OKR Soundwaves by Wave Nine #1 - The Outcome Mindset

Today we had the opportunity to chime in with Johannes and Jessica on our live Webinar about Outcome Mindset hosted in LinkedIn. They talk about their experience with organizations when introducing both OKRs and the Outcome Mindset. They touched points on the challenges and insights on how implementing them in new organizations looks like. 

Our Coaches:

Jessica Stimac - Senior OKR Coach at Wave Nine in Europe. Mainly focusing on enabling results-providing OKRs for high-growth companies and enterprise, including Fortune 5 companies.

Johannes Glatz - Senior OKR Coach at Wave Nine in the US. Helping scale OKRs and operating rhythm of OKRs into high-potential startups and established Enterprises, including F100 enterprises.

Check out the 1st OKR Soundwaves below:

Johannes

Wave Nine is the worlds largest OKR consultancy, helping organizations of all sizes internationally to improve their results with Objectives and Key Results and shift their operating rhythm to success. Part of what we do internally for knowledge sharing are these Lunch and Learn sessions. We  found these were so interesting and so valuable for us to learn from, that we thought, why not make it public? That's how the Wave Nine Soundwaves were born.

 One of the topics today is the Outcome Mindset.  What is the Outcome Mindset?

Jessica

The outcome mindset is an approach for us to measure the success of all work, in terms of the value we're creating, and not about the tasks or the output we do. I'm pretty sure everyone has a kind of a task list. We all have projects and milestones, we love to plan. But the question is always, how do we know if we where successful? How do we know that a task we're doing is adding value? The outcome mindset is pretty much that, it is about defining the value of our work and  about moving away from the task we do to, challenging ourselves. We should ask ourselves, How do we know that we're successful? What are our key success metrics for the next 12 weeks? 

Johannes

Does it mean that people don't have to do the task anymore? How does the Outcome Mindset help perform better?

Jessica

Of course, we all must do our tasks. To get to the outcomes that create value, we need to be clear and transparent on what are the next steps. So, the answer is yes, we need the tasks. But first, we need to be clear on what do we want to achieve, and how do we know that we had a very successful quarter. Once we know the key outcomes, we can then deep dive into the tasks and set the next steps to make sure that we mobilize quickly and get there. The answer is yes, we should have tasks, but let's do it step by step and don't rush into the outputs first.

Johannes
Agreed, the beauty of OKRs is that if you want to make sure that you achieve the right things, you should probably set a goal that articulates your achievement of these things. And once that goal is set, then you're done, Right?. But it isn’t that easy. Is it? Jessica, what would you say, from your experience working with Fortune 500, 100  even Fortune 5 companies. Why isn't it as simple as it seems to set meaningful goals that helps teams achieve better results?

Jessica

From my experience, I often see teams operating in the task mindset, meaning that they still have daily targets and they're being measured in terms of the tasks they do. It is a challenge, obviously, because we need to break habits and habits have been around for the last not only 10 years, probably the last 50 years. And it is also a leadership topic, how to really change, it changes a lot of our collaboration models. To add to this point, the second reason I could see is that most of the companies have chosen this task-oriented mindset, because it is an easier way to steer an organization, we all feel more comfortable in setting tasks, and we can certainly measure them. We are not held responsible for adding value and creating outcomes. At least from my point of view, these are the two probably dominant reasons, I could see. I am curious to hear some of your thoughts. Would you agree with that? Or do you have some more reasons to add?

Johannes

Certainly, if I'm given a certain set of tasks, it takes away the ambiguity of success. I can always say "I wrote that email", "I made that call and I put that date in the plan". That way, it's not my fault that it didn't produce the outcome that we wanted. Tasks are easy, and tasks are what people are used to. Habits are difficult to overcome, and I think oftentimes what people underestimate is that starting to work with Objectives and Key Results, means building new habits and behaviors. It doesn't just mean that you keep doing what you're doing; and you put your task list in an OKR framework which, unfortunately, sometimes when we start working with organizations, that is what we see in the beginning. It's  part of the issue that we touched on earlier, right? It seems so simple, but it isn’t.

Ultimately, it's also because there is no clear definition of an outcome. An outcome always looks different for the executive level,   department heads and for the frontline team. What they measure in terms of success, the different kinds of metrics are all different. There isn't a nice blueprint. Instead of turning tasks into Key Results, organizations should focus on empowering their teams. It's about the teams setting their own goals not copy pasting into a new framework. And that's the challenge.

Researchers from the University of Oslo wrote an interesting paper on using Objectives and Key Results in an increasingly remote world. In the study, they were using OKRs as guidance points, as North Stars. The OKRs would articulate the value rather than tasks - at least that was the idea. One of the early findings was however, that it is difficult to set Objectives and Key Results at a meaningful level with meaningful outcomes. They had created OKRs that behaved like tasks, being measured in as complete or not complete. The issues they found were that teams didn't feel any meaningful impact of their work and were frustrated that the Key Results didn't show any progress until the work was done. So even here in that study, did they underestimate the education necessary and ended up with a task list. What do you think?

