Spark People’s Interest

Writing a quality OKR starts with the Objective, a short phrase capturing the essence of the goal.  Good objectives serve as headlines that grab your attention and make you want to learn more.  Their intent should be clear and action oriented.

When reading objectives I look for them to ignite two things: passion and curiosity.  If they do both, congratulations — you’ve reached the pinnacle!  If they don’t, that’s ok, just recognize they can be more impactful.  You may have noticed the words ‘ignite’ and ‘spark’ used already in this post.  Building on that motif, let’s introduce a quality range you can use to evaluate your objectives and set a path for how you might improve

Flicker

All objectives need to declare intent.  Just starting your objective with a verb should help get you there.  Let’s revisit a couple of examples from the previous article before introducing any new ones.

  1. Increase Revenue
  2. Decrease Expenses
  3. Retain Customers

All three objectives start with a verb: increase, decrease, and retain.  They declare an intent to affect something very specific: revenue, expenses, and customers.  They are clear, but not very interesting or galvanizing.  They read more like the simple rules for staying in business rather than a unique challenge to attain.

Nonetheless, it’s a starting point  — a flicker.  So, where do you go from here?  Here are a couple questions to provoke discussion and start refining the objective:

  1. What’s the magnitude of the change you want to make?  For example, increase revenue by how much?  The answer can lead to very different conversations.
  2. If you accomplish this goal, what has this made possible for you?  What can you now do that you could not do before?  What do things look like with this goal achieved?  For example, what would decreasing expenses enable for you?

Flame

Imagine we were able to use the questions above to expand the discussion around these objectives.  By the end of the discussion we ended up with the following:

  1. Sell any product, anywhere (formerly Increase Revenue)
  2. Operate with efficiency (formerly Decrease Expenses)
  3. Serve Customers Across Channels (formerly Retain Customers)

Notice that each one has become a little more focused and specific, without describing the solution.  Let’s examine them more closely with regards to curiosity and passion.

Sell Any Product, Anywhere

The increased specificity allows people to connect to the topic better.  We can imagine salespeople and customers as key focal points in our discussion.  People can come up with better questions to learn about the current state and what challenges may exist.  They may ask things like:

  • What do you mean by “anywhere”?  Where is it difficult to sell?  Where are most sales made?
  • Where are there missed opportunities?  What are people needing that we’re unable to offer them?  What products make sense to sell together?

Operate with Efficiency

“Operate with efficiency” is an improvement over “Decrease Expenses” because we can now hone in on operational activities and where they are inefficient.  The objective is still a bit broad and needs to be refined.  In order to refine consider questions like:

  • What operational activities are the most painful?  How do they impact us?  How do they impact our customers?
  • What activities are the most crucial to the success of our organization?  Which of those seem unnecessarily hard?

The answer to these questions may lead you to learn that support for a specific type of transaction or area of the business may need more help than others.  Depending on the duration of the objective: quarterly, annual, or strategic, we may decide to further narrow the objective (shorter duration → more specificity).

Serve Customers across Channels

Similar to the first one, we can imagine customer service representatives and customers as the focus of our curiosity.  Now we might ask things like:

  • How do customers access our services?  What channels are underserved?  Where do they most often need help?
  • When customers switch channels, say from mobile app to phone, what do they experience?  How are the customers supported differently via each channel?  How well do customer service representatives work with one another to enhance the customer experience?

Genuine curiosity and interest from the people you need to be successful, is a key step towards achieving the goal.  If you’re having the types of discussions above, you’ve engaged people’s minds.  Congratulations!

Blaze

With people’s minds engaged, we can improve the objectives further by engaging their hearts.  Passion can provide a more sustainable energy to generate ideas and work towards the objectives.  What might these objectives look like?

Here are a few examples that may be familiar to you:

  • Win the world cup
  • Put a ding in the universe
  • Land a man on the moon by the end of the decade

Objectives that ignite passion are often bolder statements that represent something people can rally around.  They are challenging, but achievable with a strong, mobilized effort.  Creating these kinds of objectives doesn’t come naturally to everyone, so how might you start to develop that skill?

Collaboration is key when trying to take your objectives to the next level.  With collaboration, you gather a group of people and get creative.

  • If you had a magic wand and you could make anything happen, what would it be?
  • Use improv techniques to build on each other’s ideas spontaneously.   One person contributes an idea and someone else builds on it, and so on.
  • Perhaps role play using the perspectives of the people that would benefit from meeting the goal or what life might look like once the goal is achieved.

These are just a few ideas to get you started.  Capture key ideas from your collaboration.  Distill them into a new or revised objective.  See how it lands with the group.  You might be surprised with what you’re able to create.

Summary

The more engaging your objectives, the more creative energy and effort you’ll get placed towards achieving them.  Objectives don’t have to be perfect, but the more curiosity and passion they elicit, the better.  My advice is to get started and evaluate what you have.  See if you can do better.  Chances are if you’re not wowed by them, others won’t be either.  Spend the time yourselves to be curious and creative while defining your objectives to make them more appealing.

I’ve given you some examples of questions and techniques you might try.  I’m sure there are many others.  Pick something, evaluate how well it works for you, and iterate.  Blaze your own trail.

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