Who “invented” goals? Do they even work? The answer to this is my white whale, my continuous quest that never seems to end.

Is the point of a goal to enhance peoples internal motivation so they can gain purpose, mastery and autonomy like that Pink guy says? Perhaps. The jury is still out on that one.

Anyhow. OKRs. Invented by Intel, popularized by Google. (Sidenote: Intel decided OKR’s are a ‘fatally flawed system’ and moved away from it in the 90’s. (Source: random guy on the internet. Investigation needed))

Idea is to have a plan that connects the individual contributor to the larger company strategy. A way to connect measurable results to objectives.

So far so good.

Things I’m considering: Link to heading

It’s not Deming. And I like Deming. Remember the 11th point “Eliminate numerical goals, numerical quotas and management by objectives. Substitute leadership.” (Sidenote 2: The word “commandments” and “zealotry” comes to mind. Always be afraid of snakes.)

Could OKRs on a team/personal level mean a switch from “why are we doing this” to “what are we measuring?”. Will people end up doing things like described in the article and HN comments here?

What happens with goals when you are punished for not meeting them? Psychological safety is a very real thing. Can you set ambitious enough goals without this safety?

OKRs are public. Can they work without a feedback positive culture? Is the Netflix candor and feedback culture required?

Goals (as well as strategy) are so … far away. Hard to connect to day to day life.

What I usually say we want is to understand the needs/jobs/wants/whatever of our target audience. And doing this without building a better horse? Can we truly innovate by solving needs that can be discovered with a few low fidelity paper sketches?

In OKRs the Objective is where we want to go. The Key Results helps us understand how we know if we are getting there.

Christina Wodtke apparently says the below (which I stole from here without reading the book, along with the OKR definition above):

This all makes sense. If you are not constantly changing your mind. And in a world where the rate of new information is presented to us is measured (by me) in seconds or minutes - should we even have goals that stretches months or years into the future? What opportunity are we going to miss? Don’t we know by now how utterly wrong we are most of the time? Is it all about risk and the number of times you can afford to roll the dice?

Wodtke above (that I don’t yet know what her motivations for coming down on OKRs is besides her “alternative that is way better”) makes some very good points. Like: “OKRs are not about measurable results, they are about implementation of actions.” and “consider OKRs as a tool for focused implementation of projects, but not as a tool for meaningful measurement.”

That seems like an interesting thread to pull. To be continued.