The Agile Strategies Podcast: Intelligence, Strategy, and OKRs

When it comes to succeeding with OKRs, I've noticed a big difference between leadership teams that are truly teams, and those that are a collection of smart individuals. One B-corp I worked with did an outstanding job of working through conflict and continuously evolving their OKRs to focus on the most important things. I was impressed with their teamwork, and asked them, how did you get so good at this? And they told me, we've got a great coach!. I said, I'd like to meet that guy! Now you can meet him too, Jeff McColloch.

Cansel Sörgens, an OKR consultant from Germany with roots in Istanbul, shares insights on breaking down organizational silos using Objectives and Key Results. She emphasizes the shift from a top-down approach to a customer-focused alignment, advocating for her innovative 'Solar System' model that fosters collaboration. Cansel discusses the traits of high-impact teams, highlighting the significance of trust, adaptability, and psychological safety. Her unique perspective encourages organizations to embrace flexibility and structured learning for enhanced innovation.

Organizations today build value through things that, not long ago, were not really measurable, and therefore not recognized as important. But the world has changed, with intangible capital comprising 90% of the S&P 500. Mary Adams is co-author of the book Intangible Capital and co-founder of Insights7. We talk about the different forms of intangible capital, like relationship capital, natural capital, structural and strategic capital. How can they be measured, and how can we translate them into KPIs and OKRs to help us improve them?

Jim Kalbach is the Chief Evangelist for Mural, the collaborative whiteboarding tool. What exactly does a Chief Evangelist do? Listen and find out! He also wrote a book called The Jobs to be Done Playbook. We talk about how JTBD inspires innovative thinking by focusing us on customer problems and jobs independent of technology. Toward the end we get into some very fun speculations about how innovation projects can use JTBD language to write OKRs that support experimental learning.

Joe Ryan is the Executive Director of the Crux Alliance. Crux supports six organizations that focus, respectively, on the six major sources of carbon emissions. Their mission is to impact policy in countries across the planet. Joe wrote a great article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about how robust stakeholder networks accelerate climate progress. We talk about what the qualities of these networks are, and how Crux has adapted OKRs to their specific needs over the past five years. Finally, we touch on the role of strategic foresight and, potentially, artificial intelligence to provide a deeper perspective on where climate work is needed.

Peter Compo has a delightfully provocative perspective on strategy, having worked in that area at Dupont for 25 years. What do we even mean by strategy? For many, it's a stack of vision, values, goals, and big projects. Peter would call that a "strategy framework." And by his definition, many strategy frameworks actually lack.... a strategy. Peter defines strategy as a central rule or policy designed to address tradeoffs and guide decision making and other behavior. As a well-thought-out set of guardrails, this kind of strategy actually creates a clear space within it for creativity and innovation. Sound ironic? Check it out.

In this conversation with OKR pioneer and best-selling author Christina Wodtke, we suspect that OKRs are in fact being overused. It's best to have very few OKRs that focus the whole organization on giant efforts. Instead, what's happening in many cases is that there's a feeling that every function, and sometimes every person, needs OKRs in order to align with strategy and feel like "one of the cool kids." To do that is to miss the arguably greater importance of "business as usual," what Christina calls "heartbeat work." Also, we talk about the inseparability of team climate for OKR success, and the importance of effective feedback and performance coaching. As Christina says, "Most problems are people problems."

In this conversation with Agile industry veteran Evan Campbell, we talk about Strategic Agility, and particularly, the need for resource fluidity. This plays out in any organization's portfolio management process. Evan sees too much emphasis on quantitative models for prioritization of innovative experiments that often deny resources to innovative projects because the risks and benefits are so hard to quantify in advance. Rather than starve innovative projects, we need to reserve capacity for innovation knowing that not all efforts will succeed. We talk about how hard it can be to apply OKRs to long term capital intensive projects, and explore why these projects get bloated with too many features before they even get off the ground. OKRs can speed up the process and eliminate blind alleys by mitigating risks and exploring constraints early in the process.

Paul Niven has published six books about Balanced Scorecard, strategy, and OKRs, including the recent OKRs for Dummies. In this episode we talk about how the practice of OKRs is evolving, based on our mutual years of consulting experience working with both Balanced Scorecard and OKRs. OKRs have been enormously popular in recent years, but viewing them as a standalone solution doesn't bring the powerful impact we know they can have. Paul offers a contrarian perspective on the so-called "common sense" about OKRs. He challenges assumptions about linking OKRs to compensation, budgeting, OKR cadence, the use of AI, and why OKRs should matter at all to senior executives.

The view we hold of the future has a direct impact on the plans we make and the action we take in the present, so it's very relevant to strategic planning and goal setting. Frank Spencer is a futurist - but with a perspective that goes far beyond technology, openly questioning the dominant narrative of technological determinism. Frank is the founder of TFSX, offering training, consulting and certification in strategic foresight. In this conversation we talk about what Frank calls the "sheer preposterousness of the future," i.e. why we can't just extend current trends into an imagined future. Frank talks about the Pull of the Future, abductive thinking, and why we need a better acronym than VUCA to understand how to act in the face of complexity. Ultimately, the best way to create a better future is through the evolution of our shared consciousness. And what about the role of artificial intelligence? We talk about the Habsburg AI factor that undermines the trustworthiness of AI today and compromises its usefulness for out of the box creative thinking.