Objectives and Key Results: Commit, Target, and Stretch with Ben Lamorte

How do we set goals that inspire both significant achievement and collaboration across organizations? How do we measure achievement? To explore these questions, Senia interviewed Ben Lamorte, author of Objectives and Key Results: Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement with OKRs. Ben is an OKRs coach helping many organizations use OKRs effectively. He is also currently writing The OKRs Fieldbook to help other people become skillful OKRs coaches.  

Addition on March 11: Ben's book, The OKRs Field Book, was released today.

To watch the entire conversation, click here or play the embedded video below.

Senia: Please tell us about OKRs. 

Ben: OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. In its simplest form, it's really just a goal setting model. Andy Grove at Intel invented OKRs when he separated out objectives into qualitative and quantitative statements. Looking at the objectives that were being set, he noticed that some were statements like “Be nicer on the phone.” Others were more measurable, such as “Reduce time on hold from 40 seconds to 20 seconds.” As a mathematician, he wanted to know, "Is it measurable or not?" So, he separated the objective, a qualitative statement, from the key results that tell us whether we have met the objective.

He set it up so that the OKRs were not used to evaluate performance of employees. This is really important. He realized that when objectives are used as evaluation criteria, people tended to set the bar really low to make sure they’d reach them and they tended to keep them secret, which led to silos. Andy Grove wanted goals that required a stretch, and he wanted them visible throughout the whole organization.  

The OKRs model increases transparency and clarity about what we're trying to achieve and how we will know that we've achieved it.

Google started using OKRs in the 1990s when the company was small, and they continue to use OKRs to this day. It's part of their culture. OKRs started popping up and spreading out throughout organizations, all around the world. In 2018, John Doerr wrote the book, Measure What Matters, which became a best seller.

That excitement led me to write my next book, The OKRs Fieldbook, which will be the first book for OKRs coaches. Existing books are good introductions to OKRs and why to do them. My fieldbook will address the question, "How do we actually do this?" 

Senia: Can you give us an example of someone using OKRs?

Ben: One of my really early clients was a company that was doing pretty well selling online collectible cards. They approached me saying, "Ben, we need your help because we want to get focused. We have too many things going on, and we want to scale." 

Then they started telling me all the things they wanted to do. I call this the blah-blah-blah problem. We want to do OKRs because ... followed by a thousand different reasons. As a coach, I asked, "Why do you really want to do this?" They said, "We need to be aligned and focused because we have a big event coming up. It’s an annual conference that is a big deal." I said, "Okay. Let's use OKRs for that." Their reaction was, "You mean you can do that?" I said, "OKRs is a goal setting framework. If that's your goal, then that's what we want to do."

When I asked, "What is the objective?" The CEO said, “We want to make a big splash at the event.” Then I asked, “How will we know we've made a big splash at the event?” It was a magical conversation because it helped the CEO articulate to the entire company, "Here's how we know that event is a success." 

One key result was stated, “30 people will have registered for our Beta solution by the end of the trade show.” That led people to think about what features they needed in order to make that happen. Then they’d ask questions like, "What if we could get people to register before the trade show? What if we did a webinar for the people signed up for the trade show showing…."

Thus, they were having good focused conversations about how to drive the OKR. That one session led to a lot of the value. They had only one objective with three or four different ways of measuring the results. Earlier, they’d thought that every individual needed an individual OKR. The lesson they learned was that they could have one big OKR that everybody drives towards.  

Senia: What do you believe that others in your field may not believe?

Ben: We all agree to some extent that key results should be aspirational, not just stuff we are already doing. Where there is controversy is how much stretch to include in key results. Some recommend having two levels of key results, Commit Level and Aspirational Level. But I find it is human nature to just write Commit Level Key Results. People look at their work, and essentially say, “These are all the things I'm going to do. I'm going to write them down as my commitments.” It’s like making a to-do list.  

I find that we need to find a balance between "What is it that I know I can do?" and something more aspirational. Rather than writing some key results as commitments and others aspirational, I simply write all key results as both.

Initially every key result is written as aspirational, but I also walk people down asking, "But what is the committed level of progress?” The committed level is what we know we can achieve. In fact, if we can’t achieve that level, we know something must have gone wrong. 

The reason I love to do it this way is that it forces us to have important conversations. Let’s say you’re the client. I can ask a bunch of questions to stretch your thinking, but also balance that by asking what you know you can achieve. This is critical to alignment. Organizations can use it to manage expectations. There might be a key result that would be amazing. But what is it that we know we can achieve? Then I go a step further and suggest, "Let's find a target level somewhere in between." 

An aspirational key result might be to get a hundred new customers. If that’s truly aspirational, it’s probably not going to happen. Then I might say, "Well, what's the commit?" The commit might be “I'm committing to present the solution to one hundred customers or prospects. That's what I know I can do. If I don’t do it, I fail.” That's still part of that same key result, which is to get a hundred customers. 

