Workshops: Wholehearted:OKR – Integrating strategy, development, and delivery

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

OKR joins Lean and Agile as one of those things for which 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 open framework for participatory change. Happily, their respective aims coincide in the importance they attach to outcomes and to the integration of strategy, development, and delivery.

This workshop addresses 5 key challenges with OKR:

1. How to define objectives that are relevant, meaningful, compelling, and generative
2. How to measure key results with insightful metrics that will guide and stretch appropriately
3. How to deliver key results – finding the innovations
4. How to manage at multiple levels of detail
5. How to support and sustain the process

Of all our workshops, Wholehearted:OKR delivers the most complete realisation of Agendashift’s wholehearted mission. It demonstrates how to 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)

Run this workshop within your organisation and you will be creating these opportunities as you learn. Or join a public workshop and share with other practitioners – the choice is yours!

Workshop overview

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

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)

   • Layers: Customer, Organisation
   • Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO)
   • 15-minute FOTO (Lite)
   
   

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)

   • Layers: Product, Platform, Team(s)
   • Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO)
   • 15-minute FOTO (Classic)
   
   

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

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

   • Knowledge discovery process
   • Double loop learning
   • Sustaining cycles
   • Right-to-Left Strategy Deployment
   
   

6. Identify your measures of success

   • ODIM: Objective, Decision, Insight, Metric
   • X-Matrix / TASTE: True North, Aspirations, Strategies, Tactics, Evidence
   • The Meaning, Measure, Method pattern
   • Leading & lagging indicators; Balancing metrics; Scoreboard
   • The organisational view: Who identifies with what metric?
   
   

7. Options and experiments

   • Strategic prioritisation
   • Generating and selecting ideas
   • Experiment A3
   
   

8. Organising for (mutual) accountability

   • Cadence of accountability
   • Organising in circles
   • [Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR)]
   
   

See also

• OKR (en.wikipedia.org)
• There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR (blog.agendashift.com)
• Implementing your Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) – the short training workshop corresponding to session 8 above
• The generative patterns Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) and Right-to-Left Strategy Deployment
• Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audioboook 2020)

Credits

This workshop was created in collaboration with Karl Scotland, Steven Mackenzie, Kjell Tore Guttormsen, and Mike Haber.

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Copyright © 2015-2024 Agendashift Ltd (formerly Positive Incline Ltd). All rights reserved. The page Wholehearted:OKR – Integrating strategy, development, and delivery by Mike Burrows of Agendashift Ltd is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

Source text maintained at github.com/asplake/agendashift-open/tree/master/workshops/wholehearted-okr.md (github.com)

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Related

• The workshops:
  • Transformation strategy: Core, Applied, and Deep Dive
  • Outside-in strategy: Outside-in strategy review (OI-SR), Impact!, and Wholehearted:OKR
  • Short training: Coaching with Outcomes (CwO), Strategic Mapping with Outcomes, Probe! and Implementing your OI-SDR
• About Agendashift
  • Our mission: Wholehearted
  • Agendashift Assessments and Free 14-day trial
  • Events calendar – training and other events
  • Subscribe
• Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy (academy.agendashift.com):
  • Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  • Inside-out Strategy: On the same page, with purpose
  • Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale
  • Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
  • Leading with Outcomes: Authorised Facilitator and Trainer Programmes
• The books:
  • Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021)
  • Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)
• Agendashift as framework
  • Generative patterns
  • Core activities
  • Models, sources, and inspirations
• Resources
• The Agendashift blog (blog.agendashift.com)
  • Monthly roundups
  • Classic posts
• Agendashift communities on Slack and LinkedIn