarises their ideas and invites clarifying questions. People should ask and look for evidence in these discussions.
Affinity map the options and remove any duplicates
Vote on the options. Give everybody two votes.
Pick the top 3 options. Ask if anything crucial is missing. One person may feel the group doesn't grasp why one option should be the focus. Let them explain why and allow others to change their vote.
At this point, you will have a shortlist of potential objectives for the period. You should all understand how they relate to your strategy. My strong advice is to select one objective representing a fantastic next period.
A second vote should be your last resort, examine the evidence and consider your strategic hypothesis.
With your objective agreed upon, move on to the measurement.
If you have metrics that underpin your strategic hypotheses, these should be your starting point. If not, you will need to discuss how you measure your objective.
In many respects, key results are the heart of OKR. They represent the metric that teams base their decisions on. It's worth spending time to make them right, and don't limit your thinking to what you can already measure well.
You will have good ideas that you don't know how to measure. You won't solve that in the meeting, but don't discard the idea. One of the attendees should be responsible for identifying the measurement method after the meeting.
I recommend the following approach for a small group trying to identify new key results.
Spend 10 minutes working individually to document ideas. Then work in pairs and select your best options. Each pair shares their candidate metrics with the group. The group can vote to make the final selection if clear winners don't emerge.
A helpful consideration when identifying key results is to consider balancing or safety metrics. Focusing on one metric can often lead to a negative effect on another critical metric.
A straightforward example:
- We want to acquire more leads for our B2B business
- We don't want to minimise the increase in the cost of acquiring those leads
Adding two key results and setting a target related to acquisition costs can help create the balance required.
As you work through your OKR setting, I recommend using this Miro canvas or something similar to document your decisions. The canvas provides valuable insights to improve the quality of your OKRs.
