Emma Pownall 0:00
Hi today I'm joined by Roger London. He's the director and founder of there be giants, a consultancy and training firm that's focused on strategic alignment through objectives and key results. We taught strategy culture and how to get going. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Thank you so much for joining me, Richard. Before we get into the conversation around strategy and OKRs, could you give us a bit background on you and there be giants and and how that came about?

Roger Longden 0:34
Sure pleasure to be with you, Emma. So the business can trace its roots back to 2010 when I started it as just pure coaching business, and I was working with founders of tech businesses here in Manchester, and I did that for a few years in between, maybe doing work elsewhere, like out in the North Sea, I did some work on the rigs for a contract which was around operational performance at that point. But, yeah, I noticed that there was an issue with or where things fell down for those. For those, those founders often because there was a lack of experience was around once they develop their strategies and their plans, actually, getting them into play, actually, you know, executing against them. And so that's when I went on a bit of a research journey of my own to look to find other you know, how did organisations that were really good at this? What did they do that was different to everybody else. And that was when I came across OKRs, and I thought so I started to play with that with my clients, and got some really good results and and, yeah, you know, it kind of grew from there. The pivots sort of happened around sort of 20, 2016 2017 and within 12 months, we'd formed some really good partnerships, which took us off to which meant that we were getting introduced to clients all over the world. And so over the course of the next few years, we were working, you know, everywhere from Jamaica to New Zealand, when we got into lockdown, you know, like most, I was thinking, Am I going to have a business? Have a business at the end of this? But at that point, actually, what happened was larger corporates, who we kind of up to that point, the largest organisation we probably worked with was maybe a couple of 1000 people, so kind of verging on corporate, but not quite. And what happened was because all of a sudden the world had to start remote working overnight. We had companies coming to us going, Oh, we've got all these remote teams, but we've not got the we haven't got the framework or that, or the systems or the working practices to kind of keep them focused and keep them kind of together and coalesced around, you know, shared goals and that sort of thing. So we had the likes of talk talk and ITV and so on. That came and got us to do the work, and we proved that it could be done remotely, which we'd always, always known it could be. But clients had obviously always wanted us to be face to face with them up to that point, and continue to do work remotely over those couple of years where it was all on and off, on and off, on and off again all around the world. You know, even worked with biggest retail bank in Argentina at that point. God knows how they found us. I still don't know to this day, how they found us, but we ended up working with them for quite a chunk of time. And yeah, it was it that sort of took us into that gave us our foothold in the corporate space. And so we work at both ends of the spectrum. We still work with the sort of founder led businesses, I would say, ranging from sort of, sometimes, you know, 50 or 60 people, up to who are really ambitious and want to grow right up to, you know, probably three, 400 people. And then at the other end of the spectrum, we've got the corporates of, you know, 15, 20,000 people that we work with. And it's more for them. It's more that they have. Perhaps they've got engagement data that says that, you know, their employees just don't understand the strategy. They don't understand the contribution that they can make. They don't feel connected to it. And perhaps there's a lot of siloed working as well that's going on, and they need to break through those silos. They need to improve the collaboration, that sort of thing, and so they turn to OKRs to really help with that as well.

Emma Pownall 4:45
Yeah. And so do you find there's a thread with with all of these types of businesses in terms of what they're trying to achieve and and overcome by turning to OKRs?

Speaker 1 4:56
Yeah, to certain degree, there is commonality. But. I would say, at the at the the the sort of the sort of founder led, sort of medium sized business end of the spectrum is often because they want to avoid what's happened to the corporates. And then the corporates come to us because they need to kind of row back from that. Yeah. So, yeah, there is a commonality. There is a commonality there, but they're kind of approaching it from different directions.

Emma Pownall 5:25
Yeah, that's really interesting. And I imagine, brings different challenges depending on that size and complexity. I think something you said there will really resonate with most leaders, regardless of the size of business, which is, you know, a strategy can be really great in a PowerPoint presentation or a boardroom conversation and then not get into execution in a real, lived way. How does focusing on strategy through OKRs help those types of businesses, yeah. So

Speaker 1 6:04
what, what OKRs can do? And let me just be clear for for those that are watching or listening to us, you know OKRs objectives and key resource? Yeah, that is a its most basic form, just a different way of writing a goal. But there's a whole load of principles and practices that wrap around it, okay, which, if you, if you, if you really embrace those, and do those, well, then you get all the extra benefits. So it's not just a case of writing your goals in a different way and the world changes. There's a lot of stuff that wraps around it, okay, so in in terms of how it helps sort of translate the almost somewhat abstract language of strategy that you know those in the organisation sometimes find hard to understand and connect to and understand what it means for them. This is what OKRs can help with. It can help with the translation so you can, you can help. I call it framing. Okay, you can help to frame. In other words, what the, what the sort of longer term ambitions are, what the medium terms ambitions are, and therefore, what the short term ambitions are. And it's, it's the short term ambitions that matter to the majority of the organisation, because that's the timeframe in which they work, if you give them. I mean, it's funny, because just just to kind of wind back a little bit as I talked through the timeline when I was doing my research and looking at different you know, how do organisations do this? Really well. One of the things that was really motivating me was, at that point, there was a real belief in changing the way that objectives had been deployed in organisations because, and I mean that in the context of individual performance management, okay, because there was a recognition and I know This. I knew this from when I was leading my teams and in corporate, where we had to work on an annual cycle for objective setting, it was useless, because even back then in the noughties, you know, the pace of change was outstripping a 12 month objective. So you'd find yourself getting to the end of the year looking at that objective and thinking, well, that doesn't apply anymore, but because it was fixed at the beginning of the year, you had to provide some sort of write up against it and some sort of grading of performance against it, which left the individual feeling like, how hell is that? How is that fair? Because that's not what I've been working on for the past nine months. Might have been for the first three months, but not, you know, something changed. We had a course correction, and so on and so forth. So I thought it was worth just mentioning that, because that's what OKR seeks to definitely get around because, like I said, you've got the framing, the chunking down, if you will, from that sort of long term, medium term, short term, so that you've got the option, you know, if you're reviewing, resetting, say, every three months, then you've got the option to course correct. So that's where it brings in the agility, because you can, you know, something's changed internally, externally, or maybe you've learned something really valuable from the previous three months, and you want to iterate and change, you know, tweak and change for the next three months. Brilliant, absolutely fantastic. That's what it should be about. But if you're constraining yourself with, like, the traditional sort of 12 month cycles, I mean, like I say, 10 years, 1015, years ago, they weren't even fit for purpose, so that

