Objectives and Key Results

How to run it

1. Write the objective in one sentence with no numbers in it, in words you would want to repeat. Say why this period rather than any other, and how long the period is. A quarter, usually.
2. Write two to five key results. Each is an outcome in the world, not work performed: someone on holiday all period could still score it.
3. Give each a number: where it stands today and where it lands. Then name the report, app or person everyone agrees to believe for that number. Settled now, or renegotiated at review time.
4. Mark each result committed or a stretch. All committed promises nothing bold; all stretch promises nothing at all. If a result is done-or-not-done, say what number it would move and why you can’t measure that instead.
5. List the initiatives, the work you believe will move the numbers. Each names the key result it is aimed at and roughly how far it should move it. Work aimed at everything is aimed at nothing.
6. Set the review now: the date the numbers get read, what a seventy per cent period looks like, and who may drop an initiative mid-period when it isn’t moving its number.

Where it falls down. Companies pile OKRs up until nobody reads them, then score them all green at the end of the period by arguing about what the words meant.