When I started work I had my own desk. Even when I was a lowly systems administrator at Nixdorf UK I had a large desk with my own phone. A Z80 powered terminal and a laptop I’d “borrowed” from the repair stores.
A couple of years later I was on the team building the Sharp PC-3000, the third or fourth handheld PC (with the DIP team which designed the Atari Portfolio). On my first day I had to build my own desk: there was my space, there was the flat pack desk, I needed to put it together, it was almost a company tradition.
After graduation I was a programmer in an analysis team at Southern Electricity. My desk was always fairly clear and organised. Not as clear and tidy as Kerry’s – she could have won awards. But neither was it the big pile of papers that covered Murray’s desk. Occasionally a manager would question if his desk should be tidied but we knew it was his filing system. Other team members had family photos or certificates on their desk or mementos of visits to power station.
Above our desks were manuals both for the tools – a complex set of VAX VMS manuals, DEC Fortran, Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++, later Visual Basic. Hidden away behind one desk was an illicit kettle with a jar of instant coffee and tea bags. Although I kept a small cafetière in my draws among my files. This saved us from paying 12p to the drinks machine which dispensed weak coffee and tea.
(And then there was the staff canteen, social club and even golf course!)
I mention all this to remember how offices and employers used to be. In those days teams sat together and your desk was your second home. A place you belonged. Today…
Desks are a lot smaller. Few people have their own desks, most hot-desk.
Hot-desking means teams don’t sit together. You sit with some random people you may never see again.
If you do have any personal belongings you either carry them in each day or lock them in a soulless locker at the end.
You carry in a laptop every day and carry it home at the end of the day – even if you never switch it on at home. (Maybe this is why everyone on the London Tube has a massive backpack these days?)
Desks don’t have telephones any more, nor do they have family photos, mementos and certificates, let alone files and manuals!
Each desk is the same and soulless. Employee space is a cost and employers have done everything to minimise it.
There might be a fancy coffee machine, and it might even be free, but its not yours. It is anonymous and likely serviced by minimum wage cleaning staff. Still, no need to arrange who’s turn it is to bring in milk.
Is it any wonder people don’t want to go to the office any more?
At the start of my career the office was a second home, your team a second family. Over the years companies have been “reducing the office footprint” and modern offices are clinical. If people want to stay in their own home, with their own family, is it any surprise?
Personally, I’ve had a office at home for a long time but I’m sick of it. I sometimes dream that someone will offer me a job working in an office 5-days a week with my own desk. Do such things still exist?
So, is it any surprise companies struggle to get people to come into the office? Companies have stripped their offices of the things that made them home and they only have themselves to blame if employees don’t want to be there.
I tend to use the words Objective and Goal interchangeably, as synonyms. In fact, I think I might even say that somewhere in Succeeding with OKRs. But, I have been reeducated, there is a difference, subtle but I’ve come to consider it important. And it reaches back to the issue of goals within goals within goals, or maybe objectives within objectives within …
In many ways I prefer the word goal, it is shorter, more emotional and easier to find clipart to illustrate (search clipart for objective and you always get targets). But since we have Objectives and Key Results I have talked of Objectives and used Goal as a short synonym. Until last year when I (finally) got around to reading Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – a book which had been on my radar for a few years yet somehow I’d never got around to reading. There is more I could say about this book but that will wait for another day.
Back to my topic in hand, Rumelt says:
‘it is helpful to use the word “goal” to express overall values and desires and to use the word “objective” to denote specific operational targets.’
Rumelt made sense and I could see how this distinction could be useful. To illustrate it Rumelt says:
‘Thus, the United States may have “goals” of freedom, justice, peace, security, and happiness. It is strategy which transforms these vague overall goals into a coherent set of actionable objectives—defeat the Taliban and rebuild a decaying infrastructure.’
As if to prove the point I was teaching someone else’s course (something I don’t do very much) when up-came this quote:
“Goals are typically long term, overarching ideas concerning what you want for your business. … Objectives, on the other hand, are usually short-term and measurable. Many objectives may lead you to your goal.” (Forbes, 2023)
Back in Succeeding I talked of objectives being like Matryoshka and nested inside one another, what has become clear to me is that Goals are the outer dolls. By their nature they are a little vague – if only because the further into the future you look the vaguer things are. That means they may not have the very specific numeric tests Objectives, the inner dolls, need. Goals could lack key results entirely I’d rather they didn’t even if those key results were less testable.