Emma Pownall 9:39
now, the pace of change now means just so much can change in that three month period. Absolutely. So what you're talking about is small, deliberate steps towards maybe a north star or a strategic vision that a business has. How does that work in practice?

Speaker 1 9:59
So. Yeah, yeah. So it's still really important to have your North Star. It's still really important to define, you know what your I would say, You know what, what used to be a five year plan, now probably is more likely to be a three year plan, yeah. And whereas you traditionally might have when you got to say, down to that three year plan, you might have got a little bit more detailed about how you were going to achieve it. What seems to work better now is that you you say, right? These are, these are the results that we want to achieve by these certain dates in the lead up to whatever that final outcome is for the three years. But we're not going to get really detailed at this stage about the route that we're going to take. Yeah, so as Imagine climbing the mountain, you know, you kind of pick your way points, but you're happy as you're climbing to maybe alter your route, you know, because you might find that one bit, actually one path is, is, is not as, not as easy to navigate as another. So therefore you tried it, you've learned, you've come back and you started again down a different route. And that's what the benefit of having the shorter term, you know that sort of three month or some clients, you choose four, which is fine. You go any longer than that, you start to lose the benefit. You know, we find that if you, if you try to go for, say, a six month cycle, there's too much time between the setting and the end. And you find people kind of falling into the trap of thinking, Oh, it's five or six months off yet. Let's just put that to one side. And you know, for the if you're going to, you know, I said before that, there's a lot of principles and practices that wrap around OKRs, and one of them is making sure that they stay front and centre and that they're in current conversation and reviewed on a very regular basis. There's a real cadence. There's real drum beat to them, yeah, yeah.

Emma Pownall 12:05
So they don't get written out, stuck in a drawer, pick back up, yeah, three or six months later, and everyone goes, Oh, yeah. We were looking at that and yeah, it becomes part of of the cadence of of the business, rather than something that sits alongside and gets

Speaker 1 12:26
and it becomes part of the common language. You know, I was talking yesterday. Actually, there's a client that we worked with three years ago that's reached out to us again, that wants us to do some more work with them, because they've, they've doubled in size over that time, and they have. They're not their business model. Their business model. Their business model hasn't changed, but they are focusing on new areas now. And they said, we need to, we need to do a full sort of reset. You know, we know what our vision is, but we just need to help, help translating that through. And it's great to see them sort of three years on and see how invested they still are in OKRs. And what they said to me on the call yesterday was, they're just part of our common language now. People talk about, you know, they, you know, Ask how their OKRs are going, or, or, or, you know, it's how they kind of Converse. It's, you know, it's the language that they use,

Emma Pownall 13:19
yeah. And one thing you said earlier was about being a spotlight shone on on where you want to go and what you want to do. How does that change? That mindset shift help leaders who are driving the strategy forward by spotlighting with their teams.

Speaker 1 13:39
Spotlighting is one of the most challenging things, which I find leadership teams kind of grapple with around this, because it means prioritising. And, you know, I've yet to meet a leadership team that doesn't want everything done by yesterday. Yeah, everything and all, what we really work with clients to help them do is, as you say, adopt a spotlighting principle, and the opposite of spotlighting is flood lighting. So imagine you're sat in an auditorium. You're watching a show. You spotlight to certain part of the stage. You know where the action is happening, so you watch that, if the stage is entirely flood lit, you could be looking over the right hand side as the actions happening on the left. All right? That's, that's the basic principle, okay. So what we what we encourage clients to do is we encourage clients to think of OKRs as a limited resource, right? You've only got so much bandwidth, right for focus and attention over a given period. So where you're going to place your chips, what's your best what's your best bet? What's going to give you the best return? Right? You know, create the biggest value for the business over the next three months, or 12 months, or whatever period you're talking about, and more often than not, and this is a kind of guide that we give them in trying to. Make that decision is that the biggest return comes from something which is transformational in nature. It's something it's a new way of doing things. It's a new thing, perhaps that you're doing, perhaps, you know, it's actually, it might be actually recovering something that's gone off track significantly, but it is about it's about transformation. At the end of the day. OKRs are wasted if you're using them to manage just regular run rate, business as usual operational activity, unless, we'll just put a little footnotes in it, unless you're transforming it or it needs significant recovery. Okay, if it's green and it's running, then that's where it sits in the KPIs and the KPIs. Sorry to digress a second, but I think it's worth mentioning, because we get asked this a lot, you know, what's the difference between an OKR and a KPI, and how do they sit alongside each other? You know, as I was saying, OKRs, transformation, KPIs operational, right? There's a huge dependency on the two though, yeah, and I would actually say that your KPIs are probably more important, because if your KPIs are all red, forget any transformation work. You absolutely need to focus on your KPIs to get them back on track, yeah, because the fires are burning, right and but once they are stabilised and you've got that bandwidth to focus on transformation and growth and so on and so forth, that's where the spotlight and can focus.