Jessica

There are some teams that have the idea that OKRs are very simple, we do a one- or two-hour session and have clear OKRs on a paper, and that's just not what reality looks like. So, it might look like that for some mature agile teams that are very aligned on the outcomes. But in most cases, we still need to have valuable discussions before we can get to the real outcomes. To your point, to really start with the perfect outcome is a challenge, is often not what happens in the first quarter and I would say that is perfectly fine. So often I see teams needing one, two or three quarters to really get to set up OKRs, where they would say, that is a perfect focus for us measuring outcomes. Obviously, it doesn't mean that the first quarter is not valuable, because teams will start having the right conversation and they will start looking at their metrics. They will probably say that one of the key results that you find is the wrong one and that is okay, because we want to improve every quarter. A little bit more time is needed at the beginning. Also moving away from the thought that everything has to has to be perfect the first time we do it. Let's assume you want to go surfing tomorrow. Will it be perfect surf weather tomorrow?

Johannes

No. And should that stop you? Should you wait until it's perfect out to start surfing? No, because it doesn't work that way. That brings us to the famous simple Voltaire quote, "the perfect is the enemy of the good". That describes the process of OKRs, because outcomes ultimately describe what it is we need to achieve. The key there is that it disconnects from the task, to come back to the core concept. Because when you do a task, it's done or not. The goal is to flip the mindset. To touch on a quote from Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, "task progresses is like climbing a ladder". The goal is, reaching the top of the house, and the key result tells us if we are putting the ladder against the right wall and if you indeed end up on the right house. A task just shows that your climbing a ladder - it can't tell you that you're climbing up the right wall though. The key result articulates which wall to put the ladder on that you're getting better at surfing.

Your point on going easy in the first quarter, what are some suggestions that you give teams? If they're doing their first iteration with OKRs, and they are proud of the OKRs they created. Then you work with them and it turns out the key results are all tasks. How do you help them get past that?

Jessica

So the first guideline I would give is, "take your time", and don't rush it. Meaning that if you just set a one hour time slot on your calendar to create meaningful OKRs, you might give yourself a more stressful experience than a valuable one. Make sure that you set enough time to really define your OKRs. Once you have done it and you feel that the key results are still more task oriented, there are a handful of questions that you can ask yourself. For example, if I do this task, how do I know they were successful? To give you one example, I want to launch a campaign for marketing, how do we know that this is a success?  So how would we judge that the campaign brought in value? And the answer can be, more traction on a website, maybe some new leads? There are different variations of outcomes, depending on what you want to achieve. But ask yourself the question, how do we know that this task has been done successfully?

Johannes
And posting every week? Would that be the right outcome metric?

Jessica

Yes, we can measure that. But from an OKR perspective it is not a great outcome. Because it might be that nobody looks at it, so that it's not being insightful for anyone. So, I would try to loop in some more metrics and some more perspective on this topic. If we are posting, what is the overall aim we're having, do we want to position ourselves in a certain area? Do we want to increase our followers? Again, the answer to these questions will be a great basis for you to discuss actual outcomes at the end.

Johannes

That's also a super useful question to ask. Because oftentimes, we start asking these questions in our OKR setting workshops, and it's difficult for people to sometimes articulate why they're doing these things.  There's a difficulty of finding a great measurement of success. But often as you start asking people for the "why", it turns out there is no why and the work hasn't been meaningful at all. So, the question is, should we keep doing that? Or should we be doing it in a different way instead or at all?

Jessica

That brought one quote to my mind. From Peter Drucker, the inventor of  Management by Objectives, and he once said that "There is nothing so useless as doing something with great efficiency that shouldn't be done at all". I think that goes perfectly in line with what you just shared. With OKRs, we're challenging ourselves, we're rethinking the work that we're doing the right work. Not just a question of, are we doing this task efficiently? But why are we doing this task? This is indeed a very, important question to ask.

Johannes

And this is the answer to our question from the beginning: "How do OKRs and the Outcome Mindset help people focus and help people articulate their focus. It's by trying to find the "why" and the "impact" of work and doing less of what doesn't have an impact, and more of what matters. Are you doing something for the sake of doing it? Or is there actually a value behind it? And if there isn't, or if the value isn't as great, stop doing these things.

Prioritization means saying yes to one thing, but it means saying no, to all the other things. That's the difficulty. It’s easy to announce a priority, it's hard to say no to the other things. But by going back to your Key Results, you can test if a task that you may have been doing forever is actually providing value. And the consequence may very well be that we shouldn't be focusing too much on it anymore to free up time for more important work.That's the connection of key results and the task underneath.

Jessica

The response we hear from most of our clients is that this mindset shift is difficult but amazingly helpful.  There is obviously a challenge of finding the right outcome, but there's so many reasons why it's worth going through the journey, and why we shouldn't just give up after the first workshop. There are also so many different resources on the market. There are OKR Coaches out there able to support in that process because we've seen it working quite well. Obviously, it takes some time and some best practices to find the right task for your team.

Johannes

 Thank you so much Jessica for this conversation.I hope you all enjoyed the session and find it meaningful and learned something. Please feel free to reach out to us over LinkedIn or at WaveNine.com.

Wave Nine is hosting ORK Soundwaves on Linked Live regularly. Follow Wave Nine on LinkedIn and don't miss the next one.