Thinking about implementing OKRs? Your first instinct might be to shop for an OKR tool - but that could be setting yourself up for failure. In this candid Thinkydoers Short, strategy coach Sara Lobkovich explains why starting with software often backfires, and shares a proven alternative with a methodology-focused approach that will set your organization up for long-term OKR success.

Episode Highlights:

• Common pitfalls of taking a tool-first approach to OKR implementation
• Why methodology must come before software
• How to track OKRs effectively without specialized tools
• A practical timeline for OKR implementation that sets you up for success
• Signs that your organization is actually ready for an OKR tool

Key Takeaways:

• Tools alone don't solve the core challenges of implementing OKRs
• Start with company-level OKRs and establish strong methodology before scaling
• Simple tracking methods like spreadsheets can work well in early stages
• Let organizational demand drive tool adoption rather than forcing it
• Focus on behavior change and culture shifts before investing in software

Notable Quotes:

“ People need an OKR process that isn't yucky. If it's yucky, then they're going to do all sorts of work for a process that might generate a pretty dashboard for the leaders. But we want people to love our OKR implementations. We want people -- not just leaders -- to see the benefit of OKR implementations.”

"We want to focus on Objectives and Key Results as continuous learning, and we want to keep our tools and ops simple."

"We let folks struggle until they're suffering with the lack of software, and then that makes our software adoption so much more successful."

"What's ultimately most important is that leaders need objective information to make decisions."

Episode Chapters:

[00:00] Introduction to Thinkydoer Shorts

[00:43] Sara's Dual Life: Business and Racing

[01:12] Goal Fridays and Live Replays

[02:59] Decoding Goal-Setting Acronyms

[07:38] Activity Goals: The Basics

[09:02] KPIs: Key Performance Indicators (and KPIs vs. OKRs)

[11:32] SMART Goals: Specific and Measurable

[15:52] Mandatory Goals vs. Stretch Goals

[18:20] OKRs and Other Goal-Setting Frameworks

Resources Mentioned:

• Get the No-BS OKRs Workbook ($19): https://saralobkovich.com/no-bs-okrs-workbook-pdf
• Info about the upcoming print version of the No-BS OKRs Workbook & Sara's forthcoming book: "You Are a Strategist: Use No-BS Objectives and Key Results to Get Big Things Done" is available at https://youareastrategist.com 
• Other Free No-BS OKRs Resources: Access all free resources
• Thinkydoers (not-just-an OKR podcast) Home Page: https://saralobkovich.com/thinkydoers-pod

Connect with Sara:

• Newsletter: findrc.co/newsletter
• Contact: findrc.co/contact
• Email Sara at hello@redcurrantco.com
• Social Media: @saralobkovich most everywhere!

Welcome to Thinkydoer Shorts, where we embrace anti-perfection

and dive straight into the messy middle of strategy, leadership,

and personal and career growth.

I'm your host, Sara Lobkovich, creator of No-BS Objectives and Key Results,

host of the Thinkydoers podcast,

and I'm a strategy coach, big time goal nerd, And a board certified

health and wellness coach with a focus on work life well-being.

And in the next few minutes, we'll explore a current topic or insight to

spark your curiosity and provide you a pragmatic starting place to take action.

Let's dive in.

Hello, friends.

I am really excited to share this with you today.

What you're going to hear was originally recorded as a live.

This was a YouTube and LinkedIn live that I shared as part of my

recent Goal Fridays series I do a few times a year, I pulled together

free events for the general public.

Anyone's invited, and you can come and learn about the inspired and

transformative way that I work with goal setting, whether you've heard the term

Objective and Key Results before or not.

Today's topic is one of the spicy ones, especially because I have a lot of friends

who are with the OKR platforms, And I do love and think very highly of the

OKR platform space, even though I don't play in that space too terribly often.

In this episode, you'll hear why I don't recommend starting with an OKR

platform and what I do recommend instead.

So buckle up, enjoy this short, and I look forward to hearing

the questions it prompts for you.

If you are here today, then you have come to learn a little

bit more about tracking OKRs.

What's going to sound familiar to many of you who have worked with OKRs

institutionally is a little story I'm going to share in a minute about how

Objectives and Key Results implementations tend to happen in organizations.

If you're here and you're a solo or a small-business person, the

content from today still applies.

While a lot of what I'm going to talk about is what happens with OKRs

in large organizations, the first question most of us ask ourselves when

we decide to implement OKRs is, "All right, what software am I going to use?

How am I going to track these?"

With that, we're going to talk about why that isn't actually the

first question we should start with and where we should begin instead.

