What I like about OKRs is that it really focuses on providing ways to clearly specify your goals and measure whether you are achieving them. This is also its biggest weakness, since "Key Results" that cannot be expressed as continuous, clearly measurable values will suffer. This leads to cold-seeming Initiatives like the "Connect to the girlfriend for at least six hour-long sessions." from the blog post. Well meaning no doubt, but relationship quality just doesn't lend itself to quantisation like that.
That said, I'm actually a fan of OKRs for achieving personal goals as long as you can be honest to yourself about what your Objectives actually are. (ie, if you don't really value being fit but put it on the list because you feel it is compulsory then no framework is going to provide enough motivation) In corporate settings, the incentives are typically not aligned at all and that tends to break implementation very badly. But for personal settings where you are both goal-setter and implementer it can work quite well.
Well meaning no doubt, but relationship quality just doesn't lend itself to quantisation like that.
Granted, but sometimes you can find proxies and variables that increase the likelihood of success if you hit them consistently. For example, what's "successfully land an aircraft"? It's a sequence of hitting certain parameters within certain time windows that, when you do that, result in a smooth, successful, landing. Successful landing is a "lagging indicator".
There are many things, even in "artistic performance", that are a sequence of consistently hitting a target within a certain tolerance, at a specific time, etc.
In the workplace, you may have the problem of having a quality relationship with your colleagues or "reports". You may not be able to "quantify" that easily, but you can have regular one on ones in a relaxed enough setting that lead to candid conversations that unearth problems early enough that you can effectively solve them. The relationship quality is a lagging indicator, if you will, of what has been done upstream.
What I have found for myself is that I easily fool myself into applying these kind of frameworks for everything in my life, because every problem can be a nail for the OKR-shaped hammer. Some problems are better approached in different ways though. It's a valuable tool to have in the mental toolbox but it is also good to have a variety of approaches to choose from when confronted with a new problem or task.
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What I like about OKRs is that it really focuses on providing ways to clearly specify your goals and measure whether you are achieving them. This is also its biggest weakness, since "Key Results" that cannot be expressed as continuous, clearly measurable values will suffer. This leads to cold-seeming Initiatives like the "Connect to the girlfriend for at least six hour-long sessions." from the blog post. Well meaning no doubt, but relationship quality just doesn't lend itself to quantisation like that.
That said, I'm actually a fan of OKRs for achieving personal goals as long as you can be honest to yourself about what your Objectives actually are. (ie, if you don't really value being fit but put it on the list because you feel it is compulsory then no framework is going to provide enough motivation) In corporate settings, the incentives are typically not aligned at all and that tends to break implementation very badly. But for personal settings where you are both goal-setter and implementer it can work quite well.
Granted, but sometimes you can find proxies and variables that increase the likelihood of success if you hit them consistently. For example, what's "successfully land an aircraft"? It's a sequence of hitting certain parameters within certain time windows that, when you do that, result in a smooth, successful, landing. Successful landing is a "lagging indicator".
There are many things, even in "artistic performance", that are a sequence of consistently hitting a target within a certain tolerance, at a specific time, etc.
In the workplace, you may have the problem of having a quality relationship with your colleagues or "reports". You may not be able to "quantify" that easily, but you can have regular one on ones in a relaxed enough setting that lead to candid conversations that unearth problems early enough that you can effectively solve them. The relationship quality is a lagging indicator, if you will, of what has been done upstream.
What do you think?
What I have found for myself is that I easily fool myself into applying these kind of frameworks for everything in my life, because every problem can be a nail for the OKR-shaped hammer. Some problems are better approached in different ways though. It's a valuable tool to have in the mental toolbox but it is also good to have a variety of approaches to choose from when confronted with a new problem or task.
Agree that a quality-sensitive metric can't be modelled fully in the structure. This is something I'm even observing in the work-environment also.
Do you have any learnings to make such initiatives work?