Emma Pownall 16:33
Yeah, I think I really like the analogy that you've told me in the past, which is the sat nav versus the car dashboard, the car dashboard. And I think that really sort of hit home. The difference to me, between KPIs and and OKRs, you can't get where you need to go if you've not got enough petrol, and exactly, not going at the right speed, but you need to know where you're heading with your sat nav. Yeah,

Speaker 1 16:59
exactly. And you know, if you're if you're running low on fuel, then you just reprogram your Sat Nav to find the nearest gas station. And then once you, once you sorted, then you, you know, you reset your Sat Nav back to your original destination. So that's the interplay between the two. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah.

Emma Pownall 17:15
So we talked a lot about the theory behind OKRs and strategy. Can you bring it to life a bit with an example?

Speaker 1 17:22
Yeah, so a client we worked with last year, business that has ambition to triple in size in the next three years, leadership knew that they needed to do things differently. They couldn't just expect that to happen by just doing more of the same. Had thought, had kind of heard of OKRs, and were curious to learn a bit more. So we spent some time with them to kind of, you know, fill them in on what they are and what they could do. And they were like, right? Okay, we really want this. And they really threw themselves into it. We went through the original setup with them, so helping them to define their first set, getting the the sort of framework in place, how it's going to run, how they're going to use them. You know, the corporate term is governance, but, yeah, I'm not, I'm not massive fan of that phrase, but it is what it is, really. And they also invested in having some coaches, which is really important, because, like I said, you know, writing your goals as OKRs doesn't change anything. It's how you then use them and how you then you know, if you as we've already said, they run on a cyclical basis, so that means that they have to be reviewed and reset, and you need some facilitation for that, and you might not want to be calling us back every single quarter to do that for you, although we're happy to do that. But you know, so we actually train up coaches, and they trained up their coaches, and they have done a fantastic job. I'm still in touch with the CEO, and it's interesting, he said to me, because I one of the, one of the early questions I asked him, I said to you personally. All right, you personally, John, how are you going to feel like this has worked? What's what's going to be the evidence for you personally? So he said, spending more time on the things that I enjoy around the business, interesting and and I was with him, actually, just only a few weeks ago. We invited him to event, an event with me. And I said, so how do you think it's going? You know, you personally, this is great. I can focus on developing, you know, finding new clients and stuff like that, he says, which is the stuff I love. I'm not getting drawn into the internal stuff. I just see it all happening and all ticking over now. And he loves it. And I think one of the biggest shifts that happened for that, for that all. Organisation was adopting an outcome focused mindset, right? So the kind of the clues in the title really key results. Okay? So it's not an action, it's a result. It's where you want to be. It's that finishing line. You're defining that finishing line. And a lot of people shy away from that because it it really kind of lays bare whether you've achieved something they you know, a lot of us tend to default to measuring or judging our our performance by actions. We ticked everything off. Well, yeah, that's kind of part of it. But have all those actions kind of added up to a result that you wanted in the in the first place. And that's that's a shift which that clients that organisation has really kind of gotten to grips with. And he said, he said to me that he's seen even even when they're not specifically talking about OKRs, he said he's seen people start to challenge each other about, well, what's the outcome that we're focusing for here? We're focusing on we're looking for here. And so he said, I can see it kind of permeating way beyond just, you know, the actual working directly on OKRs, because not everyone works directly on them, because not everybody can impact them. But he said, like in the one to one conversations, and you know when, when the sort of the team leaders are having conversations with their with their teams, you know, he says, I'm just hearing outcome focus come out a lot more.

Emma Pownall 21:34
Yeah, that's really interesting. And I suppose that also leads to then stretching and and thinking about what outcomes you want to achieve, and what success looks like as a result. And that might not be 100% achievement of an outcome if you're on the direction towards

Speaker 1 21:57
it. Oh, you're touching on, yeah, a hot topic there, yeah, because where this comes from is, I don't know if it's still the case, but if you Googled OKRs about seven or eight years ago, actually, Google came at the top of the list because they were one of the early adopters. Yeah, and there was this kind of there was this lecture by one of their guys from their innovation labs about how they deployed OKRs. And he talked extensively about the stretch, right, okay, and, yeah, you know, there is absolutely scope for a stretch in a key result, okay, particularly if you're it if you're trying to, if you're trying to achieve something which is really, really ambitious. Now, does that mean, then that some key results are perhaps not ambitious, not necessarily, but some of them have to be committed. And this is where we kind of keep one foot. It's all well and good. You know, Silicon Valley, all that you know, got to shoot for the stars. And if you all this, that and the other, absolutely yes. However, in the rest of the world, where they, you know, they can afford to fail, left, right and centre, they're where they're failure. Failures on their sleeve, almost like, you know, Stripes. Here in the rest of the world, there are some points, some some results, which absolutely have to be committed. I'll give you an example. Maybe you want to sell a new product, and in order to sell that new product, you need to get an accreditation. Yeah, okay, and it might take you three months to earn that accreditation. Okay, so is that a genuine key result? I would argue yes, you could have that as a key result, because it's about what's going remember key results. Focus, focus, okay, hours on what's going to create value for the business you want to open up a new income stream by selling a new product, and you need to get this accreditation in place, then fine, you need to have that as perhaps as a key result. But there's no oh, 80% on that will do. It's absolutely it has to be 100% it's the same with contract signatures. I've seen contracts be be put in as key results in and that may sound, you know, those two examples I've given are not particularly measurable, right? You don't have data against them. So there might be some people listening to this having, you know, choking on their coffee with what I've just said there, you can still make them measurable, because you you that you create milestones. You define what the you know, what, just 20% 40% 60% 80% progress look like on towards that. So you make it transparent, you make it reportable, even though there's no data that you can actually track. So, yeah, you can. Still make it measurable, even though it looks like, at first, like it would be a have we got it? Or haven't we