So why do I say this subtle difference is important?
Well, precisely because Goals are imprecise, they leave much more detail open to interpretation, they allow for subjectivity and leave space for imagination and experimentation. As such they are both a tool for leaders to describe their shining city on a hill without being specific about in which way it is shinning or how high the hill is. That leave space for emotion, engagement and autonomy. By leaving space goals allow others to share. They are essential when the goal is somewhere off in the distance and actually, the way we think of shining might change between here and there.
That said, they may be used by teams and lesser leaders to describe general principles and aims which guide a team.
So, quarter by quarter set objectives, with key results, every quarter. These should be really precise. These objectives exist within a framework of annual OKRs and them within product goals and company goals. In fact, this takes me back to my description of level 1 goals and purpose. Armed with this language of goals and objectives that blog might well benefit from a little rework but the message stands.
With that in mind there is a space for leadership. Those who’ve read Succeeding will remember I advocate teams setting their own OKRs in line with leadership goals. Then the leaders reviewing the OKRs so both sides can find discrepancies (between the long term goal and the immediate objective). Well, Rumlet has something to say here too, even though he doesn’t discuss OKRs:
‘A leader’s most important job is creating and constantly adjusting this strategic bridge between goals and objectives.’
Objective
Goal
Narrow and focus
Broad and more general
Backed by key results with testable numbers
Key results might be backed by number but more likely to be general
Set by teams to direct operational work
More often set by senior leads to direct work – may be used by teams to define ambitions
Continuing my slight diversion from the core topics of this blog – I’ll return soon, I promise. Today, I want to share some thoughts on conferences.
In particular I want to suggest two things so lets cut to the chase, state them and then I’ll explain myself.
Firstly, we need to recognise a conflict between inclusion & diversity and community. Having any community requires a differential between those inside, and those outside the community. You can welcome, even seek out, diverse people to join the community but if you prioritise diverse outsiders above insiders then the community is weakened.
Second, I think its time – for the sake of inclusion and diversity – to use random selection as part of conference selection.
What has changed
I think I know a thing or two about conferences. In the last decade I’ve spoken at more conferences than is good for me – some years more than a dozen, and thats not counting local group meeting. I’ve been intensively involved with three conferences, years on the programme committee of each, and I’ve chaired a few.
The pandemic obviously halted everything, but conferences have bounced back. There are now online conferences and physical ones. Online I find sterile, few have any feeling of community, they are transactional. But they exist and succeed in knowledge transfer. That makes physical conferences even more valuable for their community side.
But the second change pushes against community: the rise of online mass submission systems.
Many conferences use these now. As a speaker I can register, select the conference I want to submit to and do it in a few clicks. The system will then say something like “People who submitted to this conference also submitted to …” and they will encourage me to submit to more.
Except, I don’t know anything about those other conferences. I’m not a member of that community. Sure I can submit but am I really interested in going? It is a transaction. But its cheap to submit so …
Technology downside
Now the conference committee have to review my proposal together with all the other people who submitted on a whim. So the first problem: these systems make more work for conference organisers while weakening the community.
So the conference committee now have lots more submissions. Which is good because most conference want to broader diversity and become more inclusive: equal representation of the sexes, more under represented minorities and so on. I can’t really object to that – especially ‘cos, while I may present as a white-middle-aged-man I am also in one of those minority groups (neurodiverse).
The real solution to diversity at conferences is to tackle the source: we need more people in under represented groups submitting. This also means that conference organisers need to be actively monitoring submissions and working to increase minority submissions.
More problems
So two more problems: organisers need to monitor submissions for diversity, most don’t. Then they need to work – more work again – to increase representation. Few have the resources to do either properly.
When it comes to selecting submissions many conferences will tell you they select the best. So when comes to selecting organisers are looking for quality and diversity. Which is itself a change, conferences have always looked for quality but many traditionally privilege their own community: those who had attended before, perhaps regularly, and those who had spoken before.
The problem is: community and diversity are opposites. They only align for a very few people. Staying with your community reduces diversity but increasing diversity reduces community.
