OKRs and Radical Focus

OKRs and Radical Focus with Christina Wodtke

Sohrab:
All right. Welcome to our next conversation as part of the Agile Insights conversation series. Today we have Christina Wodtke as our guest. I'm very excited because I've been reading her book Radical Focus. It's here now, the second edition, and Christina and I are going to talk about several things. Before we introduce Christina or give her a chance to introduce herself, I want to tell you a little bit about the intent of this interview and this conversation. I want to focus on topics that haven't been covered in other interviews, because Christina has done quite a few interviews, especially last year when the second edition of the book came out.

One of the interviews was with the folks at Why Matters, which I really enjoyed. We're going to link to that interview in our notes so it.... I try to avoid redundancy. The topics I want to talk about are the following. So first, getting to know Christina, second, hearing her definition of OKRs and why she's such an advocate for this issue. I mean, not only has she written a book on the subject, but already the second edition. I want to know what are the requirements in companies to implement OKRs, because I see many companies, clients of ours, but also others, who want to implement OKRs and encounter many difficulties. I would also like to talk about the role of leadership.

And finally, I want to talk about the concept of the learning organization. Because when I listen to your interviews, Christina, and when I read your book, the concept of the learning organization keeps coming up, right? But a lot of people don't associate a topic like OKRs with the learning organization, but you do. And I think that's very insightful. So without further ado, let's get started. First of all, I want to welcome you, Christina, and thank you for being here with us. I know it is early in your homeland, but we are very happy to have you here.

I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself briefly so that the people in our audience who don't know you yet can get a good sense of who you are and how your journey has been so far, because it's quite interesting and remarkable.

Christina:
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you guys inviting me on your podcast. It's a great honor for me. Excuse me. Agile is such an important part of my career and it's great to reach out to people who care about the topic as much as I do and you do. So I'm just checking in from my office at Stanford. I'm a lecturer in human-computer interaction. I'm primarily concerned with how we can make technology more human, which is something that I'm very passionate about. The reason I'm writing about OKRs in "The Team That Managed Itself" is that I also want the economy to be more human. All the stuff we build is there for people. So why isn't it supporting us and taking care of us the way it should?

I feel like it's my job to fundamentally change that. I teach a number of courses, and I'm going to start a course in the fall on people-centric product management, which is about how we can consider not only the people we serve - which is incredibly important - but also the people we work with. So that's where I'm at right now. And then, of course, I have... If I list everything I've done so far, the list gets pretty long. I've worked at a number of companies, such as Zynga, MySpace, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and of course Egreetings in the early days. I also started a couple of companies that dealt with social issues. Yeah, and then I found my way to teaching and really love it now.

It's a great time. When I work with my students, they always say, "I must have the perfect first job." And then I say, "No, no, you really don't have to. You can have so many different lives and adventures if you just follow your nose and do the things that are important to you."

Sohrab:
If you just follow your nose, and I think if you also put effort into every new journey or every new step that you take.... I mean, similar to you, I've done a lot of different things. I started out as a doctor, then I was a management consultant, and then I went down the path of being an entrepreneur. So I can very much relate to your path. And maybe someday I'll end up at one of the better business schools in the world and teach because that's my true passion as well. Christina, thank you so much for this brief introduction. A lot of your work, both at the companies that you listed, like Zynga, which I think was one of the most remarkable companies of its time and where you also first encountered OKRs, if I'm not mistaken, and many other companies, but also, especially in your books, your work is based on this framework, on the topic of OKRs. Could you briefly explain to our listeners what OKRs are and why you're so passionate about them, and maybe you can also make a connection to what you just mentioned, human interaction?

What are OKRs and why are they important?

Christina:
Exactly. Unfortunately, I feel like a lot of people who are looking at OKRs see it as another way to get more productivity out of their employees. And if you're constantly fighting for more productivity, you're treating people like machines. If I can just make them a little better, a little more memory, whatever, but that's not how people work. I learned about OKRs at Zynga, and Zynga was a John Doerr company. John Doerr introduced it to Mark Pincus, who was CEO at the time. He was CEO at times and not at times. I don't know if he is now, but he was the founder. And I think it was CityVille in particular that made OKRs a strong art form, very simple, high aspirational, but it was always about what we don't do, but what we need to do.

So Zynga was a very, very opportunistic company. If you remember, it was notorious for jumping on fads or taking advantage of certain trends, and it was good at that. But the problem is, if you're a very opportunistic company, how do you deal with strategy? So that's how they dealt with strategy, to make sure that they went for things that were incredibly important to them. Then when I left Zynga, people didn't know what to do. So I consulted with some startups and made it easier to deal with OKRs. But the most important thing for me was when I left Zynga, I didn't know what to do. And I thought, "Okay, I'm tired. I'm burned out. I don't know what direction I want my life to go."

And I thought, "Well, let's use OKRs to fix my life." So I set OKRs for myself early on, like having a job that makes me enough money to live on, but also makes me happy. And what about well-being? And those are really important questions: what are the signs that I'm not well? Is it an upset stomach? Is it back pain? And by being able to figure that out, I've learned a lot about what I should be doing in my life. And I have to say that it worked, because I've never been so happy in my life. This job is just great.

Sohrab:
Yeah. So you've seen it applied to a start-up or a scale-up like Zynga. You applied it to your own life. And if I'm not mistaken, you've also helped many larger organizations implement OKRs in your past - sometimes successfully and sometimes less successfully. Now when we talk about OKRs, and for those who don't know what OKRs stand for, they are goals and key outcomes. The goal is the future that we want to see, and the key results are basically indicators of whether or not we've achieved the goal, right?

Christina:
I couldn't have put it better myself.

Sohrab:
Yeah. I learned that from your book. I see over and over again that organizations that are struggling in a lot of places are not necessarily agile, which usually also means that they're struggling with innovation of all kinds, whether it's product innovation or business model innovation or whatever, that they think OKRs can be a quick fix to a lot of their problems. And what I find particularly interesting when I look at your work is that it starts with a blogpost that you wrote in 2014, "The Art of OKRs," and that you revised in 2021, I believe. And even in that short blogpost, you already state some of the requirements for OKRs, but I think too few people bothered to read even that blogpost, let alone this book, before OKRs were introduced.

I want to share a quote from this book with you and then use it as a trigger for a conversation with you. And this quote isn't even from you. It's from the foreword by Marty Kagan and it goes like this: "What a lot of people unfortunately don't realize is that this particular technique that relates to OKRs depends on a culture of enablement. It came about in companies that already had that culture of empowerment." And when I hear you speak on other podcasts, you keep emphasizing that ownership is a requirement. I'd love to dive into that with you and first understand how you define empowerment, the extent to which empowerment needs to be in place before we can get started with OKRs, and also the extent to which OKRs can help us move toward a culture with more empowerment.

How can OKRs help us create a culture of empowerment?

Christina:
Yeah. Well, I wouldn't say that OKRs are a solution to getting more ownership. And I don't think they're a solution either.... I don't think they're a solution to a lot of things, except maybe shiny object syndrome, but I would say they are.... I have this wonderful friend, Ed Batista. And he always says, "They're a vitamin. They're not medicine." So you want to make the company healthy first, and then the OKRs can make you even healthier, stronger, and better. So I always think that the prerequisites.... I mean, you should be agile, you should be lean, and you should look at Alex Osterwalder's work on business models. Because there's a new way of working, and this new way of working, of course, has come to the attention of Marty and a few others, including Jeff Patton.

I refer to them as "nimble." These are people who are working lean and agile, who are constantly in an endless cycle with their customers, who are constantly gaining new insights. And those are the people for whom OKRs work really well. But what are you going to do when you have a team that nimble? You have to be able to let them follow up on things. You can't micromanage them. You can't micromanage them if you're the CEO or the executive director. So you have to empower them. And this is where the OKRs are really useful, because the OKRs don't tell you what to build. They just say, "This is the outcome I want." And so you pass them on to your nimble team and say, "Okay, you know, we'll get back to you later and let me know how it goes."

And the person who sets it up, which is the boss, can stop by every week for Monday check-ins or every two weeks or whatever, it doesn't matter because if you've hired well and your team is doing really well, they'll just deliver on that promise and make things happen for you. And that's really the dream, because you can't grow your business if you can't grow yourself. And the only way to grow yourself is to trust your teams and your managers, right? And that's also about psychological safety. Because if you're giving people OKRs and they're constantly wondering, "Should we do this? Should we do this?" That means they're afraid. They're afraid that if they make a bad decision, they're going to get fired, right?

Or they'll lose a bonus. And that means you haven't done the work to say, "I really trust you. Let me show you by turning things around." I work a lot with leaders and I ask them, "How can we change your conversations with people to be more along the lines of, should we do this?" And then you can say, "Well, what do you think? What are the pros and cons?" And then you listen to them and let them talk out their answer and then say, "Okay, that sounds good. Let me know how it goes." You know, this constant relinquishing of power and taking away the punitive parts of management, that's the only way that people are going to feel comfortable doing anything. And that's going to set your smartest and best people on fire. They're going to be so excited. The thing that they're getting off the ground is like their baby. And that's what you want. You want motivation. You want the carrot, not the stick.

Sohrab:
Yeah. What I liked about the sequence you just walked us through is that you tied together so many topics that I've talked to people about before, like Marty's work on empowerment and leadership and coaching, Theresa Torres' work on product discovery, right? Jeff Patton's work on product management or product stewardship in general. A lot of those things and psychological safety as an additional concept. You tied all of that together and basically said that the problems that you see in your business can't be solved if you don't have all of those OKRs.

And as a physician, of course, I love the analogy that OKRs are a vitamin and not a medicine. I'll never forget that, that's great. Now help me understand one thing. When you say that these things are prerequisites to some degree, like empowerment, discovery, agility, nimbleness, what would you recommend to organizations, especially larger organizations that don't have a culture of empowerment, a culture of innovation, a culture of whatever, like great leadership, when they approach you and say, "Hey, Christina, you wrote this excellent book, right, we want OKRs." What do you do with them?

What do you do with OKRs?

Christina:
I think we start with conversations, and I'm sure that's where we start. We're asking questions. I want to know more about why they want OKRs. What are they hoping to get out of it? What are they struggling with right now? What is their industry? Is it even an industry that can be nimble, or? So it's really important to understand yourself, your company culture, and your company psychology, because OKRs aren't really for everybody. Sometimes it's better to just have some KPIs that you're watching and take it slower. At this point, maybe I would say OKRs are only appropriate for a portion of your business. Usually in every company there are some groups that would benefit. Sometimes it's R&D, sometimes it's new product development. Sometimes it's a fast-growing product in the company, but I really advise companies not to spread them out to everybody, because that never works out well. I would say that almost no one comes to me and says, "Hey, Christina, we read your book and we're going to try it out." They come to me and say, "Christina, I've read your book and we've done it completely wrong and it's a mess and a disaster and nobody wants to do OKRs anymore."

Sohrab:
Same thing with agile, same thing with agile, yeah.

How do you successfully implement OKRs?

Christina:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So at this point we have to talk about, you know, and they've always done the same thing. They've always tried to do it for the whole company. So pilots, pilots, pilots, I always want to start with their high performing teams. They always want to start with the bad team. They say, "Oh, the OKRs will fix them." And I say, "Nah, nah." We're going to take somebody who's already really good. We'll take somebody who really understands the business, who exemplifies what you're about, and we'll start with them and explain it to them. They usually like to try it out, because the good teams are always looking for ways to get better.

And they're the ones who notice when something doesn't fit the culture or the schedule. They are then the team that figures out how to turn the best practices into something that the company can actually use. I usually have to help them not pre-work too much, because sometimes people have a bad feeling and think, "This isn't going to work. This isn't going to work." And I'll say, "Oh, you know, let's just try it. Let's just try it for a couple of weeks. We can revisit it. Let's try it for this quarter and see where it takes us." And at that point, you usually have a good sense of what's working and what's not working. And then you introduce it very slowly. We always start with multidisciplinary product teams, the nimble teams. But there are a lot of teams that just shouldn't get it. It's ridiculous. For example, I was talking to a company that had a two-person team that was responsible for people management. And they said, 'We have no idea what our OKRs are.' And I said, "That's because you guys don't have your time. You guys are running around like maniacs trying to keep on top of everything. You guys shouldn't be doing OKRs. It just makes you sad because you can never get to them." And I think that's one of the big dangers that people don't think about: some groups will just get depressed when they try OKRs and fail. A slower introduction will help you understand OKRs, and then you can make your own better decisions about who should use them and who shouldn't. You don't want me to hang around forever, and I can't anyway, I have to teach. So I'm always thinking, how can I get out of there as quickly as possible? And the answer is you have to understand what OKRs mean to you.

Sohrab:
Yeah, I absolutely agree with you on that. You mentioned earlier that I made a note because when I talk about self-organization or self-management, which is very smart, that's one of the prerequisites or one of the outcomes of hopefully most agile frameworks. I always say that self-management and self-organization require certain constraints, because if there are no constraints, it ends up in chaos or anarchy, and the teams that don't have constraints are like you said, "Okay, what should we work on?" And constraints can be defining who your target customer should be so you can build something for them. Constraints can be the strategy that you're pursuing as a company. You say to yourself, 'Well, do something that fits the strategy.' You're saying that OKRs help us as leaders and teams to collaborate, and I'd like to get into that collaboration and define the boundaries within which a team can manage itself. Is this interpretation correct?

How do OKRs help teams collaborate and manage themselves?

Christina:
I think OKRs set the most important strategic priority for the company. When you work for a company, you can't just go around doing what you enjoy or what seems interesting or what you think is a good idea. Sometimes you can, but not full time, because as you said, that leads to chaos and arguments and all sorts of craziness. You're bringing a team together to accomplish something great for the company. So the OKR is a way to formulate that strategy. But I also think you can't use OKRs if you don't have a strategy, if you're a very opportunistic company because you don't know what to do. I've heard stories, and I'm sure you've heard them, of somebody who sets up different OKRs every two weeks, and I'll say, "Yeah, don't bother. Don't bother."
Because that means you don't have a strategy. And I think I'm finding more and more that very few people have a good model for thinking about strategy. You know opportunities are great and all the literature shows that you need a mix of opportunistic behavior and strategic behavior, right? You want to be able to take advantage of the pandemic or react quickly. You don't want to hold on to your OKRs if suddenly everything collapses, that would be insane, right? But on the other hand, you also want to say, "Okay, this is our long-term goal. This is where we want to be in 5 or 10 years. We want to enter this new market. We want to develop this new product for this target market." You need those plans to keep going even when life throws a wrench in your plans, right? So the OKRs act like this. They say, "While you're doing all these cool opportunistic things, let's keep moving toward the big goals. And that's what a healthy, robust, long-term business is all about.

Sohrab:
Yeah. So what I'm hearing is that in addition to empowerment and so forth, you also need an organization that has a strategy, right? You can use Roger Martin's framework for "Play to Win," so where you play and how you win, or any other framework, but you have to have a strategy. I think that's a good segue into the role of leadership, because both having a strategy and having empowered teams and creating alignment, where I also think OKRs are great for creating alignment when you have a strategy. What do you think is the most important thing that leaders in organizations that don't already have OKRs can do to prepare the organization to get that vitamin boost and benefit from it?

Christina:
Absolutely. I think I'm going to say something unexpected now, but you need....

Sohrab:
Shoot. I like that.

Who do you need for OKRs to be successful?

Christina:
You need to have a good HR department. You need to be able to hire exceptionally well. That's the most overlooked and absolutely the most important thing you can do. You need a combination of A and B staff, to be honest. It's like Moneyball, which thank goodness everyone got excited about: You don't just need A players. You need a combination, a team of all kinds of people who can bring both stability and agility to the group. So in that case, we often just hire our recruiter and don't give it a second thought. But as a CEO, as a leader, you need someone who really understands what you're trying to accomplish, who understands the strategy of the company and the culture of the company, who can hire great people and fire them quickly. I think Patty McCord has done a lot to help people realize that this is critical and that growth hacking has reinvented marketing.

I think HR is going to be reinvented next, because people are everything. And if you have the wrong people, you can't use OKRs. So as a manager, you have to ask yourself, do I have the kind of people that will let me do extraordinary things? And I work with some people in areas where hiring is very, very difficult. And that's the other thing, if you can't do it.... I'm lucky that I live in Silicon Valley. When I was in industry, I could hire a great person, you just had to find them. You just had to talk to enough people to find that person. But if you're somewhere where there's not as good a market, you have to learn how to grow people, right? You have someone with a lot of potential, but they have bad habits.

You need to learn how to talk to them about conflict and make them understand why their behavior is not good for them and help them become stronger. You need to be able to move someone into a job where they will be successful. You need to demote them when you've made a mistake. And those are things that people don't like to do. They hate it because it brings conflict, anxiety, and emotion, but it's a prerequisite for you to have a company that can do great things. So I would say that it's very important for you as a leader to be comfortable with interpersonal dynamics and to be really good at management, and to make sure that every single one of your managers can do that. And they should be able to create psychological safety. They should be able to empower people. They should be able to coach their employees.

I just heard a wonderful interview with Adam Grant, the CEO of Microsoft, where he said that it comes down to managers. You have to care. You need to feel cared about. You need to coach people. You need to nurture them. And I think we're coming into an age where we're going to realize that we can't just wait for artificial intelligence to show up. We have to learn to be adults and deal with people.

Sohrab:
Yes, yes. I like that point. When I was preparing for this interview, I initially thought OKR was going to be a very technical topic, not so much a technical topic like programming, but a technical topic for business, focusing on metrics and how to define good OKRs and so on. But the more I read your work and the more time I spent listening to your interviews, the more I came across the concept of human interaction. I didn't phrase it that way. You said it right at the beginning of our conversation today. And what you just mentioned is that the role of the leader is to create an environment where that human interaction gets better, right? Help people learn how to deal with conflict. And in your book or in one of the interviews, you mentioned that you liked Patrick Lencioni's work, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," right?

You were inspired by him in writing this fable and his book is all about human interaction. If you look at the five different levels of this pyramid, it's about psychological safety or trust in his case, then dealing with conflict, the ability to keep commitments and hold people accountable. It's about human interaction and ultimately achieving results together. And that's first and foremost the manager's job. And if they've hired great people, people do their part, right? They support the team, which then hopefully manages itself. You mentioned earlier a particular symptom of companies that are implementing OKRs but aren't ready for it, which is frustration and saying, "Hey Christina, we tried. It's not working." What are the other symptoms? And now I'm speaking as a physician: what other symptoms do you see in organizations that aren't ready for OKRs but are desperately trying to implement them?

When are you as an organization not ready for OKRs?

Christina:
Yes. A classic example is the confusion between output and outcome thinking. A lot of people... That shocked me because I've been in Silicon Valley for so long. But the rest of the world is doing things that make them enough money, but they don't always know what works and why it works and how it works. You mentioned earlier that OKRs are a great help in learning. And I believe that, too. So people will say, "Okay, here are our OKRs, what's going wrong?" And it says, you know, objectively, which is usually okay, sometimes a little bit grim. But the OKRs are, "Start this thing and do this thing and talk to this person. And then I say, "No, no, no, no. This is your to-do list. This is your to-do list." So I have to explain to them how to think: If things go as well as you hoped, what would this thing do? What are the signs in the world that you're being effective? So it's very important to move to a metric way of thinking. And I don't think the human side and the numbers side are at war. In fact, I think they work together beautifully. So if you're going to do something inspiring, how do you know if you've been successful? How do you know what's really working? A lot of times I have to talk to them about instrumentation. Sometimes it's just because they can't do it, but sometimes the leader is also not willing to trust others.
So he still gives them things to do. And sometimes there are just things that are almost impossible to measure. And it's going to take a while to figure that out. Again, in HR or customer service, for example, people are rushing to put metrics on customer service. And there's the famous story that you have to serve a certain number of people. That's a nice metric. The way the call center dealt with it was they just hung up and said, "Hello, we've reached you. Okay, hang up." That way they were able to get the number of calls they needed to get their bonuses. So it's not enough to say, "Okay, we're going to find numbers for everything." You have to find the right numbers. And that takes time.

Sohrab:
Yeah. Well, the number of bank accounts I think one of the U.S. banks, Wells Fargo. Sohrab: Yeah, right. Yes, exactly, right. That's also a very, very good story.

Christina:
And the VW story where they were asked to magically make their diesel good for the earth. Yes. That went really well.

Sohrab:
Yeah, yeah. That's a very sad story. That's a very sad thing. At least with the number of bank accounts, we didn't penalize the environment, but with the other one, we did.

Christina:
Indeed.

Sohrab:
Thinking about OKRs and trying to explain it to people, you just pointed out something, right? People give a lot of tasks as key deliverables. And I try to help them by using a medical analogy. For example, the goal might be that my patient is healthy. The key outcome could be that the blood pressure is in a certain range, right? That's just one metric; there are a lot of other metrics. But then my job might be to make sure that I'm choosing the right kind of medication to balance the blood pressure, and that I'm convincing my patient to comply, right?

Christina:
Good luck!

Sohrab:
I help them change their diet and exercise more, right? But those are not my OKRs. Those are the tasks then.

Christina:
That's right.

Sohrab:
But I can measure whether I've reached the goal based on the blood pressure. Does that analogy work from your point of view?

Christina:
It works very well because if you have a goal of lowering blood pressure, and let's say you see them in three months, because that's a quarter, then you can try different things, right? You could say, "Oh, but I'm not moving anymore. Why don't you walk to the store instead of driving. Okay. It's too hot where you live. Okay. How about when it cools down in the evening, you do some sit-ups?" You just have to keep trying something until something sticks. And that's what makes OKRs so effective: a team can keep experimenting until the numbers move, rather than investing in a single strategy that may or may not work. Yes, that's a big difference. I don't usually care that much about how people formulate their OKRs until they have a million of them. But I think that's very important because it gives you the freedom to achieve your business goals instead of just doing things.

How many OKRs should you have?

Sohrab:
Yeah. You mentioned the number of OKRs just briefly: as long as it's not millions. I've heard you make a strong case for having only one set of OKRs. The argument is that if you have two or three goals and each goal has three to five key outcomes, suddenly you have to remember 15 things instead of three or four, and you probably have to figure out how to prioritize between those goals. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Because that's one of the issues that I see with almost every company, millions of OKRs, if you overdo it a little bit.

Christina:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there are so many reasons why people have too many OKRs. And when I work with a company, I usually have to reduce them piece by piece. First of all, people think that they have to have an enterprise-wide OKR at the highest level that supports absolutely everybody in the company, but that's not necessary, right? You just need the most important strategic thing for the company. So that's the one thing. OKRs are not something that every single person wants or needs. When I tell groups that are struggling with OKRs that they're not cut out for it, they say, 'What if you didn't have one?' They then say, "Oh, I'm so relieved." So the boss is like, "I'll be so nice and make sure everybody's taken care of." And then it's like, "No, you know, some people just want to keep things stable, right?

Sometimes people just want to grow slowly. But you don't have to do that. So let's do away with OKRs, which are about a lot of different people. And then we can go to the next level, which is, you're probably doing a lot of things, but what's the most important thing that needs to happen this quarter? You should think about the order, because if you're.... Let's say you have limited resources, that's true for everybody. Everybody has limited resources, right? It doesn't matter if you have 200 people or 10 people, you don't have enough to do everything. So you have to ask yourself, are there dependencies, you know? Do I want to make sure I have customer retention first before I start advertising? Are there... So those are the natural ways to distribute it. I recommend that managers look at all four quarters. Even if you don't include all the key results, at least know what you're going to focus on in each quarter so you have an overview.... Remember that you have time. Another thing we forget is the day-to-day stuff, right? You still have to call your vendor and do this and that. All of those things are not covered by the OKRs. OKRs should be reserved for only the most strategic things. More and more I hear, "You know what, you don't need OKRs. What you need is product management. You need a freaking roadmap, you know. You need to learn how to track things. You need an anthill approach. You need to be on board." Like you don't need OKRs. That's not what OKRs do. I think a lot of companies just need to figure out how to get a sense of what's going on, how fast it's going, and how many resources they need to do it. Just capacity. And I think it's really hard to create OKRs if you don't know what the capacity of the organization is.

That often fixes things that shouldn't be. For example, you have A-members all the time. I've heard that before from HR and said, "That's just your job. Don't worry about it. Just make sure everybody does it all the time." Because OKRs are about change and not everything has to change all the time.

Sohrab:
That's exactly how it is. Especially with the day-to-day work that we have to do, like you said: calling suppliers, participating in RFPs, etc. Now, before we get to the issue of the learning organization, there's one thing that I've observed, and I think it's mostly in Germany, but maybe you've seen it in other countries. I see a lot of consultants adding additional things to the framework of OKRs, like forms, right? I don't even know what that actually stands for. And since I have with me today one of the thought leaders in this area, I wanted to ask you about that, right? To what extent do you think these supplements are helpful or harmful?

Christina:
I'm a big fan of as simple as possible and not simpler. I've seen processes like SAFe that everybody likes to make fun of, at least in my circles. So, you know, everything is.... First of all, it's so complicated that you can't remember it. So there are problems with memory. Eventually, when you get used to it, it moves from short-term memory to long-term memory, which is great. That's one of the things I love.... Well, I'll save that for the talk about learning organization, but I really like the OKRs. But when you have so much complexity, it gets brittle, and people don't have room to use their own brains. They don't have room to try different things. It's just, oh God, I don't know. I think when you add a bunch of stuff, it's a bunch of stuff, and maybe you want to make it your own, or sometimes it's the same problem you see when you create a website or an app.

How do you implement OKRs in an organization?

As a consultant, you live and breathe them. So naturally you say, "Oh, and that would be really good. And that would be really good, and it would help people, because it really helps me. But the fact is that the people who create OKRs don't do it full-time. They have a lot of other things to do. So you should keep it simple and clear and give them a lot of leeway to find their own way, and only really be hard on the crucial things. As I said before, you shouldn't move away from being results-oriented. If you have tons of OKRs, you shouldn't get into that. I always say just one because I can get them down to two or three, and I'm always happy with that. But one is really good. Just because we consultants think these ideas are great doesn't mean they fit into our clients' lives, and some people just give up. They think to themselves, "This is too many things. I need to lie down now."

Sohrab:
Yeah. I love a quote when it comes to consulting: in theory, the difference between practice and theory doesn't seem that big. In practice it does, so let's leave it at that.

Christina:
I don't think anyone has been working on OKRs much longer than I have. Maybe Ben LaMorte is about the same age. I've seen it work for companies big and small, and it's worked in practice because simpler is better.

Sohrab:
Is better, is better. Right. If you think about it, OKRs were originally developed by Intel and then Google, but those companies, as far as I know, kept it very, very simple. Especially if you read Andy Grove and John Doerr's work on this topic, it's great. Let's move on to the last topic, the learning organization. I know I always associate agility with empiricism, the scientific process that frequently and systematically reduces uncertainty about your customers, your products, and of course your business. You connect OKRs to the learning organization, explain how you do that.

OKRs have a methodology around it.

Christina:
Oh, absolutely. That's not a problem. Unlike other goal setting methods or systems like Smart Goals and KPIs, OKRs have some methodology around them, right? On Mondays, you say, "What are we going to do for our OKRs? On Friday, we'll celebrate our successes." It's just a little thing, but it makes a big difference. And the interesting thing is that when I started teaching, I got deeper and deeper into learning science. Now I have tons of data, and when I look back at the OKRs, I think, "That's why they work so well. Oh my gosh." So at the beginning, you say, "Okay, we think we can do this." So that's a prediction, a classic learning technique where you try to predict what's possible, and then you find out that that leaves deeper ruts in the neurons, or whatever you want to call it. That's how you can remember it.
So you set your OKRs and say, "Okay, we think we can do this." Then every Monday we try something and the next Monday we say, "Okay, that didn't work, we'll try this." That's learning. The other thing is that every week you talk about your OKRs, which means you're moving them from short-term memory, which can't store much, to long-term memory, which as far as we know has unlimited capacity, because you're strengthening the pathways between neurons and embedding memory deeper and deeper in our minds. So in the first month, you think, "I can't remember the third KR. What was that?" And at the end you say, "Oh, I'm just living the self-retainers." That's what I do, and I know what numbers are important and why they're important, and I know what I should do.

That's what I talk about when I talk about learning. Not the moment where it's, "Oh, we tried that and it didn't work. Or we tried this. That worked." Rather, it's really understanding what makes people sign up, or really understanding what the market cares about, because you're constantly staying with that theme and understanding all the pieces that go along with it. Also, every single Friday is kind of a retrospective, and of course there are retrospectives in the agile methodology, which is why I didn't include them in the OKRs. I'm already like that, right? But I like that at the end of the quarter, no matter what happened, we pause for a moment. Let's look at what we succeeded at and what we failed at. Yeah, and then we make some decisions about how we want to move forward. And that's really good for learning. In fact, I would say the biggest benefit of OKRs is learning, and the biggest competitive strength that you need as an organization is learning, because things are evolving quickly and we need to be able to keep track of that. So that's really...

Sohrab:
Yeah, there's this...

Christina:
...is everything.

Sohrab:
Yeah. There's a presentation by Gary Hammond where he talks about knowledge becoming a commodity. The only thing that's going to be a competitive advantage is the speed at which you create new knowledge.

Christina:
Yes.

Sohrab:
I like how you connected the OKRs to the learning organization, because you're learning on one level: you're getting better at setting OKRs. You're getting better at making predictions, and predictability in your business is always beneficial, especially when you're dealing with multiple stakeholders. It builds confidence. It gives you even more authority and all that. But you also mentioned that by iterating and experimenting to achieve a certain outcome, you develop a deep understanding of your customers' needs or how to retain them. And I love how well that connects to the learning organization and everything that I teach. And now...

Christina:
Absolutely.

Sohrab:
...I want to pay attention to your time, because you were kind enough to share your perspective with us. And I want to close with a brief summary of what we discussed. I was taking notes as you were talking. The first point you mentioned, which I think might be the overarching theme of this event, is human interaction and how important that is, especially going forward. More and more of the work is being done by people working together, creating great products and services and delivering them to their customers. You also mentioned that OKRs should help us understand what we don't do but would be interesting. And in the fable that you're telling here, in the conversations between Hannah and Jack, Hannah is all about, "Oh, we should do this. We should do this." And Jack completely forgets about those things. By the way, I was rooting for Hannah the whole time because I saw so much of myself in her, which was fascinating.

Christina:
Wonderful.

Sohrab:
Then you mentioned what for me as a medical professional is the quote of today, OKRs are a vitamin, not a medicine. I thank you for that. And all the conditions that we need to create and how leadership is really responsible for creating the environment for them to implement OKRs.

Christina:
Yes.

Sohrab:
And we close with the theme of the learning organization, where OKRs help us through repetition, but also by really focusing on achieving certain goals, experimenting and getting there. I want to close with another quote from this book. It comes from the introduction in this case as well. But that doesn't mean that I haven't read more. You know I read about Hannah and Jack and all that. But like I said, "If you're ready to commit to a culture of self-determination, you're going to love this book. It will inspire you and set you on your path." And I couldn't have said it better myself. Really anyone who wants to embark on this journey, and I think this is a very powerful framework and you put it together so beautifully, especially with the fable at the beginning. I just couldn't put the book down. I want to thank you for your work and for sharing your knowledge with all of us who don't live in Silicon Valley. and you also shared your time with us, Christina.

Christina:
Absolutely.

Sohrab:
Thank you so much.