Love the article. It's unfortunate that OKR, and even any metrics, are usually difficult for people to grasp and understand how they can influence it in a meaningful way. My experience when trying to bring metrics as part of decisions is that, most of the time, people have a decision in mind, and then try to find and even "clean up" the metric that will support it.
Humans are humans. We try to understand our world mostly through some stories or narrative, not numbers. "Tell me how this help would help us achieving our objectives and what you would be able to show me afterward to prove it" have given me way better results than any request for a specific metrics. Sure, the end result is the same ("we expect this metric to grow"), but it is now better contextualize in a less abstract concept.
You are totally right. We also didn't link stories, tasks or whatever. OKRs should be an orientation for creating/prioritizing those items, but also for every decision everybody in the team takes. It's misleading to thin every level of goal and todo could be systemized and linked! Thanks a lot for your article!
One aspect often missed is learning what did not work and sharing it openly. Not only regarding activities and outputs, but also the OKRs themselves.
Love the article. It's unfortunate that OKR, and even any metrics, are usually difficult for people to grasp and understand how they can influence it in a meaningful way. My experience when trying to bring metrics as part of decisions is that, most of the time, people have a decision in mind, and then try to find and even "clean up" the metric that will support it.
Humans are humans. We try to understand our world mostly through some stories or narrative, not numbers. "Tell me how this help would help us achieving our objectives and what you would be able to show me afterward to prove it" have given me way better results than any request for a specific metrics. Sure, the end result is the same ("we expect this metric to grow"), but it is now better contextualize in a less abstract concept.
This reminds me of the book "Who does what by how much?" by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.
They define a Key Result as a change is customer behavior. This is the best definition of an outcome I have come across yet.
So you could potentially link a Key Result to a Jira issue, but does that single delivery item really change customer behavior all by itself?
You are totally right. We also didn't link stories, tasks or whatever. OKRs should be an orientation for creating/prioritizing those items, but also for every decision everybody in the team takes. It's misleading to thin every level of goal and todo could be systemized and linked! Thanks a lot for your article!
Thank you Hans-Jörg