In between the aspirational key result and the committed level, there’s a target. 

A Story about Key Results

A retail chain needed my help with OKRs. One key result set by the leader was for a particular department to reduce expenses by $25 million. When I talked to people in that department, they said, "That's just so ridiculous. There's no way we can reduce the expenses by $25 million." At the time, the key result was not labeled aspirational or commit, it was simply, "Key result, reduce this much." There was no scoring system. I went back to the leader and said, "Do you know that your team thinks it's absolutely ridiculous that you put reduce expenses by $25 million there? They think it's impossible." The leader said, "Yeah, I know that. But I read that Key Results are supposed to be aspirational things that probably won't happen anyway, so I went with 25 million."

I asked him, 'What is the amount of reduction that you know you can commit to hitting by the end of this quarter." He said, "That would be 18 million." I said, "Well, how do we know you can commit to it?" He said, "That's already locked and loaded. If we don't hit 18 million in reduction, something went seriously wrong. We have a plan for it."

I said, "Then is 25 million the absolute maximum?" He said, "Yeah, that would be only theoretically possible." Then I asked, "What's the target level at which you would be very happy. One that you’d have about a 50/50 shot of achieving?" He said, "I'd say 20 million."  

All of a sudden, we had a key result. The key result was to reduce expenses by 18 million (commit), 20 million (target), 25 million (aspirational). When I went back to the team, people said, "Oh, I get it now." 

I have found in practice that for every person who wrote a single aspirational key result, there is an equal and opposite person who wrote done the commit level.

What was the correct answer? Is it 25 million or 18 million? I find you need the full story for a given key result. Show me the commit, show me the target, and show me the aspirational (stretch). People in the company found this language valuable. Hallway conversations were going on like, "Oh really? Is that your commit or your target? What's your stretch? Is that really a stretch? That seems more like it should be a target. Oh wait a minute, you're saying that's a commit. There's no way we can commit to that. That should be more like the target. The commit should be this."

The discussions became so much more engaged in aligning around what is going to really happen versus what's going to be amazing. It gave them a common way of talking about key results so they could avoid conversations like, “I don't know what that guy's thinking. There's no way we're going to get 25 million."

If you could see only one of the three numbers, which would you choose? A lot of big companies use the target. The target level is a 50/50 shot. If we achieve it, it's good. They might also add, "Oh, by the way, here's the stretch and here's the commit."

OKRs as a critical-thinking framework

Working on OKRs is about having conversations using a critical thinking framework. It’s about asking a certain set of questions throughout the whole OKR cycle in order to focus effort, to make measurable progress, and to work together. 

I know I'm doing OKRs when I'm asking questions such as, "Is this really a commit?"  

Getting back to the believe question, most of my colleagues might say, "That key result scoring system seems so complicated, and it takes too much time." That’s what my clients think at first. But once I’ve gone through it with them, they never look back. There's a little bit of a barrier to entry, but every one of my clients loves this process.

Senia: What is a quick summary of what you believe? 

Ben: I believe that OKRs is a critical-thinking framework that involves asking a certain set of questions. I also believe it best to have a standard approach so that every key result is written as an aspirational key result. But I also believe it best to specify a commit level of progress in order to have accountability. Otherwise, people that miss the key result will just say, “We didn’t achieve that because it was aspirational.”

I force clients doing OKRs to think about the key results. What is the aspirational level? What is the commit level? What's the target level? (Target level usually falls somewhere in between but doesn’t have to be right in the middle). It’s really important to have that conversation because it forces alignment and manages expectations right from the start. We need to know how we’re going to score key results.

Senia: What thought would you like to leave with our viewers?

Ben: Think of OKRs as asking questions like, "Why is that objective important?” or, "How will we know we've achieved that objective?” or, "What is the intended outcome of producing the demo? How will we know the demo makes an impact?"

These OKR-style questions are incredibly valuable whether we’re setting goals annually, quarterly, or weekly, whether the goals are individual, team or company. What will the end of the time period look like if it's a commit? a stretch? 

Senia: If you were to snap your fingers and almost everyone in the world were to take some action, what would you want that action to be?

Ben: I would love for them to do a reflection exercise. Take a piece of paper. Draw a line down the middle.  

Transcribe a conversation in the right-hand column. Write down what was actually said. You might do that for a particular moment when you had a breakthrough or when you felt completely stuck or you left a meeting feeling like nothing got accomplished.

In the left-hand column, write down what you were thinking but didn't say. 

In my experience, this leads to insight, often an actionable takeaway. This exercise leads to critical reflection on our own behavior and interactions with other people. If everybody did the two-column exercise today, I bet the world would be a better place within a day or two.

Photo by Weerapat Wattanapichayakul on Dreamstime

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