Two Letters Struck Through

Everyone was taught to set S.M.A.R.T. goals. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely. Two of those five letters are the reason most goals do nothing: achievable and realistic cap a goal at what the person setting it already knows how to do, and a goal set that way is met, reported and forgotten, because nothing about the organization had to change to meet it. Strike the two letters and you have objectives and key results — specific, measurable, timely, and deliberately set past what is known, with seventy percent of the way there counted as success. The shelf's Business Transformation section opens today with that model: Objectives and Key Results.

A model, not a goal-setting tip

The acronym is the easy part. What makes OKRs a model — how the organization is built, in the shelf's sense — is the cascade. Objectives are set only at the company level, three to five for the year, by the executive team. Department heads write the key results against them, and those key results become the departments' objectives. Individuals write their own key results, aligned to their department, one committed and one aspirational. Four levels, each written by different people, each level's results becoming the next level's aims. An organization that lets every department write its own objectives has five pyramids and no company.

The numbers have to be interdependent, and they have to be visible. One person's retention target is the same fact as the Customer Success leader's metric and the Board's expectation for the year, cut to one person's size; and everyone can see everyone's, up to the Board's and down to the newest hire's, because an interdependent number that is hidden is just a target. That transparency is what turns "we are all Customer Success" from a poster into a fact.

The check-in

I have run this model with tools and without, as an executive and as a consultant, and the best correlating factor I have found for whether people make progress on the numbers they own is not the software or the scoring. It is the weekly, human-centric check-in: every manager with every direct report, thirty minutes, three questions — what are you achieving, where do you need help, what risks do you see — and a shared agenda that both of them can open. Above it, the cascade and the rhythm are structure. Below it, there is nothing: just someone deciding, on a Tuesday, whether the number they own is going to move this week. The manager's job in that meeting is not to inspect but to resource. That is the whole method, and it is the page of the model I would keep if I could keep only one.

Twelve pages, free to use with attribution, with the first year written out from the rhythm and a checklist at the end. The shelf's three domains are all open now.