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Wholehearted OKR– Integrating strategy, development, and delivery

 

Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a popular framework for defining and tracking objectives and outcomes. Done well (wholeheartedly), it’s a great model for participatory strategy deployment. Done badly... well, let’s say that you don’t want to do it badly!

OKR naturally joins Lean and Agile. The way you introduce it matters at least as much as the thing itself, placing it very much within the scope of Agendashift, the wholehearted and outcome-oriented engagement model, and an open framework for participatory change. Happily, their respective aims coincide in the importance they attach to outcomes and the integration of strategy, development, and delivery.

With this workshop, we support organizations to addresses 5 key challenges with OKR:

  1. Define objectives that are relevant, meaningful, compelling, and generative
  2. Measure key results with insightful metrics that will guide and stretch appropriately
  3. Deliver key results – finding the innovations
  4. Manage at multiple levels of detail
  5. Support and sustain the process

With Wholehearted: OKR, we aim to deliver a complete realization of Agendashift’s wholehearted mission. We create opportunities for:

  • Authentic engagement on issues that matter
  • Meaningful participation across strategy, development, and delivery
  • Anticipating and meeting needs
  • Leadership around outcomes (each inviting the other)

Our mission is to create these opportunities as you practice and learn.

Workshop overview

We deliver the Wholehearted: OKR workshop in 8 sessions of between 90 and 120 minutes each, typically delivered in 4 half days or 2 full days, online by default.

Agendashift OKR Workshop

 

Sessions 1-4: Outside in strategy – customer and external environment first

  1. Context

    • Identifying the adaptive challenge
    • Celebration-5W
    • Introducing OKR, 4DX, and Agendashift
    • Stories as expressions of strategy, the meaning behind the metric
  2. Outside-in strategy review (I)

  3. Find your objectives

    • Plan on a Page
    • Option Approach Mapping (not its real name)
    • Option Relationship Mapping
    • Define your “Wildly important goal” (WIG)
  4. Outside-in strategy review (II)

Sessions 5-8: Right to left and upside down – outcome-orientation and organization design

  1. Changeban (optional – may be replaced by the Agendashift delivery assessment)

  2. Identify your measures of success

    • ODIM: Objective, Decision, Insight, Metric
    • X-Matrix / TASTE: True North, Aspirations, Strategies, Tactics, Evidence
    • The 2MBM pattern: Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method
    • Leading & lagging indicators; Balancing metrics; Scoreboard
    • The organizational view: Who identifies with what metric?
  3. Options and experiments

    • Strategic prioritization
    • Generating and selecting ideas
    • Experiment A3
  4. Organizing for (mutual) accountability

Credits

(c) Agendashift(TM) 

Mike Burrows created this workshop in collaboration with Karl Scotland, Steven Mackenzie, Kjell Tore Guttormsen, and Mike Haber. Ivaylo Gueorguiev delivers it in the context of your organization.