Embrace the Mess
OKRs appeal to our sense of order, but they are MESSY!
Recently, I lead a leadership team through four-hour OKR-writing workshop. It was hard, but successful. We’d emerged from the chaos of the workshop with a nice solid goal statement for the group. I told them, “These workshops sometimes feel like landing a large plane on a short runway in a crosswind gale.” No one laughed.
Here’s the thing: OKRs appeal to our sense of order. They’re a neat system for setting our goals, right? They have a simple format: Objectives express the goals, Key Results express the measures. Every goal in the same format—neat and tidy! Done!
If only it were so easy. In reality, this neat and tidy format doesn’t start neat and tidy, and the process of making it neat and tidy requires a ton of work. Messy work. Debates. Disagreements. Confusions. Misunderstandings. Misalignments. Getting through all of that is difficult. It’s emotional. People find that work uncomfortable. I find that work uncomfortable. But that work—that discomfort—that’s actually what makes the whole thing work!
Why Is The Mess Important?
In our book on OKRs, Who Does What By How Much, Jeff and I describe OKRs as three things:
A goal-setting framework
A new way of working
A cultural intervention
It’s tempting to treat OKRs as simply a goal-setting framework. When you do that, you lean into the neat-and-tidy idea. Write your goals, and you’re done.
When you’re trying to make OKRs stick though–to make a long-term change in the organization–you need to lean into the other dimensions. Working with OKRs is messy, and you have to build a culture that not only tolerates that, but actively values the mess.
OKRs only work when people embrace them—when people agree that they’re important, and when they know that their peers, their teams, and their organization all feel that way too. To build that feeling, you have to go through the mess, and you have to do it together.
That workshop—the one that felt like landing a plane in crosswinds— was hard because the team was looking at the complex landscape they faced and trying to decide how to navigate that together. They were a half-dozen-plus people and they had different opinions, different points of view. And they respected each other, so they listened. They tried to understand each other. They disagreed, but stayed present, trying to find common ground. They felt lost and confused sometimes. As the facilitator, I felt lost and confused sometimes too. (I hate that feeling, and I’m sure many of them felt the same way.)
But when we did land the plane, we emerged with more than an OKR. In a way, the OKR was the least important thing that we walked away with. More important was the clarity, understanding, and agreement that we’d created. And we did it by navigating that mess together. We talked about the misunderstandings–and turned them into understanding. We surfaced the disagreements, and decided what to do about them. The OKR itself became more than a goal statement: it became a shorthand symbol of the understanding and agreement that we’d created.
Don’t Shortcut the Mess
Leaders sometimes want to shortcut the mess. “Can’t we get this over with faster?” they’ll ask. Sometimes, they’ll shortcut the mess by simply dictating the OKR that they believe is the right one. And while it may very well be the right OKR—it might be the same one the team would have arrived at on their own, it will be less powerful than if the team had created it themselves because the team didn’t do the important cultural work to create the OKR together.
When teams walk through the mess together, they begin the cultural intervention of making the OKR important. In the long run, this is the kind of goal that you’re trying to create.