Emma Pownall 25:06
got it? Yeah, so I suppose it really helps you then define what are those non negotiables, and what are those stretch aspirational pieces and and allows you to really understand as a business which, which which are which, and what you really need to achieve to get that strategic focus and strategic alignment. So people listen to this thinking, Oh, not another management framework to work on. How would you talk to them about OKRs, and what would you say to them?

Speaker 1 25:43
Well, I would say, you know, much as I would love to say, it's something new and something really shiny, it's, I think you'll probably find a lot of what it covers, what it includes, what it entails. You're doing already, just maybe not in, not in a, not in as structured and coordinated way. And it's that, it's that, it's that structure and that coordination which which really brings the value. So, yeah, all right. It is another acronym to think of. But in many respects, we find that it replaces. It's not about adding more to what's there. It's usually, it usually. It's the case that it replaces what is is happening with something that is a little bit more how can I put it common in terms of, everybody's working in the same way and everybody's speaking the same language? Yeah, so that, in itself, really starts to help to align people, help to synchronise people, help to, you know, spot those synergies and so on and so forth. So, yeah, everybody's working at the same clock speed at that point, and it kind of that really helps. That really helps.

Emma Pownall 27:08
So we've covered how we start small and and the cadence of of OKRs. How does a framework like this help people to own and stay engaged with what they're doing.

Speaker 1 27:24
So the ownership, I mean, it has to start with leadership. Okay, where I've seen OKRs fail, certainly in the early days, it's been because the leaders have said, right, just go do this and, you know, work, but don't, don't bother us. Don't involve us. We won't. If that's the approach that an organisation or a leadership team is taking, then we won't work. We won't work with them, because it's just not going to work, because the leadership team have to lead by example on this. Okay, so in terms of ownership, they have to be the ones to own it. First of all, they set the example. And in terms of how they work with it, I think it's really important that they set the tone around, sort of leading with a bit of humility around it. You know, we're trying this. We're not going to get it perfect from day one. Yeah, right, that's a really, really important point. I've seen some teams almost get themselves into a state of paralysis because they're too frightened to get going because they don't know they haven't got a guarantee that it's going to be perfect from day one. It's like you've just got to jump right, and you will learn how to fly. It's just that it might be, it might be a bit turbulent turbulence at first, but you will get there. You will get there. I was working in India last week with a team who were got themselves almost into a bit of a debate cycle, and I just had to say, guys, time out. You've got what you need to get going. You have right and remember, you will review and refine every three months. So it's not like you're committing yourselves, you know, forever in a day, to this. Okay, and and then, yeah. So the leadership team really needs to move forward, and they also need to respect the facts. I mean, we touched upon it in a roundabout sort of way, but we haven't referred to it specifically that this is a change. This represents a change to the wider audience. And, you know, different people respond to change in different ways, and we have to be aware of that and respect that some might need a little bit more hand holding, a little bit more coercion, a little bit more support than than others. So you have to take a proper change management approach to this. You know, you have to. You. Position it you have to tell the story that's leading up to the change, why it's really important, why it's you know what, what potentially could happen if we don't do this, why it's imperative now, what's in it for everyone? How's it going to make things better? How is it going to make things easier for us all? And talk in terms of what resonates for the audience, not in terms of what resonates for the leadership, or what in terms of resonates so what for their exactly, their roles, exactly, exactly, and then just make sure that there's there's there's there's there's probably more support. Go overboard on the support that's provided, and that support looks like. You know, it can be anything from briefing sessions, training sessions, coaching sessions, you know, materials that are provided, training that's provided, so on and so forth. There's a huge amount, okay, which can be provided there and then. And then, as you start to see the changes take effect, you capture the green shoots. And the green shoots are the other signs that it's starting to work, that it's starting to stick, yeah. And really kind of lift those up, champion them, recognise them, maybe even to some extent, reward them, because that will then drive further adoption. Okay, it's proof that it's working. And, and, and you'll get to a point eventually where you'll be able to, kind of call it as, you know, being part of your this is how we do things. This is our operating system around here. But you can't expect that immediately. You know, I would say, if you're working on a on a three month cycle, I would say it's probably not until your third cycle that you start to feel like, Hey, I think we're getting hang of this. This is starting to really feel like it's habit, rather than, you know, it's being forced.

Emma Pownall 31:49
Yeah, and that's really interesting, because I suppose, you know, we're leaning a lot on change management theory there, around celebrating the wins and building the urgency. And you know, my experience people who are in their day to day roles, they might not feel that urgency needed, because it might be coming from the outside world, or the ambition that the leadership team has. How do you keep that momentum when people aren't potentially involved in OKRs, but are needing to understand why it's it's becoming a part of the fabric of the business.

Speaker 1 32:30
Yeah, so you make a good point, because going back to the principle of spotlighting it can mean that there are parts of the business, and therefore people within the business that are not necessarily in this in scope for OKRs at that particular given time. Now, the spotlight might move, and it could be in the next quarter. They might be, but for those that are not, it is really important to be transparent, and this is where it's doing your check in. So you should be keeping, you know, your OK, our data around what, where you're up to, your progress and your confidence in terms of hitting them, should be, you know, pretty, pretty current. I would say, every two weeks there should be, you know, the latest information available. And so it's down to leadership to take the judgement as to how transparent they are with the rest of the organisation on that, I would say at the very least, it should be done quarterly, at the very least. But there's even that, even some clients have even opted to send out, like a monthly bulletin, you know, to the broad bit of a perhaps a broadcast and then a dialogue every quarter, but a broadcast on this is how we're doing. This is where we're at, and this is what it means.

Emma Pownall 33:45
Yeah, keep everyone up to date and what's going on, because I suppose we, you know, we are talking change, and we're talking longer term, because we're talking strategy. Those things can take a while to be seen within the business without that cadence of communication and sharing those small wins along the way?

Speaker 1 34:07
Yeah, absolutely. And if this is done well, I mean, I'm going to kind of tie it back to sort of a bit of psychology here. You know, what's really important, especially in this day and age with so much uncertainty around is that people feel secure in their role, in their job, in their employment. Now, I know that's not always possible, and there are some times and some instances where certainty can be a bit low, but if you as a leadership team are able to demonstrate and be transparent about the steps that you're taking to build, and you know, to build the future that the organisation wants, and there is a place in that for everyone, and so on and so forth. Then that can actually help. You can leverage benefit from Oke. Hours there for people who aren't even working on them. Yeah, you see what I mean, yeah. So, because you're becoming a lot more structured and transparent in how you're working towards those really big, really important goals for the business, you can kind of leverage that and for to so that it has a, you know, a benefit and influence beyond those that are just working directly on them.

Emma Pownall 35:26
Yeah, yeah. And I suppose that leads me on to my next question, which is, How does culture affect the success of an OKR programme? Because it feels like it's pretty interesting. Oh, it

Speaker 1 35:39
is, yeah. Again, the you know, like I said, OKRs are much more than just writing your goals in a different way. It's interesting, because when we work with clients, and OKRs often reveals that sometimes culture needs tweaking here and there the principles and practices, OK? So it's no it's no coincidence that when we work with clients to help them adopt OKRs, they often share our clients very similar values, okay? Sometimes they're explicit in the organisation. Sometimes they're just there, okay, but it's that most of them value collaboration. Most of them value innovation and empowerment and transparency and accountability, and those, those those types of, those types of values. Now they might value them, but they might not necessarily be absolutely, really strong and healthy. Okay, so, for instance, transparency, for transparency to work, you have to have a healthy amount of psychological safety in the organisation, because if you want people to be open and honest, particularly when, for instance, if you're having a check in, a fortnightly check in, and your key result is maybe not looking quite as hopeful As it was a couple of weeks ago. You've got to feel safe enough to be able to be transparent and say, I think there's a risk we might miss this without fear of any comeback on you. And that's what psychological safety is about. And if psychological safety isn't healthy enough, then what you'll end up with is people in that situation going, Yeah, it's fine, it's fine. And then at the 11th Hour, you find that it's not and it's too late to do anything about it. So and psychological safety isn't about making things soft and fluffy. It's actually about having having a space in which it's safe enough to have the hard and difficult conversations. That's what it is. So from a cultural point of view, yeah, psychological safety is super important, super important. And then, like I said, the other, the other, the other ones like around collaboration and innovation. And you know, another part I'm going to tie this one back to psychological safety as well, is around the particularly if you're using OKRs to kind of test out new ideas. You know, we have a we have a theory that if we do x, we're going to get y, and you know what? We're going to try that for the next three months. And if it doesn't work, then okay, at least we've learned, and we can maybe try something a little bit different Next, in the next quarter, in some organisations, that could be really, really difficult to do for people, because they might, you know, any, any mention of Failure? Good God, I'll get sacked. This is not about just, you know, failure per se. This is about accepting what I would call intelligent failure, which is where you in fact, I actually, I prefer to use the term experimentation, because that's a little less Yeah, yeah. It's a little less emotionally loaded than the term. So let's, let's, let's experiment with this. Let's test it out, yeah, and see. And if we fall short, yeah, if we fall short, then at least we've learned, okay, and that's the that, that's that in an organisation that has a low level of psychological safety, you're never going to get out. You're going to get people who set key results and commit to key results that are entirely achievable, that are entirely doable. They're going to sandbag them because they just don't feel confident enough to stretch or innovate.

Emma Pownall 39:39
Yeah, and then they stay in a safe environment, which will lead to strategic ambition not being achieved because everyone's staying safe and yeah and not moving forward. So talking there about failure and and the inevitability that trying something new, there's going to be failure at some point. And all of this, not everyone's going to get it right first time. What are the common pitfalls that you see people fall into with this?