Imagine you run a hard core programming conference. Traditionally you have white-male programmers turning up. They are your community and the speakers are drawn from that community or people on the edges, who are probably also white-male programmers. Sure there are a few non-white, non-male, non-programmers but are there enough for a whole conference?
Now pause for a moment. It might look like your programme and audience lacks diversity what about the diversity you aren’t seeing? What about neurodiversity? Sexual orientation and gender that are invisible? Or maybe age profiles, skewed older, or younger? Social profile, income level, education level, religion?
Because your population is biased towards one way you have to go outside the community for diversity but by definition that reduces the community aspect. What is the balance between continuity and disruption?
What do you want?
Then there is a side problem of: what do you want your programme to look like? Male-female balance is easy, but what about ethnic group? neurodiversity? Religion? And remember, if we are talking about IT conferences we are skewed towards the upper income levels already. And talking about IT … the IT industry has an age bias. While I see conferences looking for “young upcoming talent” there is a blind spot on older workers.
Do you want your conference to reflect the industry (or society) as it is?
Or as you want it to be?
How many vegetarians should be on the programme? And should you correct for historical in balances?
And remember, the more diverse you make the programme the weaker you make the community. What happens next year? Who comes back?
And remember, because you get more “random” submissions from people on mass submission systems it is harder to form a community of people who come back year-after-year.
O, Quality
Of course you want high quality speakers no matter what their background. But, if your conference is any good there will be more good speakers who want to speak than you have space for. (You could make space but that would damage the economics of the conference.)
If you are selecting on merit you might find you have 30 submissions for 4 speaking slots – the kind of ratio I have seen.
Some conferences will ask for more an more details on the submission page. However, this runs against diversity and inclusion. You are increasing the barrier to submission, you are also filtering for those who are good at writing submissions and have the time required. Dyslexics (more words) and some parents (more time) will be put off.
Conferences which anonymise submissions are fair except you can no longer use past experience or watch old recordings. So you are filtering for people who write good, mainstream, submissions. (Really alternative submissions find it hard to meet criteria.)
Take away the rubbish and good but not very good, you might be down to 10 to 3. If you have multiple reviewers grading them 1 (worst) to 5 (best), you might find yourself choosing between one scoring 4.6 and one scoring 4.65. Is that fair?
What if you then look at their name to see if they are male or female? Or their profile picture to check skin colour? None of this is reliable let alone fare.
What is a fair submission systems?
For years I equated fair with merit. I wouldn’t do it now. I went along with blind reviews for a while but I think they are flawed. Even if you don’t sneak a peak do they give you a diverse set? And what about community?
I’ve given this a lot of thought in the last few years and while I don’t have all the answers I do have some ideas I think are worth trying.
My suggestions
Organisers must monitor submissions for minority criteria they consider important. So sex, ethnicity and age are monitored, but perhaps not religion, handedness and neurodiversity. If nothing else this will move the arguments over criteria to the front of the process rather than arguing about them during selection.
Perhaps controversially, while I don’t want to create entirely curated speaker programmes I think it has a role. I’d say about 40% of speakers should be invited outside of a call-for-papers.
Some of these would be for community continuity. Some would be specially invited because the conferences wants them or their topic (a little of this always happens behind the scenes, if only for the keynotes who are usually invited.) The rest would be from minority groups the organizers wanted represented at the conference.
There would be open submission, probably blind, for the other 60% and they would be reviewed by a panel. But they wouldn’t be selected on merit. (I still think I got it right when I created a 2 round submission process, first round blind, second round with speaker profiles.)
The conference would set a quality bar. Anyone below the bar would be rejected. So if you have 20 submissions for 3 slots on a 1 to 5 scale, the quality bar might be 4.1 so the 10 scoring less would be rejected. From the 10 scoring 4.1 or above 3 speakers would be selected randomly. So another 7 would be randomly rejected.
This seems fairer to me than a process that ignores community during selection and is biased towards those with good grammatical form-filling skills (which might be a privately educated bias too.)
Randomness over complexity
At the end of the day there are just too many competing factors to balance. A random element might be the only way to remove hidden or overlooked biases. That said, in order to keep community and allow the organisers to create the conference they want there needs to be some pro-active selection.
