Don't be Stupid with your OKRs

Introduction

Alright. A big hello to all our beloved people and culture practitioners. Delighted as always to have you join us today. I'm your host, GC, people science leader at mesh dot ai, and someone who considers himself extremely blessed to have worked with and learned from hundreds of people and culture as well as strategy executional practitioners over the last fifteen years.

Now when it comes to solving for business performance through their people, modern organizations find themselves almost rebuilding the plane as they're flying it. With that said, the future is already here. It's just unequally distributed. And that's where the performance puzzle comes in, a show where expert practitioners from around the world volunteer their experiences and their playbooks to help you navigate the intersection of people strategy and business success.

Now ever since we began the performance puzzle last year, a lot of you from the community at Mesh Studio have been telling us, hey. Why don't you talk about the very topic that sits smack in the middle of business performance and people performance, which is goals and OKRs?

So today, we are indeed here to help save both business as well as talent teams from being stupid with their OKR programs.

And the big answer to why we waited so long to talk about OKRs is because we were waiting to get the best expert on the planet for it.

As always, we will funnel common questions, challenges, and pitfalls that we've learned from all of you, our community of subscribers at Mesh Studio, to our deep subject matter expert on today's topic. Without much ado, let me indulge in a slightly longish introduction to our expert speaker today. The gentleman we have joining us today has truly seen it all when it comes to scaling organization wide goals successfully, Someone who's always had a ringside view on the application, evolution, allegedly the proliferation of various goal setting frameworks.

Right from his days in the nineteen eighties of collaborating with Messers Kaplan and Norton during the time balanced scorecards were the new OKRs.

Folks, please welcome me in plea please join me in welcoming Brett Knowles. With over thirty years of experience in performance measurement and management, he helps organizations achieve significant and sustainable results by executing on their strategic intent. As the founder and leader of PM2, a consulting firm specialized in OKRs and other performance solutions, he has successfully assisted over three thousand clients across all sectors and regions, including some of the world's most renowned companies and public institutions.

Brett, a very warm welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking time out to give back to the community.

Honored to be here. In fact, as you rattle off my resume, it sounds pretty impressive. I would like to meet that guy.

You know, as folks who are listening in, I think you would have figured out by now, Brett's bringing humility back in fashion. As a quick icebreaker before I get into some audience, we have joining us, Brett.

What what are the odds of any one of those three thousand clients of yours giving you a quick call right now to bounce off some ideas on their gold programs in the next sixty minutes?

That's why my phone's on mute because there's a high probability of it happening. And we're dealing with clients literally across the globe, so not that it matters, but my my first client call was about three thirty in the morning today. So it's it's, a lot of things are happening in this space right now.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Folks in the audience, as always, we're here for you. Now is a good time for you to check out two cool features on the nav bar on the bottom of your screen, the chat, where I'd highly encourage you to share your thoughts, opinions, and experiences completely unfiltered as you listen in to Brett and his insights.

And equally important is the question section, where you can post questions to our speaker as and when they occur to you. As the moderator, I'll try my best to weave those into the conversation. Like I was telling Brett, no pressure. And given that Brett is such an authority on the subject at hand, I'm amply aware that I'll need to do a really, really good job with my questions to help unpack all of his super deep perspectives in the next fifteen minutes or so.

What should help us cover good ground, is the agenda of our show. And no surprises for those of you who are regulars to the performance puzzle.

Chapter

Agenda of the Show

We take a three part agenda.

First up, we will start off at thirty thousand feet to understand why our OKRs the talk of the town, why our company is solving for this today. We will then get into all sorts of stupid as well as kind of demystifying and understanding what do the simple and actionable best practices and playbooks look like. Obviously, