OKR Discussion 2018-12-27

Facebook 2018-12-27 Organized with additions @2018-12-30

I’m trying to think of my OKRs because it’s the end of the year and the beginning of the New Year, and I’m wondering if I should just focus on one? I have a sense of uneasiness. I’d rather not get involved in this or that, or take on a lecture I’ve been asked to give, so that I can focus on achieving my goals anxiety, but should I just go for the bust? I feel that way.

• I was anxious to focus on one goal.
  • Anxiety to focus on one goal
  • The “need to focus on one” is a misconception.
    • Measure What Matters p.56 Column “The Essentials of OKR as Demonstrated by Andy Grove”

      • narrow down

        • Select a handful of goals carefully so you know exactly what to say no to.

        • 3-5 goals per cycle, so you get to choose the most important ones.

    • Therefore, the process of “narrowing down from a myriad of states to a handful” is important, rather than making one

Ah, this is a bad pattern, “[Think of the plan as a fixed one. Just because you set a major goal doesn’t mean you can’t do something that doesn’t contribute to it, and you don’t have to worry about it in advance because if a more promising opportunity comes along in the middle of the term, you can just scrap the plan.

• Measure What Matters p.90

  • How do the new goals compare to those already set?

  • Should we cut existing goals to add new ones?

It is burdensome to prioritize after many candidates appear and time is depleted. If you choose one first, you can discard the second one when it appears before there are too many. The effect of clarifying what is major so that decisions can be made without worrying about trade-offs when they occur. This is the equivalent of the trade-off slider in the inception deck!

I talked to my wife about it, and she said, “If you try to pick one, it would be ‘survive’ as an overarching goal.” You’re right, if you don’t survive, you won’t accomplish anything, will you?

• It is not appropriate to try to put a comprehensive goal and end up with a highly abstract “survive,” but if there are goals O1, O2, and O3 that we can now specifically see, we should ask “What is the reason for doing those things? Why are we doing them?” O should be created after the fact as a result of thinking about the following.

I think OKR is a method suitable for “teams” that have a clear raison d’etre (and tend to be somewhat disjointed), but not for “individuals” who have a complex set of roles.

• OKR is a method in which each individual verbalizes his/her Objective and Key Result, but when we say “organizational OKR and individual OKR,” we implicitly assume that each individual belongs to one organization, and there is a slight incompatibility with parallel work. I think it is a little bit different from parallel work.

• In that case, I think that for the individual, the individual’s OKRs are primary and the organization’s OKRs are secondary. If the organization’s OKRs don’t fit with the individual’s OKRs, then the individual should leave the organization.

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