I don’t claim to have all the answers. And maybe I’ve missed some vital point, but this is what I’m seeing right now. I’m interested to know what readers this, so at the risk of spam I’ve enabled comments for this post. Please let me know.
While this blog may not have the big reader numbers of some blogs many of my readers are very loyal – my mail open figures are off the chart! Thank you.
I ignore many of the blogging rules I’ve heard advocated: short posts, tight topic focus, limit topics, keep focus both in the posts and across post. I’ve tried following such rules but it doesn’t last. Its not me.
In my mind you, my dear readers, follow me and my (sometimes) whacky ideas. I like to think we have a “special relationship”. Having said that, I’ll also admit: I write about what interests me, you reads seem to like that!
So I want to share something personal with you. I share it because I’m sure some of you will have had similar experiences. It is important to recognise we are not to blame. Sad to say that no amount of success seems to insulate one from this sort of thing.
About two years ago I got involved with a toxic client. I won’t go into details but in retrospect the client’s manager was a bully. I’d not been working with the client very long when I saw there were problems. I decided to tackle the problems face on and sat down with the manager concerned in an effort to resolve them.
Rather than resolve them I brought them to a head. The manager turned on me. In classic bully fashion it was all about them, how hard they worked, how many problems I created for them, the problems they faced. So I suppose I did resolve them but just not the way I wanted to! There then followed a few weeks where they wanted me to sign an NDA and I refused. That itself is a story but ultimately I called their bluff.
If anyone offers you an NDA to keep quiet remember: they want you to keep quiet for a reason, you have power over them. If they are clever they will realise that offering you a sum of money and then taking it away is probably more likely to make you share your story and it makes them look worse.
Anyway, this was all really bad for my mental health.
I had some counselling at the time and thought I had managed it but actually I hadn’t. It had completely undercut my confidence. I was failing to function properly. It dragged on, weeks and months.
I was slow to realise this but then two things happened. One of you, yes you readers, came to me with an idea. Something which I’d never thought of, it got me back in harness. Thank you.
Once I started working again I quickly realised how I wasn’t over the bullying incident. I was still carrying a lot of baggage. It wasn’t just the recent bullying, I was bullied at school. So I went back into counselling for several months.
In counselling I also came to realise that much of my internal logic stemmed childhood: both the bullying, the way schools treated me and the (now obvious) fact that my neurodiverse dyslexic brain doesn’t see things the way it is “supposed to” – I don’t share the canonical view of, what, some many other.
Take Project Myopia and #NoProjects for example. I’d seen Projects as crazy for years, it was only when Mary Poppendieck said the same thing over dinner in 2011 that I realised I was not alone. Slowly I started to say publicly what I’d only thought privately and ultimately write the book.
At the time my views on projects were career limiting. Not only could I never be a Project Manager but nobody who was doing a “project” (which was everyone back then) who checked out my social media would hire me.
But, I am not the only one who thinks like this – many of you readers do too! It is because I think differently, because I will say these things that I am immensely valuable and I suspect, why you read this blog.
So my dyslexic brain if both a curse and a blessing,
Back to where I am now.
I’m actually in a pretty good place now. My professional life is very different to where it was two years ago and I don’t think its every going to go back. I’m not sure what happens next, I have a couple of ideas but I’m in no rush to change.
Anyway, I wanted to share this with you for two reasons.
In the last year I’ve told several people about my mental health problems and I’m often told in return that they too have had problems. It seems a very common problem for people who have worked as agile coaches to suffer mental health issues as a result of the work. (I might talk about way that could be another time.)
Second, anyone can have mental health problems, and they are nothing to be ashamed off. In truth I’ve had mental health problems on and off my entire life. It is not because I am weak, it is because of things that happened during my childhood I had no control over – like being dyslexic.
Second my professional pivot leaves me wondering what happens next with this blog. I’m not giving up, I’ll keep blogging. I wanted to say thank you to my loyal readers, knowing some people value what I write has meant a lot to me during this time. I’ll keep up non-canonical ideas coming.
I might be known for speaking my mind, being honest and wearing my heart on my sleeve but there are some things I try to avoid talking about. There are time when I consciously bite my tongue.
Perhaps because I brought down the wrath of project managers with #NoProjects all those years ago I try my best to keep my mouth shut when people ask me about Change Managers and Change Management*.
