Are your strategic themes gathering dust like unused New Year’s resolutions? If you’re investing significant energy evaluating initiatives but your enterprise themes seem vague, unconnected, merely decorative, or too restrictive, you might suffer from “Strategy Theater.” The frameworks these organizations use prescribe a strategy artifact. But the leadership team responsible for it hasn’t boarded the …
Does it ever feel like OKRs are too much overhead? Does it make sense that OKRs will only work when “We we will have more people to manage them”? Let’s be honest – OKRs can sometimes feel a bit heavy: If you’re tempted to hire a PMO to manage your OKRs because they’ve become too …
What gets measured gets managed. But setting OKRs isn’t enough. The flow and traction of OKRs need to be managed as well – otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the OKR swamp. Using an OKR Kanban can help you both see the swamp and improve the flow and traction of OKRs. Here’s an example – Here …
Here’s one major reason why your OKRs are enabling waterfall projects and not product orientation. And its related to the common advice to focus on Outcome OKRs … We constantly talk about moving from outputs to outcome OKRs. Providing alignment to the real goal and enabling flexibility and discovery. What we should talk about more …
Do you ever feel like your goals are too inclusive? Being inclusive is essential for culture but not so good for setting goals. You want your goals to mean something. They shouldn’t be an excuse to enable you to continue to spread your attention all over. A question you can ask about your goal/s is …
In this video, I explore the core issues many organizations face with their OKR (Objectives and Key Results) practices. We’ll revisit the fundamental principles that often get lost in the process of setting and tracking OKRs and explore how to fix misaligned strategies. Tune in for actionable insights to help you reset your approach, align …
“OKRs S&%k, but we don’t know anything better” This was a direct quote from a cybersecurity scaleup’s Chief of Staff, but I hear the sentiment way too often from founders, chiefs of staff, COOs, and others in the scaleup ecosystem. I started encountering OKRs when working with scaleups a couple of years ago, helping leaders …
Strategic Themes in SAFe represent strategic choices at the Enterprise/Portfolio level that should guide decisions throughout the portfolio. A qualitative Objective accompanied by a quantitative, valuable, and measurable evidence-oriented Key Result connected to a portfolio KPI is a great way to make sure the strategic theme is pointing toward desired outcomes without going into too …
Are you struggling with OKRs? Tune into my Fixing OKRs Videos, which were recorded in a set of live streams earlier this year. If you want to dive deeper – check out my updated OKR offerings.
OKRs – Yet Another Silver Bullet It seems OKRs are the new “silver bullet” – VC/PE/GE Investors give John Dorr’s “Measure What Matters” book to their CEOs and strongly suggest that their portfolio companies use OKRs. While the idea of using OKRs to improve strategic focus and alignment with execution is great, things often go …