OKRs are a goal setting exercise and it may be tempting, as such, to lump them in with their cousins, SMART Goals, along with performance reviews, 360s, competency libraries, agile workflows and a whole bunch of other corporate mumbo jumbo heard everywhere in the halls of corporate America and almost nowhere outside them. However, I believe OKRs are different and have potential value for many of us, both in our work and in other aspects of our lives.

But let’s start from the beginning; OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. It is a methodology first practiced at Intel in the 1990s but popularized over the course of the last decade or so, largely because one of its early adopters, Google, shared their experiences with OKRs with the rest of the world. There is an excellent (if long) You Tube video done by a Googler on how OKRs work both in theory and in practice..if you are interested in the specifics you should check it out.

At first blush, OKRs appear to be similar to all cascading goals exercises: The person at the top proclaims…”these are the three things we are trying to do this quarter” and all the successive levels of the organization create their own goals based on how they are going to help deliver their boss’ goals. It sounds good, but without a fair amount of rigor it devolves into something like this:

Boss: “we’re going to sell 15 percent more Doodads this quarter” Minion A: “Great idea boss, I’m going to teach our sales people how to sell better” Minion B: “Brilliant idea boss, I’m going to improve our marketing materials” Minion C: “What a paradigm shift boss! I’m going to get with our channel sales partners and talk about how they can sell more.” When Doodad sales remain flat everyone looks around and wonders why.

OKRs are built on the concept of being measurable. Every quarter, you choose three objectives (not ten) that line up to at least one of the three objectives of your team (your team’s manager creates those based on the larger team, etc, etc.) You then come up with three key results, which must be quantifiable, that you believe will be the output of the most important activities you can engage in to drive that objective. At the end of the quarter you and your manager score your OKRS based on what percentage of these three key results were actually met and you end up with a score between 0 and 1. (1, by the way, is not the perfect score at Google – it means you probably set goals that were too easy.)

The secret sauce, though, is that these OKRS are shared with every other member of the organization both before and after scoring. So – if you have a key result similar or complimentary to someone else’s key result you might be able to work together to drive them. Or, if you are counting on partnering with an individual but you see that they are planning a six-week travel assignment you can adjust your strategy. Again, if you are interested – check out the video here. I’ve also been a productivity disciple of David Allen for years – you will also find some commonalities between OKRs and the wisdom of Getting Things Done.

But here’s why I’ve come to realize that PFA needs this approach. Now six months in to the return of Project to Find America one of the challenges I face is a nagging suspicion that all of the work that has gone and will continue to go into this project won’t make a damn bit of difference in solving the fundamental problem at hand. If you have been reading this site for awhile you may have been thinking the same thing all along.

As with any good goal setting exercise one of the keys is to get the first part right…what is the fundamental problem at hand that I’m trying to solve? Part of my challenge is that I have expressed it in different ways before but here it is again:

At a time when the world is changing faster than ever before, the United States needs a government that can create policy that is more responsive and more flexible than ever before. But instead of that, our prime legislative body – the US Congress, is less responsive and more inflexible than it has been in at least the last hundred years.

Please do me a favor – read those last two sentences again. Do you disagree? I didn’t think so. So, what is to be done? If your answer is “things will get better after the impeachment trial,” think again. The 116th congress was well on its way to ignominy before the President even dialed up Ukraine last summer. The impeachment process has merely moved the progress meter from glacial to sedentary. There are many reasons for this and the best analysis I’ve found of most of them can be found in It’s Even Worse than it Looks (now changed to Its Even Worse than it Was,) a book by a pair of longtime Washington scholars. But while the book is instructive in understanding the problem, I found it much less so in understanding what to do about it.

That then, is the problem at hand. Tomorrow in this space we’ll lay out some OKRs for Project to Find America and then Sunday, look at what a world in which Congress itself adopted some of these same principles might look like.