A few years ago a contact asked “What is your chagne philosophy?”
Inside I thought “I don’t have one! Change is not a thing” but rather than say this I waffled. Since then, from time to time, I have glimpsed my change philosophy out of the corner of my eye. Let me try and break it down…
Fundamental my change philosophy rests on the belief that
People don’t resist change, they resist being changed.
Take those two parts separately.
People actually like a lot of changes: when you get a new mobile phone or other gadget, when you get a pay rise, when you change your location for a holiday and so on.
That is not to say people like every change but the changes people don’t like – and thus resist – are largely the changes they have no control over. Thus, if you start from a position that change must be done to people then resistance becomes a self-fulfilling proposition.
Therefore….
Enrol people in change, don’t impose change on people, respect them and make changes which they welcome.
(I almost wrote “put them in driving seat” there, while that conveys what I mean its not entirely true as in most cases there are multiple people on he receiving end and they can’t all be drivers. The moment one person becomes a driver everyone else becomes a passenger and that is exactly what I don’t want.)
Remember …
Change is a leaning process, some people learn faster than others and it is difficult to know what you will see until you have learned. So don’t plan too far ahead. Indeed, one person’s far sightedness can be another’s learning inhibitor.
Because …
Change is not the objective, focus on the outcome.
Talking about change in the abstract – a change programme, a change manager – is a diversion from the goal you are trying to achieve. Change is a means to an end but when we talk about change itself as a thing in is own right it becomes a distraction.
When people are part of a change which benefits them, i.e. makes their life better or supports something they believe in, then success breads success: focus on the outcome, take small wins and use them to motivate further action.
It flows from this that Change Managers, Change Programmes and even Change Initiatives create the most of the very problems they set out to address.
Instead, focus on the outcome you want to achieve and ask people to help.
When OKR setting I’m very keen that everyone involved thinks “What is needed?” – more specifically, “What do our stakeholders/customers/users need?” or just “What will add value?”
The aim is to park the “can we do this?” and “how long will it take?” because to answer those questions you need to know what you are doing. And when you answer those questions you start to ask about details, and this all becomes a long conversation, especially when people doubt the information available (i.e. they don’t trust it or don’t want it to be right).
Getting such information also introduces a forward tail where with upfront pre-work. That creates scheduling problems and complicated everything.
Instead you want put customers and outcome first, assume that in the twenty-first century with technology coming out of our ears it is possible to do something which will move towards the objective. What that something is, is itself open to questions but something can be done. Even if it doesn’t solve the problem entirely.
Rather than set an objective by reference to what you can do, set the objective by reference to what is needed.
Remember: to any problem there is always more than one solution. The solution you choose will depend on other parameters like resources and funding. There are always options.
The OKR 2-step
Step 1: set the objective, decide the outcome you need to advance on
Step 2: think/plan/design how you will go about meeting the objective (or at least moving towards it)
Step 1 might be in the morning and step 2 in the afternoon. Or maybe step 1 happens this week, there is a week of feedback and refinement, then step 2. Just separate the discussions, allow your brain to think differently in each.
Of course it is entirely possible that when you come to do step 2 you decide that step 1 and the resulting OKR needs revisiting but that is a worst case scenario.
In truth it is always going to be difficult to completely separate the “what shall we build?” from the “can we build it?” and “what does the solution look like?” questions. If you don’t try you certainly won’t.
I apply this 2-step approach whether setting OKRs which are ambitious (moonshot, 10x thinking) or predictable (guaranteed delivery). When aiming for predictability its gong to be even more difficult to separate the what from the how but again try.
I mean, what could possibly be wrong with putting the customer first?
In recent posts about OKRs I promised to say something about eggs-within-eggs, I also promised to talk about the OKR 2-step. So, at the risk of creating a OKR mini-series here…
Objective egg
The objective – or outcome with my OACs renaming – is a goal, a target, something to aim for, and outcome you wish to bring about. But, as much as I’d like that outcome to be the end state in itself, more likely, it is part of a broader, longer, larger goal.
The thing about goals is they are almost always wrapped in other goals. Look at sports, like football: you score goals, scoring goals is the aim. But actually, those goals are are themselves part of a bigger goal: winning the match.
But winning the match is not the final goal either. Winning the match may help the team win the league this season. So the real aim is to win the season – or some other contest.
But even winning the season isn’t the ultimate goal. The team wants to continue winning, and to continue winning they need to make money. Even winning the season is a goal nested inside bigger eggs.
Lacking alignment
Now goals aren’t always so well aligned. The owners of the team may aim to make money, so although they want the team to win their make money goal can some times conflict with the winning games.
On the whole the individual players will have aligned incentives: win the match, be crowned the best player, bag a bonus. Possibly a player has other incentives, one recovering from an injury may have other concerns. Just possibly, a player has been offered a lot of money to throw a game, so they may be pursuing a personal goal which conflicts with the team.
Goals work best when there is alignment, small mis-alignments may not be an issue but big misalignments can be.
Misalignment probably isn’t nefarious
The same is true in our work. Taking a Machiavellian view you see lots of conspiracies for team and individuals to pursue alternative goals. However, I tend to the see goals diverging for more mundane reasons.
Goals aren’t communicated clearly: leaders say one thing but workers hear another.
Works see divergence between what stated goals and their actions.
Conflicts between different goals aren’t spotted, or nobody listens conflicts are spoken, e.g. cost effectiveness is a goal but so too is innovation.
Or simply, goals aren’t prioritised sufficiently: everything is priority #1, team A spend their time on goal Y while team B on goal Z and team C try and do a little of everything an get sidetracked somewhere else.
Try this at home
Try drawing your goals as one of my egg diagrams – like above. Start with your immediate goals, then the goal they exist within, carry on going for as many layers as you can identify.
Then check your company website: what are you stated goals? or missions? What about your values? Do they all align?
Now show this to others and see if they agree with your analysis or see things differently.
Challenge, respond, disuss
This is why I advocate a challenge-respond-discuss protocol, it is feedback. Leaders set out the bigger goals and and challenge, ask, teams to contribute. Teams respond (with OKRs) and then the two sides discuss and give feedback, they iterate towards goals which everyone agrees.
And this is where the outer eggs become more relevant: by understanding the different eggs and how they need to align all can work to build smaller goals they support bigger goals.
By not giving orders leaders test their own communication. If teams come back with goals that don’t align, or don’t seem to build towards the leaders goals the question is why?
Is there something the leader didn’t know? Did the leader’s communication lack clarity? Or maybe a team member had a insight the leader should know about?
If the team members misunderstood who’s problem is that? And more importantly, what can we do about it?
By letting team members decide for themselves not only do you enhance motivation and bring their knowledge into play but you get to debug your own thinking.
The thing is, you don’t get alignment by telling people. Simply adding OKRs to your way of working does not deliver alignment either.
Rather, you get alignment because this approach shows you where alignment is missing or where conflict exists. Because each goal is articulated and can be compared with others. Because these are seen by different people.
Rrather than call them Objectives and Key Results I wish, o how I wish, that I could rename them OACs – Outcomes and Acceptance Criteria
Why?
Well, two, or maybe three reasons.
First off the terms. There is an increasing emphasis on Outcomes in a lot of discussions and management teams. Indeed, if you look beyond the “agile is dead” click-bait many former agile advocates now talk about “outcome based working” or some variation. Nor is this confined to those formerly known as “agile coaches.” Indeed “product model” thinking revolves around the same idea. While many in the product community seem allergic to agile they pursue to the same idea.
This raises the question “what is the difference between an objective and an outcome?”
Personally I see little difference. Thus I define an objective as “an outcome you wish to bring about.” You might think of “objective” as forward looking while “outcome” is backward. The objective is a target, an aim, a goal, a outcome is the realisation.
Tell me again: Key results?
When it comes to “Key Results” there is some ambiguity. I don’t think “key results” intrinsically speaks to people. People don’t automatically know what is key and what is a result. At best it requires explanation, at worst it is interpreted erratically.
Perhaps because of this key results themselves are often a little fuzzy. Time and again key results are little more than a to-do list: a work breakdown or plan of action. Now I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a plan of action to achieve your outcome (objective) but key results is not the place. (Another blog I need to write, “The OKR 2-step.” I talk about it in presentations and training but haven’t blogged about it.)
Key results are the key – the important, the main, the principle, chief, first and foremost – results, the consequences, the effects, the measurable differences, you realize when the outcome is met.
At the same time key results are measurable and therefore testable. Thus in test first management the key results are the acceptance criteria.
Outcomes and Acceptance Criteria, OACs
This rename has two more benefits. Because this interpretation highlights test first management it continues the test first story which began with automated test first unit tests (TDD, Test Driven Development). Then Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) into Behaviour Driven Development (BDD).
That might seem like a small benefit but in positioning OACs closer to the agile way of thinking creates distance from the past.
One great thing about OKRs is that they did not appear out of nowhere. By the time they hit the mainstream there was already a body of work discussing them. Plus at least two well-known case studies. This helped their adoption by teams and leadership, and, for better or worse management consultancies who are keen to push them.
But, at the same time it brought baggage. I really dislike some of the writing on OKRs which is too “rah rah, win one for the Gipper”. Or (to use a word I dislike) its outright “boosterism.” While that can be good for rally-the-troops it is also short on detail (how to) and sounds like another silver-bullet.
Some of the older writing on OKRs, that dating from the 1970s, actually propagates the mistakes I see in key results: like the to-do list tendency. It also comes with a command-and-control assumption that manager knows best. Under my interpretation of OKRs they are used more as a challenge-respond-discuss protocol.
So, why not?
As much as I’d love to replace OKRs with OACs I don’t think I’m ready to do it. Thats because, for all their “faults” OKRs are pretty good. That legacy has oiled their passage into management circles. Similarly, despite the flaws in the older writing there is good advice in there.
Still, I’ll continue to push my interpretation, dream about renaming them and continue talking about Objectives and Key Results.
A roller coaster on the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ.
“Should I rollover OKRs which the team didn’t meet?”
No
“If I do rollover our OKRs, should I update them or keep them the same?”
Always update them
I recently spoke to an American health care provider about OKRs and backlog free working when these questions came up. This is not the first time I’ve been asked about OKR rollover so I thought I’d post my answer her.
Basically, when you start writing OKRs start with a blank sheet of paper.
A blank sheet has no carry over work. You are going to ask “What are the most important things we should be working on in the coming period?”
Do not start with carry over work, do not come with assumptions, do not make promises in advance. You have never set objectives with these people and this point in time before.
You probably set the previous OKRs 3 months ago. So let me point out the obvious: that world no longer exists.
Sure the last 3 months – January to April 2025 – have seen a lot of changes (understatement!) but every 3 months see change. Three months ago you probably agonised long and hard about what were your most important three (or maybe four) things that were worthy of OKRs.
Hopefully you have achieved these OKRs and have the outcomes to show for. But if not… do you really like in the same world you did 3 months ago?
Why would your priorities 3 months ago still hold today?
Is your business so stable that priorities from 13 weeks ago are unchanged?
Do your customers want the same things?
Are your investors and executive team relaxed about the market, cashflow, ROI and everything else?
Have your competitors, and government, really done nothing?
Count your blessings if you live in such a world. Lets pretend you do.
It is entirely possible that you are working towards some even bigger goal, something that does take more than 3 months to produce – landing someone on the moon, creating a new technology, gaining a certification/qualification, or some other big thing.
That is good, that is a bigger goal – the next level up, it might last a year, two years, 10 years or longer. That goal deserves articulating in its own right and while it remains your bigger goal all your quarterly goals should contribute towards it.
(Although I talk about the nested-egg and OKRs I haven’t posted about it here, I’ll correct that soon. In the meantime check out my Employees: growth driver or cost to trim post were I mention them.)
Now, suppose that the big thing you wanted 3 months ago is still really important to you. But, suppose you didn’t complete the OKR. There is work outstanding, or you didn’t meet all the acceptance criteria. Entirely possible.
Do you carry it over as is?
No.
Even if you didn’t complete it you probably did some work. If it is no longer important write it off, don’t fall for the sunk-cost-fallacy.
Assuming it is still important evaluate where you are and reflect it to reflect both the work done and what you have learned in the last 3 months.
You might be half way to your target already, in which case you might want to increase it. Or maybe you realise how hard the target is, in which case you might want to relax it.
Either way you will have learned something, revisit the OKR and ask: is it still worded the right way? are the targets right? should we add more key results or delete some?
So in short: do not, never, ever, look at an OKR and say “We missed it so cut-n-paste it for next time.”
In the early days of Agile this approach was called “Time boxing.” Work which wasn’t finished at the end of the time box was either released or abandoned. Over the years the industry has relaxed that understanding and today “time boxing” has been diluted to mean “a period of time.”
OK, I get that 2 week cycles are tough, I get that sometimes work flows beyond the sprint, I get that abandoning work is tough.
It is in working in time boxes, be they 2 weeks or 3 months, that we get good at working in time boxes. They make our lives difficult to force us to think, revaluate and learn. We get better at it the more we do it.
So please, lets not unbox OKRs: 3 months is a long time. Just ask any politician.
At the mention of product roadmaps I’m reminded of the scene in Blackadder II where he becomes a explorer. Lord Melchett hands him a scroll and says “The foremost cartographers have prepared this map of the area you will be traversing.”
Blackadder unrolls the scroll, looks at the other side and replies “But it is blank”
“Yes,” replied Melchett, “they asked if you could fill it in along the way.”
Which if you think about it, isn’t that different to what the Lewis and Clerk expedition did. Starting with what was know they explored and created better maps.
Now you don’t have to talk to a Product Manager for very long before the topic of Roadmaps comes up:
“How can I build a good roadmap?”
“How can I guarantee my roadmap is delivered?”
“How do OKRs fit with a roadmap?
“How can I make sure my roadmap is accurate?”
and so on… frankly, roadmaps drive me to despair. For a start the word “roadmap” means different things to different people, or rather, different organisations expect different things from a roadmap.
Second, most so called roadmaps are little more than a list of features with dates. Worst still, most of those dates are little more than guesses so even if the features listed didn’t change they are unreliable.
What roadmaps should be
I’ve long held that the best roadmaps are scenario plans, they are one version of how the future might unfold. Like all scenario plans they are designed to create learning, that means they need to involve multiple people. Creating a roadmap should not be a solo activity for a product manager. It should be a group activity, as is so often the case the true value is not the map itself but the process of creating a map. Another case where you want to prioritise planning over plans.
Like a good scenario plan the starting point for any roadmap should be what you know will happen. The future is uncertain but there are many events which are already programmed in.
We know how many people will turn 18 in 2030.
It is almost certain that Apple will launch an updated iPhone in 2026.
Laws don’t come out of the blue: implementation is usually months, if not years, after the law if passed by legislators.
You know the major trade shows in your industry and when they will occur. If you work in telecoms you will already be planning around WMC Barcelona, 2 March 2026. You can bet in WMC will be March 2027, then March 2028….
Only when you’ve mapped out what you know might you turn to what you want, and when you want it.
But still, roadmaps are hard. There must be a better way…
Compass over map
Leave aside those lists with dates, product development is too complex to make them worthwhile. Those who request them are misguided themselves and those who provide them are either living in fantasy land or knowingly offering up a flawed map.
What we need is direction.
What we need is purpose and intention.
Maps are not a good metaphor, what we want is a compass. We want a mechanism for pointing us in the right direction, a tool to measure deviation from our desired destination.
After all, we increasingly aim for a “North Star” (or “True North”, or the one I heard this morning “Lode Star”).
Armed with such a device, if you know where you are, and how long you have to get to your destination you can calculate how fast you need to go. Or, if you know how fast you are going you can work out when you will arrive.
Although, nobody has ever arrived at Polaris, the North Star. We have only at interim points along the journey. If we do the right thing then good things will follow.
Navigation with automomy
When you follow a roadmap you are programmed: Feature X by 1 June, feature Y by 1 September, product completion by 1 December. Miss one of the milestones and you may be called to account. Maps reduce your autonomy.
When roadmaps are used as a plan they are disempowering. Someone has decided the route your job is to follow not to question it. There may even be traffic police on hand to keep you on the route and take charge of any accidents, further removing autonomy and discretion.
Compare that with compass and North Star: you take readings, you recalibrate, you calculate how far you need to go, you adjust your direction… in other words you Inspect and Adapt!
Having a compass and following a North Start leave responsibility and decision making with those on the journey, the team. After all, the team are the experts, the team have the most knowledge, the team should be the fulcrum of making things happen.