But first, before we get into all that, I am Sara Lobkovich.

I'm a board-certified health and wellness coach, and I specialize

in career wellbeing and impact.

I have also trained over 2000 OKR coaches and led OKR adoption in

multi-thousand person organizations.

I'm an enormous Objectives and Key Results nerd.

And I work with organizations from the Fortune 100 to purpose-driven solos.

So today we're gonna flip the script on these things that

tend to lead to challenged OKR implementations when it comes to

taking the software-first approach.

So we'll talk about why starting with a platform might lead to failure, which

is exactly what we don't want, and what you might consider doing instead.

And for my friends with platforms, hello, I love you.

You're the best.

You might not like the title of this live, but you're gonna like the finish of it.

Because what I'm here to do is to make sure that people adopt the OKR platforms

at the right time and successfully.

So while the title might be rather provocative here for my, OKR platform

friends, the message you're going to like.

With that, let's dive in and take a look at how most OKR

implementations tend to start.

What tends to happen is an executive gets really excited reading a copy of

Measure What Matters, and they read Measure What Matters, or they hear about

OKRs from a colleague or a business acquaintance, and they get all excited

about the potential of Objectives and Key Results in their organization.

So they come back to the office, they hand a copy of Measure What

Matters to our hero, and our hero is our OKR core team champion.

Our hero reads Measure What Matters and kicks off that first OKR cycle.

And there's a lot of excitement, especially among the executives.

There's a lot of excitement among OKR early adopters.

And then there's a whole lot of skeptics.

There's a whole lot of people who want to debate what words mean because

they're uncomfortable with the idea of actually setting measurable goals.

You wouldn't believe the things I've seen people do to try and stall on

actually setting measurable Key Results.

And so what tends to happen is then we get into this, like, panic

over the information we got from Measure What Matters is not enough

for us to actually implement.

And so things go off the rails.

The first thing most people do when that happens is they sit down and Google OKR or

they look for resources online about OKRs.

And what they tend to find is one of the over 100 OKR platforms that are here

to solve everyone's problems with OKRs.

And there are lots of them.

They're very prevalent in the search results.

They make great content.

You can't argue with the prolificness of the content

that the, OKR platforms create.

Some of it is really awesome too, as a newer practitioner, it's hard to

tell what is actually helpful and what might not be so much, or what might

be a little bit of smoke and mirrors.

so it's really easy to fall into the funnel of the OKR platforms.

And then once you're in that funnel, they say, Just trust them."

That's what they exist to do — to help people with OKRs.

And so sign here, get your seats.

You're going to want to onboard everyone because you need everyone

in the system for this to work.

And that's how people wind up in the OKR platform ecosystem.

We can solve all your problems.

Trust us.

Sign here.

This is going to work best if you have us handle your platform onboarding.

So getting people into and established with the software and services.

So, we're going to help your team learn how to do OKRs successfully so that

both those things together lead to wins.

We're going to get quick wins with our OKR implementation using this approach.

That's the message from our software friends.

And sometimes, that is what happens.

But too often, what I see is that the services are often really

overburdened, like very busy.

And so it's not that they're doing anything on purpose, poorly — actually

those people, like I've been in that position, they're the people who wind up

in services in these companies are some of the most talented and passionate OKR

practitioners on the face of the planet.

They go above and beyond for their clients absolutely every day.

But because of the system and incentives and our OKR platform that wants to

maximize the number of seats that are sold, they want as many people using

their software as much as possible.

You might see there's a little bit of a conflict potential there, where

the OKR services onboarding might focus on methodology just enough

for people to create OKRs to type into the software because they want

to get those OKRs into the software and get people using the software.

And that lack of careful attention to methodology might

yield a low-quality adoption.

And so, the end result of this specialty software to the rescue approach that's

really easy to fall into is frustration of why isn't anyone using the OKR platform?

We spent all this money.

We've got all this labor and no one's using the platform.

I've seen remarkably low utilization rates on large deployments.

And this was with clients, not when I was working with the platforms, but I had

one client that deployed, I think it was over a thousand seats of an OKR platform.

And there were three regular users of the platform.

So, we'll talk about some of why that happens, but we get that frustration over

why isn't anyone using this thing that we've put all this effort into and it was

supposed to ease all of our OKR problems.

And it isn't.

And then we also get this exasperation of why are we tracking milestones in our

OKR platform and our delivery platform?

Because a lot of times, the platform services folks are always going to

say we want to focus on outcomes, not activities, in our Key Results.

But the reality is, if they're going to get butts in seats deep into

the organization, at some point, people are probably going to stop

writing measurable Key Results and start identifying activities.

And so then, we wind up with people dual-entering their planned activities

into the OKR platform and managing it in their project management or

whatever their delivery system is.

And so then, we wind up with Is this really any better than

what we were doing before?

Often, it's just a couple of core team members who are nagging people

to put their updates into the system so that we can get the dashboards,

which is what the executives really wanted to see — the pretty dashboards.

But there might or might not be any labor saving or efficiency compared to however

we were doing it before, and however we were doing it before is probably

things like spreadsheets or Power BI and PowerPoint and compiling our quarterly

or monthly business reviews manually.

The selling point of a lot of OKR platforms is they

make that process automatic.

You can plug everything in, the updates go in automatically, you get your beautiful

dashboard, and it saves a bunch of labor.

But getting to that point — it's not always as easy as it sounds.

So, this isn't to knock the software companies because they do a really

good job at what they're good at.

And that's why we'll talk about, I'm not anti-platform.

I am just pro-getting your methodology established before

you adopt an OKR platform.

So, where does this go wrong in the specialty software to the rescue approach?

There tends to be an oversimplification of methodology because we want to

get people into those butts in seats.

There's sometimes some winging it involved with the approaches

that are taught by the platforms.

They might teach more practically than Measure What Matters does, but they

still might not provide enough practical information to successfully implement.

Sometimes also, because we're adopting an OKR platform, and it's a separate piece

of software, it can feel like our OKRs are bolted onto the organization when they

need to be woven into the organization.

We don't throw out our existing systems or planning methodology.

We want to weave it all together so OKRs are solving a specific problem in an

existing strategic implementation stack.

Most organizations really underestimate the magnitude of the culture shifts here.

So, whether working with someone like me, who's on the methodology side or

the platform side, implementing OKRs is a massive cultural transformation

in terms of the decisions you're going to be making about transparency, about.

What gets communicated to who, about what our mandatories are,

what our must-achieves are, and what our stretch territories are.

Big culture shifts that the OKR platforms, despite their services people

wanting to help with all of that and be successful, it's just not in their remit.

OKR platforms have huge awareness, and they're really good at

what they're really good at.

And it's really easy to fall into that software funnel.

They have huge awareness.

They have big dollars to spend on search advertising.

So, you're gonna see a lot from the platforms when you start

trying to learn about OKRs.

But we have to remember that the platforms exist to sell and retain software seats.

And so, yes, they need their methodology to be enough successful

that they retain their users.

But most of the tool-first implementations I've seen are designed for users to make

happy executives, because executives are the ones writing the checks for

the software, most often, not always.

But there is that focus on we want to make whoever's signing the check happy

so that we retain them as a client.

And that's different from working with a methodology-focused person like myself,

where I don't have a retention target.

There's no goal for me to keep clients.

I want clients to implement, learn, get enabled, get successful, and then help

them get to a point where they're ready to work with a software platform, because

people are banging down their doors because they need the software solution.

There are just different incentives or different reasons at play with

working with software providers versus methodology practitioners.

And then the other bottom line is, tools alone don't solve the core

challenges of implementing OKRs.

I talked about the magnitude of the culture shifts, like, we have

to actually change behavior for Objectives and Key Results to

achieve what we're hiring them to do.

So anyway, I just wanted to break down a little bit why so many

organizations fall into this funnel.

And then if you're in it and you're struggling with a platform

adoption, you are not alone.

what I'm going to talk about from here on out applies to getting started

with Objectives and Key Results, and it can also apply to rebooting an

OKR implementation that's struggling.

The alternative approach, which is what I work with, is we go methodology first.

We introduce the Objectives and Key Results methodology, and in my model

ideally, we start with leaders.

We don't always, sometimes we start within the organization, but starting within

the organization can present some risks.

in the ideal case, we're starting with leaders, and leaders go first

with creating Objectives and Key Results at the top of the company.

And that's important because our leaders are going to model for the

rest of the organization, what an objective is and what a key result is.

So, what the leaders do establishes the best practice.

We want our leaders to learn and use the key words and meanings of OKRs.

This is one of the places where implementations go sideways all

the time — they don't necessarily establish a definition and a working

example of what an objective is, and especially what a key result is.

When we're working with platforms, they always, or almost always

coach, "We want our Key Results to be measurable, not activity.

We want them to be outcomes, not activity."

But in practice, they're trying to get OKRs into the system.

So, there are sometimes some corners cut on quality of the Key Results, especially.

That just doesn't work.

We need to model best practices of Objectives and Key Results, and we have

to have quality assurance practices that ensure nothing gets called a Key Result

that isn't a key result because that term really needs to preserve its meaning.

This is for bigger companies, not our solos, but a lot of people,

especially in large organizations adopt OKRs, because they want to

localize from the company-level goals or strategy down into the organization.

With a methodology adoption, we don't localize or scale until our

leaders are reliably walking the talk, because they set the best practice

for the org, for everyone else.

Their behavior is what other people look to learn the practice.

When we're getting ready to localize or when we're getting ready for

scale, we establish and document the norms, we reconcile OKRs with our

existing rest of our strategic stack, we avoid avoidable known issues.

That is a plug for working with a methodology pro.

We've seen it all.

Most of us have playbooks and practices to avoid stepping in the things that

can be avoided because we've seen all of the common issues that affect

the quality of a OKR implementation.

That's not a challenge to my clients to surprise me,

although inevitably it happens.

You can still surprise me sometimes.

But we want to focus on Objectives and Key Results as continuous learning, and

we want to keep our tools and ops simple.

So we focus on the methodology until people, and not just leaders,

are begging for an OKR tool.

And that's by design.

We want to keep our tools and ops as simple as possible so we can focus

on the methodology adoption, really learn how we're going to use OKRs, and

then that makes us better customers of OKR platforms because we know

exactly how we are going to use it.

We know our use cases, we know how many people, we know how different parts of

the organization might use the platform.

It's really hard for OKR practitioners, but we have people saying, "We just

can't do the spreadsheet thing anymore.

We need software."

And that is such a better position to be in than adopting software, and having

no one use it and asking why we're using it or why we're paying for it.

So, we let folks struggle until they're suffering with the lack of software,

and then that makes our software adoption so much more successful.

In the model that I work with, and this is, again, in an large

organization, not a small business.

Small businesses just go really faster.

They can accelerate this.

But in a methodology-focused adoption, in the first quarter, in

an large organization we'd focus on company-level OKRs created by a

senior leader or by senior leaders.

At the end of Q1, we do a review and reset of the company OKRs so we

can see what did we learn about the OKRs we were working with and what

might need to change for the future.

If the leaders are walking the talk, we might localize OKRs for a next level down.

Sometimes we do all of that in one quarter, but it's really nice

to work with a company level for a quarter before we localize.

And then, at the end of Q2, if we've localized, we review and reset the

company and organizational OKRs.

And then quarter four or whenever we're ready, then we can scale so that we're

supporting cross functional OKRs or team level OKRs and even aligned individual

goal-setting where people's individual goal-setting is aligned to the OKR model.

So, that's a fast large organizations rollout with a methodology focus.

And then, a slower large organizations rollout with a methodology focus — I

use this when I have organizations that have a really established strategic

plan and That fast approach is very experimental and learning focused.

If that's not culturally appropriate, then we do a slower rollout that might

start with just creating a strategy one pager in Q1 so that people can see

the organization strategy on a single page, which doesn't usually exist.

Sometimes it does, but that's where we start.

If we have one of these orgs where we need to move a little slower, then in

Q2, we create company-level Objectives.

We get folks used to the idea of company- level Objectives.

And then, in Q3, we might layer in some experimental company-level Key Results.

And again, we can scale when ready.

So methodology-focused adoptions are focused on achieving methodology success,

and then we get into the platform.

How can we track OKRs without a platform?

There's like an adage in software that any software problem that's

solved by a piece of software could ultimately be solved by a spreadsheet

and email, and it's not wrong.

So, a lot of starting out starts in spreadsheets with tracking OKRs.

If you're in a large organization and you're like, "There's no way we could

do spreadsheets," some of the most successful OKR implementations I've

seen in large organizations are based on SmartSheets, where they are able to

manage two levels of localization and then have a linkage to their L3 material.

It actually is possible to manage large systems of OKRs in spreadsheets

because if we're going to try and do that, we just make the system simple.

We don't try and link everything that could possibly be linked.

We recognize there's probably math that connects at level one and level

two, and then there's probably way less math that actually connects below that.

So, we tend to focus on managing level one, or the company, and level two in the

spreadsheets, and that's the extent of what a spreadsheet can usually handle.

When we get to three levels of math or more, that's where

platforms really become essential.

It's pretty hard to manage more than two levels of math in a

spreadsheet-based approach.

And then we always need some sort of visual of our Objectives and Key Results.

So, we can be really lo-fi with the tracking and still get the

information that we want and need.

We help ourselves when we zero in, narrow, and focus the number

of Objectives and Key Results.

It works better for everyone.

So, what's ultimately most important is that leaders need objective

information to make decisions.

They need data on which they can report up and across on team performance.

They need insight into progress, blockers, and resource needs.

And they need that information that they actually have to rely on for collaboration

and cross-functional alignment.

That's what's most important for leaders.

Leaders want the nice, connected, beautiful, automated, fully

synced, integrated dashboard.

But what they actually need is these four things.

And then our people in an OKR implementation need, first and

foremost, clear expectations.

That they're able to see really clearly what's expected of them.

They also need an OKR process that isn't yucky, because if it's yucky, then

they're gonna have to do all the work for this process that might generate

a pretty dashboard for the leaders.

But we want people to love our OKR implementations.

We want people to see the benefit of OKR implementations.

People also need the ability to align their work to what matters,

and that doesn't always have to be systemically connected.

If we can see our Objectives and Key Results on a page, and they're

really well-formed from a methodology standpoint, then people in the

organization can look at that single page and say, "I see how my work aligns.

That objective I can support.

This theme applies to my work this way."

And so being able to see that on a page view, instead of with some of the

platforms, it's almost like a "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist" issue that

people run into because it's just a big box of software with lots of stuff in it.

Most of them have some sort of all-in-one view, but it is different to see the

software based all-in-one view versus the kind of single page that you can

print and sit next to you on your desk that practitioners like me work with.

And then, people need a psychologically safe culture to be able to tell the truth

about their progress and what they need.

And that's not something that software does for us.

We have to achieve that with our impact on culture and with

how we approach our methodology.

Our OKR core team, the people who operate our OKR rhythm, need

people to do their own labor.

They don't like nagging everyone to update their OKRs, and to put their OKRs

into the system and to write their OKRs.

They need people to do their own labor, including leaders.

Software can facilitate that.

I said, what can be automated is automated, software can automate

reminders, but reminders also just become something we ignore after a while.

And what we need to do is build the behaviors.

of people doing their own labor with OKRs so that we don't rely

on our core team dragging the organization through the OKR rhythm.

Our core team also needs ease of preparation of reporting, and

they need people banging down their doors for an OKR platform.

Because that's how we ensure a successful OKR platform adoption

— when people have felt the pain of doing this without an OKR platform.

And they're like, "We can't take it anymore.

We can't implement that platform fast enough."

It feels like we're failing.

When people say that, what that actually is, is an enormous success,

because if you've made it to that point, you have set your organization

up for a successful platform adoption.

So, the approach to tracking that I use with clients when they're pre-platform

is we have our OKRs on a page.

It's usually a slide, so we can see one set, the company OKRs,

for example, on a single page.

And then we need a way to track linked, quantifiable progress.

So, if we have multiple levels, we need that math connected so that we can update

our child Key Results, and that rolls up to an updated parent Key Result.

And we also, in an ideal case, need some way to have a linkage

between our initiatives that align to OKRs and the OKRs they align to.

And so, that is usually our spreadsheet, and that has our

Objectives and our Key Results.

And then for a Key Result, there might be a link to another spreadsheet where

that Key Result's initiatives are, represented, or a link to whatever the

project management system report is.

for the Key Results for that initiative.

I coach separating the delivery plans or project management from OKR tracking,

because if we don't, if we try and do those things in one tool, what tends to

happen is the project management eats the OKRs, and it just becomes project

management and delivery tracking.

So It is kind of a pain sometimes if we have separate project management to

then start up our OKR rhythm separately.

A lot of the tools especially are combined.

That might work, but we want to make sure that we have a really strongly established

methodology culture before we try and put those things together so that the

project management doesn't eat the OKRs.

Alright, that is why we start with methodology and not software, and how

we do that is by keeping our tools very simple, by focusing on excellence of

methodology, adoption — whatever that means for that organization — and then

scaling when the organization is ready to, when leaders are modeling best

practices, and we have a solid playbook.

So, if you want more information about any of this — I do have a n OKR

workbook that's currently available.

The No BS OKRs workbook is only $19.

You can also, I have a print version of that workbook that's in its

final stages of layout right now.

And I'm really excited to get that one out.

So, the print version of the workbook is coming soon.

And then I also have a book called You Are a Strategist: Use No BS Objectives

and Key Results to Get Big Things Done.

That one's in proofreading right now So with that, I'm going to turn you loose.

Thank you for tuning in, and I'll see you next time.

All right, friends, That's it for today.

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