Transcript: How to break through the process theater (Using outcome orientation)

Transcription: Faster-whisper base.en, English

Transcript

[00:00:00] Do you ever have nightmares that your transformation is managed by the South Park underpend gnomes?

[00:00:07] Picture this. You’ve invested in a framework, maybe you’ve rolled out agile, say, for OKRs,

[00:00:14] and your teams are following that process. But despite all of the activity the promised business

[00:00:20] impact just isn’t showing up. Sound familiar? If so, you might be caught in what they call

[00:00:28] process theater. That’s the situation where everyone’s performing the rituals,

[00:00:33] but the outcomes you care about never materialize. Let’s explore why this happens,

[00:00:40] how to spot it, and what, and currently, how to use outcomes to move from process compliance to

[00:00:47] really sustainable traction. So what does process theater look like? First, let’s get

[00:00:54] clear on the symptoms. It isn’t about bad intentions. Most teams and leaders that are stuck in the

[00:01:00] process theater genuinely want to improve. But what you’ll see is the focus on the mechanics

[00:01:06] over the meaning. Teams that spend most of their time and energy on following the process to say

[00:01:12] we’re doing it, nothing necessarily because they see the value. Actually, if you ask them,

[00:01:18] a common symptom is that they don’t see the value and they feel like they’re following a theater,

[00:01:26] and they feel worse and worse about it over time. Take OKRs as an example.

[00:01:32] If your organization is measuring success by whether OKRs exist, not whether they’re helpful,

[00:01:38] you’re in OKR theater. You’re tracking the presence of objectives and pure results,

[00:01:43] but nobody’s using them to drive decisions or grade to alignment. It’s activity

[00:01:48] masturbating as progress. Why does process theater take root so often? It usually starts

[00:01:56] with a reasonable goal. Maybe in the case of OKRs, leaders want more alignment or sharper focus,

[00:02:03] but instead of connecting the dots between the process we’re introducing and the intended impact,

[00:02:09] more likely people jump straight into implementation. It’s the classic underpennignals problem.

[00:02:16] Step one, collect underpence, or in RK, surround stand-ups, write OKRs.

[00:02:24] Step three, profit. In this case, achieve alignment. Or whatever was the original reason you decided

[00:02:33] to go for OKRs or whatever is the transformation that you’re focused on.

[00:02:39] While nobody can explain Step two, you ask again and people go back to the activity and features.

[00:02:46] That missing middle layer is the connective tissue. The actual behaviors and outcomes that bridge

[00:02:53] process and impact. Without it, you often end up with a lot of motion, but not much movement,

[00:03:00] not the impact that you’re looking for. So let’s talk about OKRs again.

[00:03:07] The intent behind OKRs isn’t just to document objectives and key results in the two.

[00:03:11] It’s to create alignment with autonomy, most of the time. That’s what people are looking for.

[00:03:17] You want people moving in the same strategic direction, but with the freedom to figure out

[00:03:22] how to get there. It’s the heart of agility, aligned and empowered teams.

[00:03:28] But in order to get there, you need to define the behaviors you want to see.

[00:03:33] Instead of teams writing OKRs because they were told to, you want teams to understand the strategic

[00:03:38] context and can make decisions themselves. For leaders, it means providing clear intent,

[00:03:45] direction and stepping out of the way, trusting teams to own the house.

[00:03:51] So how do you build that trust? Leaders need to know what teams are working on.

[00:03:56] When teams focus on a few key things and deliver tangible process, it builds trust.

[00:04:02] That trust, in turn, leads to more empowerment and more decentralized decision-making.

[00:04:07] Over time, you get a positive flywheel. More trust leads to more autonomy, which leads to

[00:04:12] better outcomes, which builds even more trust, which then leads to more autonomy, and you can see how

[00:04:18] the flywheel can flow faster and faster. But it doesn’t happen automatically. In most organizations,

[00:04:26] leaders are used to being involved in every decision. So once you map out the outcome,

[00:04:31] the behavior that you want to see, the behavior that you want to change,

[00:04:35] you can then define it as a key result in a change focused objective.

[00:04:40] Here’s one way this could look. If our objective is the majority of our innovative

[00:04:46] knowledge work takes place in aligned and empowered teams that had the autonomy and ability to innovate

[00:04:52] experiment, sense and respond by the end of the year, the key result that would lead to that

[00:04:59] would indicate we’re heading there, that would be the thing we focus on in order to create that result,

[00:05:05] is leaders let their teams figure out what to build 80% of their time.

[00:05:11] And you can stop here. You identify the behavior you want to see,

[00:05:16] but sitting this is your okay, are you providing direction and flexibility, you’re saying, I want

[00:05:22] to see leaders letting their teams figure out what to build, but I’m not going to tell leaders

[00:05:32] what, what do they need in order to get there, not going to tell teams what to do to get their

[00:05:37] leaders to enable them to do that. The leaders and teams would work together on achieving

[00:05:44] this objective, this key result, they will have to hypothesize, ship some changes to how they work,

[00:05:51] sense whether they’re working, respond by adjusting course, different techniques, different interventions

[00:05:58] to try to move the needle towards this ball. Having said that, sometimes a bit more direction can be

[00:06:05] useful. While you should avoid telling teams exactly what to do, you could provide the direction

[00:06:12] that points to trust as a leading indicator or an enabler for empowerment and autonomy.

[00:06:19] So how might that key result look like? You might use something like leaders, consider 80% of their

[00:06:26] teams to be a colorful, predictable and trustworthy. What’s important, by the way, is to provide that

[00:06:35] connecting tissue to share with teams the reason we want to choose this key result is because we

[00:06:42] consider it a leading indicator towards leaders letting their teams figure out what to build.

[00:06:51] We’re pointing to an assertion, an hypothesis, an assertion about the connection, the causality

[00:06:57] between these two key results, a leading indicator and a logging indicator. So if you’re a leader and

[00:07:03] you sense process theater in your organization, here’s what you might try. Start with mapping out the

[00:07:12] specific behaviors that feel like that theater. What are people doing just to check a box? Walk

[00:07:17] back from those behaviors. What’s driving them? What’s the impact? Can you identify a downward spiral

[00:07:23] where these behaviors are causing other behaviors that are undesirable and over time?

[00:07:32] Let’s say in the case of our OPRs example, we’re doing things that are making us less trustworthy.

[00:07:41] The fact that we’re less trustworthy will lead to us being trusted less and micromanaged more.

[00:07:48] We should make us feel more like pawns rather than like players, which would lead to us not being

[00:07:57] very accountable to our work and saying, yeah, somebody else is going to fix those things,

[00:08:02] anyhow they don’t trust us, which is going to lead to less and less trust more and more medley,

[00:08:07] and eventually to leaders feeling like they have to be involved in everything and the

[00:08:13] organization not really being scalable and not a fun place for people to thrive. So at this point,

[00:08:20] you might want to reconnect with the original intent. What are the outcomes and impacts you were

[00:08:27] after by introducing this practice, this framework, this intervention? You can use

[00:08:34] outcome mapping to clarify the chain from the process that you’re using to the desired impact

[00:08:40] and look for where it is broken. Where is there a missing link, missing tissue, or where,

[00:08:50] a behavior is happening that is undesirable, that you would like to actually intervene.

[00:08:57] Look for the intervention that will stop the downward spiral and ideally start turning the fly

[00:09:04] wheel towards the outcomes and impact that you’re seeking. And then you can set an objective and key

[00:09:13] results or a set of key results around these behaviors and outcomes, not around the vanity metrics,

[00:09:19] even these are harder to measure. I prefer measuring qualitative outcomes in an imperfect

[00:09:26] way than measuring quantitative vanity in an accurate fashion. Over time, you can build a

[00:09:32] capability to be more quantitative around outcome metrics. But if you have to choose,

[00:09:40] that’s what I’ve seen work better, to focus on the qualitative outcome earlier. And remember that

[00:09:49] you’re making an assertion, you’re making a bet. You might rewrite about the intervention,

[00:09:55] you might be wrong. And one of the key points here is to consider your key results and your

[00:10:02] objectives continuously and see if you’re able to make progress towards them. And if they even

[00:10:09] make sense that despite the fact that teams are more accountable, predictable, and trustworthy,

[00:10:17] that’s still not leading to leaders empowering them. Maybe there’s something else going on,

[00:10:25] maybe you fixed one thing and now you need to tackle the next obstacle, the next constraint,

[00:10:30] and maybe it was a wrong assertion to begin with that trust had anything to do with it.

[00:10:38] The important thing is by focusing on what’s the impact that you want to see, what’s the

[00:10:44] lagging outcome that you want to see and by setting leading indicators as well as the ability to

[00:10:50] be adaptive around them to sense and respond around them, your building, your ability to develop

[00:10:59] your organization to work through issues, rather than managing a project of implementing OKRs,

[00:11:07] in this case. What you’re doing is you’re using OKRs thinking outcome orientation and

[00:11:13] experimentation to build an adaptive organizational capability using an adaptive approach.

[00:11:25] List thinking, outcome mapping, all of this is inspired by OKRs workshop, which I participated

[00:11:33] in last week. I recently joined Sense and Response Learning, Jipton Josh’s organization as a certified

[00:11:40] training partner, and we’ll be teaching the OKR Masterclass to help organizations leverage OKRs

[00:11:47] to move their product development and transformation efforts from outputs to outcomes, from process

[00:11:55] theater to an experimentation, adaptive capability. So if you’re sick of process theater and the idea

[00:12:02] of evolving to focus on outcomes sounds interesting, let’s discuss. Thank you for listening in to

[00:12:09] another episode of Scaling With Agility, I’m Yuval.