Speaker 1 40:10
Okay, so I'm going to talk in terms of leadership teams again here. I've yet to meet a leadership team that doesn't have huge ambition. Okay, that's why they're a leadership team. And so the way that that shows up when you starting OKRs is they want to apply OKRs to everything. So you have to kind of get them to throttle back a little bit from that. And this is where the spotlighting principle become, comes back, comes into play. It's why it's so important. So one of the common pitfalls is that they set themselves too many, right? Okay, that they set themselves too many. In fact, we've actually been calling to organisations in the past that have, you know, read the book and gone. Oh, how hard can it be. They've tried it for themselves, and they've ended up just absolutely drowning under the weight of their OKRs

Emma Pownall 41:02
because, and what does too many look like?

Speaker 1 41:05
Well, I was talking, it's interesting, actually, because that I mentioned before that I was talking to a former client yesterday who wants us to come back in kind of three years later. And that one of the things they were saying to me was, I think, I think we've we kind of, we see real value in them in the three month level, that's where we've got it. But I think I'm not too sure that we've gotten the focus just right, because we've got a lot focused around our operational plan. And so we're probably sort of 8% operational, 20% you know, on the trunk, on the transformational. And I said, Right, okay, so just out of interest, how many have you got? They said, Oh, we've got about 43 I think you've probably got a few too many, and that's for an organisation that's got 300 people

Emma Pownall 41:51
in it. Okay, what does a good number look like? What's a good number

Speaker 1 41:57
in terms of quarterly OKRs, if you're really focusing them purely on transformational activity, I would say three or four. Okay, yeah, three or four. I know it's a big difference to 43 you know, we've got, we've got a corporate client that has 12 month Okay, hours, and they have had nine this year, and they're going down to six for 2026 right now. All right, I said they, they use their 12 months as most organisations would use three months. That's because of the size that they are. And yet they're not. They, their drum beat is a lot slower than, than, than, perhaps, you know, a 300 person organisation. But the point is that they have decided, they've learned, and they have actually decided to contract down, because even nine for an organisation that has 20,000 people, even nine was too many, right?

Emma Pownall 42:56
Wow, yeah. And so that's a common pitfall any others that we need to look out for?

Speaker 1 43:03
Yeah, I would say being to not, not sort of getting the the outcome focus right from the outset. So you end up still with lots of tick lists, actions, so on and so forth, which just, and that just doesn't deliver the value. You know, I think that's one of the very, very easy pitfalls to make that there isn't that sort of outcome discipline around it. The other thing is, and this is kind of sort of touches upon change management, but from the point of view of setting yourself up for success depending on the size and shape of the organisation is often worth doing a pilot start off with. You know, the organisation which I mentioned, that has gone from nine down to six. We did a pilot on one of their programmes, which allowed us to test out the design that we created for them around, you know, their review and reporting and resetting and so on and so forth. And that was what we see with pilots, is that it, it actually creates a bit of a buzz. So from a from a change point of view, you can kind of leverage that energy where you can kind of, Oh, we've proved the concept. And this, you know, you use it to communicate the successes, to demonstrate that it's working. And all of a sudden you see the energy from the rest of the organisation being changed, from, oh God, not another, you know, new approach to, when are we getting this, yeah, you know, and can we be, yeah? We feel left out. So it's a bit of, you know, you kind of tap it into a bit of FOMO that, yeah, one of, I remember another client that we worked with who it was a whole function. It was their business. It was their commercial sales function that decided to pilot them. And kind of, what happened at leadership level was that the the. The head of the commercial division, within six months, was running rings around his his his his peers on, you know, in the leadership team, because he was so on the ball, what was going on with it, with the key priorities in his area. And because he knew, not just on the progress, but also knew the confidence ratings around them, and so was able to sort of really talk about forward planning with confidence, you know, with a degree of certainty, and that then really kind of showed the rest of the team up. And that was interesting, actually, because initially that client wanted to do a full implementation, but we worked with the leadership team, and a number of them were going, I've got my spreadsheets. I don't need that. I don't need this. I don't need that. Six months complete sitting around

Emma Pownall 45:44
really. And so did the wrestle leadership then want in on they did programme and

Speaker 1 45:50
but I know at least one of them that decided to leave. Okay, and this is in this is interesting, because some people do not want to get on board with the level of accountability and transparency that comes with this interesting. It's not it's it doesn't, you know? I'm not going to say that it happens every time that an organisation adopts OKRs, but I have known it happen that some particularly seniorly, some senior leaders just go, this isn't for me. I'm out,

Emma Pownall 46:17
yeah, interesting, and I suppose as well, there might be a sort of cultural shift for people around accountability as well, because you form in groups of people to get involved in the strategic focus that maybe in the past, has been owned and run by a leader and and that control sits with them. You're moving into more of a sort of squad environment, where people are a bit more involved and accountable at all different levels within the business,

Speaker 1 46:48
absolutely, and that's one of the beauties, I think, of OKRs, is that it just, I think there's two, there's two perspectives to look At this really. You know, leadership can empower others, right? And the benefit to leadership is it actually creates them, it actually gives them some bandwidth, for them to go off and perhaps do more work at a strategic level. But in turn, and it also, as well, means that they don't have to have all the answers. You know, the answers often lie within the organisation, because those are the people who are closest to the challenges or the opportunities, and probably have a much better idea about how to either seize them or overcome them. So therefore, you know, why not bring those people in? And so that said. So that's, that's the other perspective on empowerment, is that you're, you're kind of unlocking that, that insight and potentially energy that's there in the organisation to to bring this all forward and make it and make it happen within the framework of OKRs. And yet, you know, there is that accountability you mentioned you mentioned teams. It's not about the whole team having accountability, because, all right, we're getting into nuts and bolts of it here, but I think it's worth mentioning. You know, if you've got an OKR that's been worked on by a team, there's still individual accountability in that, because you'll have one person in that team who is an objective leader, and then you'll have the rest of the team members who are owners of the key results. So there is still an individual accountability, even though they are a tight knit team or squad, like you said, which are focusing on that, on moving that forward. And they often comprise of people from different functions,

Emma Pownall 48:38
interesting So, different perspectives, yeah, people who don't normally work together, 100% 100%

Speaker 1 48:45
because a priority for the next three months, for instance, might not necessarily neatly fit into one single function. In fact, they, I would say, 90% of the time they don't, and they need collaboration. A classic example is a product. You know, your product requires development, it requires research, it requires testing, it requires marketing, it requires sales, it will need some input from finance and so on and so forth. These are multi disciplinary teams that, at various points through the life cycle, different areas need to make contributions. So you need different people on the team, okay? And so, yeah, you know, this is why, when we see clients, I mentioned that we've had, we've gone in to kind of undo OKRs. When clients have tried to do them for themselves, they've often gone straight to, you know, this is the organisational priority. Therefore, what can eat for each function do, okay? And you have the head of each function who wants to, you know, take ownership and be seen to be taking ownership, step up and say, Well, I think my area can do this, this and this, because that's what instinctively feels like the right thing to do. I don't blame them for it. Don't blame them for it. But the consequences are. Load of siloed activity, yeah, which then creates waste, it creates disconnection, and you don't actually know whether you're going to achieve what you need to achieve until the end of the three months. And all everything rolls up from the silos. And you think, has it connected? You know, you don't know if it's connected until right at the end, and that's a bit late.

Emma Pownall 50:21
Yeah, a lot of wasted time and effort and energy along the way. So big portion of our audience are either MDS or CFOs in organisations. How can OKRs help them with either financial outcomes that they're looking to achieve or business outcomes that they're looking to drive.

Speaker 1 50:42
So I'm going to come back to the principle of key results here. And you know, key results can be, can focus on financial and non financial as well. So they're not, they're not wedded to one or the other. But yes, they can provide that spotlight for that measure which is going to make the biggest difference. And, you know, I mentioned KPIs earlier, it's possible that you might actually have say, for instance, some financial measures I don't know about. You know, cost per acquisition of customer, perhaps, is something in marketing that you might want to focus on. And you can, you would undoubtedly have that as a KPI on your on your marketing dashboard, maybe even your financial finance dashboard. But it doesn't mean to say you can't then use that as a key result if it's something you want to focus on. Okay, so the benefit to your FD, the benefit to the MD is, instead of just having a single dashboard of all your KPIs and going right, well, we need to focus on this. This is this you can actually then pull out, you know, a few of those, use those as key results, in which case you will have a team of people focused on whatever is going to happen to improve that cost to acquisition. And so you're actually, you know, the focus that that brings to drive an outcome and an impact on that key result, on that particular measure, is the benefit that the OKRs brings.

Emma Pownall 52:15
Yeah, so you're not reinventing the wheel every time. If there's key measures that are really important to that absolutely strategic focus, absolutely yeah, yeah, right. Let's get a little bit more practical. What's a small experiment or pilot, potentially, that a business leader could do to sort of dip their toes into this OKR world? Yeah?

Speaker 1 52:39
So pilot, you've got a couple of choices. You can either pilot in in a function, so kind of vertically, if you will, or you can pilot horizontally. We've done some pilots just purely at leadership level. There are pros and cons to either with sort of a pilot in a function you can find yourself. I mean, you don't get the cross functional benefit, obviously, by doing that at that stage, yeah. So you're kind of just keeping yourself you by virtue of that. You kind of limiting the scope as to the, I suppose, the level of ambition that you can have, because you can't really pull in other areas at that at that stage. So it's just, it's like the ambitions purely within that function, okay, which is still entirely, you know, a decent way to sort of prove the concept, decent way to sort of prove that the habits and the routines work and the reporting work, and there's value in it when you pilot sort of horizontally across a leadership team again, you know, that helps the whole of a team get to grips with and get their head around. You know what it means for them, what it means for, you know, perhaps their existing routines, and how it can fit in with that. Because, like I said, we don't want to be adding, we in. We either want to be integrating or maybe in some, some instances, even replacing. It's about one client once said to me, it's about making sure that okay, else happened within the flow, all right, not above the flow, which I thought was a nice, nice way of putting it. The the disadvantage of doing horizontal pilot is, and this, but I say disadvantage, but you can actually leverage this, as I mentioned earlier, is that you end up with the leadership team talking in a language which might not necessarily be fully understood by the rest of the business. So there is, there is a, there is a, yeah, there is a disadvantage in that. But if you you can leverage that in such a way so as to actually kind of build an energy, you know, around, well, okay, when are we going to get it? You'll find that individual members of the leadership team will be kind of. Almost itching to want to start defining OKRs with their people, yeah, yeah, yeah. We want to start talking the same language with everyone. I've never in the How long is it now? Eight to nine years I've been working with OKRs. I've never worked on a pilot with a client that they've then turned around and said, We're not going to do this right. Never, never. It's always right. We just, and I think it's maybe down to the fact that the clients perhaps just want to build their own confidence with it first of all, yeah, and maybe it's maybe sometimes it's the leadership team that are not fully bought into it and want to see it for themselves, fine, no problem. But we've never, ever done a pilot, and it's never and they've never followed through and taken it further into the organisation. So I would say, yeah, the pilot is super important. And the the other thing I'd say that is really important is, and this is, this is definitely when you get to the larger in bringing in the rest of the organisation to it is, you have to define how you're going to use them. Because if you just write them, and even if you get a piece of software to put them into, that's not enough. That's not enough. People need to know what the routines are around them, how they fit in with the whole drum beat of the organisation where the reporting is going to be reviewed, how it's going to drive things, how it all connects. You got to paint the picture. And that comes back to that term governance. But yeah, it's, we call it designing the framework,

Emma Pownall 56:44
yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose it's that again, coming back to that difference between writing something and sticking it a drawer, coming back to it 12 months later, and it actually becoming a living, breathing part of the business and what the business is focused on. And and again, that spotlight piece that we've talked about,

Unknown Speaker 57:04
yeah, yeah. Very much. So, very much. So,

Emma Pownall 57:06
so I'm curious where do you see OKRs going over the next few years?

Speaker 1 57:11
Okay, so a got to mention AI here, it's interesting how it's starting to kind of feature in the OKR work that we're doing and that some clients are doing for themselves, and so on and so forth. It's, it's even showing up in some of the OKR software. Now, it's possible, if you, if you so wished, to, for you to upload your strategy into GPT, for instance, and for it to suggest OKRs to you, I would really caution against that, because one of the really, really big benefits of OKRs is the socialisation of the strategy of the priorities, and therefore how people can contribute and connect and so on and so forth. Yeah, and if GPT is firing out some OKRs at you, then you're, you just going to be doing it's just then handing them out to people, and they don't can have any ownership. They're not going to feel like they've, they want to do it because they've, they've had a hand in creating it and influencing it and so on and so forth. Where I think AI can help is in helping to refine what you've created for yourselves. Yeah, so if you come up with an objective and some key results, then, yeah, by all means, run it through GPT to see if they can, you know, perhaps, you know, make the objective more compelling, more engaging. You know, because an objective is always written, is never written for the people who write it. It's never written for their benefit. It's written for the benefit of those that are going to read it, so the wider organisation. So that's why, when we get our clients to write an objective, we challenge them to say not just what they're going to do, but why they're going to do it. And you know, we're not all the greatest wordsmiths in the world. Some of us are a little bit more creative than others, and those of us that are not can rely on tools like GPT to help us out in that respect. And I think absolutely that's that's and if you're trying to, if you, if you've got an objective and you're trying to think what could be good measures for it. That's absolutely a question that you could you could put to to GPT for ideas, but to hand everything over to AI and say, produce my OKRs for it. I think is, is you miss out on a huge amount of benefit. Effectively, you're just relying on the fact that your goals are going to be written about OKRs, and just assume that that's going to change everything. It's not yeah at all.

Emma Pownall 59:45
It comes back to that human connection, doesn't it? And actually, the practice of sitting down questioning, what am I doing? Why am I doing it, and how am I going to measure it? Is part of the process of understanding. In that direction of travel, how you're going to get there, what you're going to intentionally do to spotlight these things and and like you say, chat GPT, spitting out a perfectly formed, perfectly worded OKR isn't necessarily going to get the minds of the people that are working on them to really know where they're heading and what they're doing.

Speaker 1 1:00:23
That's right. So for as long as organisations have people within them whom they require to use their brain power to solve challenges and to help seize opportunities, then and come up with a way, new ways of doing things and new innovations. As long as that's required, they still, you know, there's still a place for OKRs, yeah, in the way that you know we've been talking if we get to a point where, you know, everybody's acting like they're a robot, they don't have to think for themselves, then, you know, doesn't sound like a great future, but yeah, I suppose you know that's that's when OKRs become redundant. But for as long as we are required to solve the problems and innovate, we need something like OKRs in place.

Emma Pownall 1:01:17
Okay, final question, what's one small step that someone could take this week to get to the sort of progress you've been talking about, oh,

Speaker 1 1:01:28
I would say even before you start thinking, right? OKRs, you know, should we do a pilot? Should we go big bang? Outcome? It's the outcome focus. You know, if someone listening or watching wants to kind of play with some of what we've talked about, the next time you sat down having a conversation with someone about expectations and what you want, what you're looking for, just make sure that you're not talking in terms of actions, right, challenge yourself and them to think about right? Okay, if we do this action, how we're going to know that it was worth doing in the first place, right? What's the evidence that we will see that it's worked? Okay? And that's just, that's just a small step towards sort of starting to build that outcome focused mindset. And I think that's, probably the the easiest first step that you can take. Yeah, okay, even before you start thinking about how to write things in OKRs,

Emma Pownall 1:02:27
interesting, and that's such an easy thing to challenge on a conversational basis, or in that PowerPoint of your strategy, is it, is it outcome focused? Is it, is it measurable? That's right.

Speaker 1 1:02:43
And you can be forgiven for thinking that those leadership level might be a little bit more inclined to just have a natural outcome focus. Nope, not. In my experience, it doesn't matter what level you're working at in the in an organisation, I've found that that outcome focus is hugely variable, right? Yeah, hugely Interesting.

Emma Pownall 1:03:07
Well, thank you so much for the conversation, Roger. How can people get in touch if they want to find out more?

Speaker 1 1:03:13
Well, they can always find us at their be giants.com, that's all one word. Obviously, I'm on LinkedIn under Roger Longden and, yeah, you know, we're always well up for conversation around OKRs and and how we can help clients become more outcome focused and build more connection to their strategy. So, yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much. No, you're welcome. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai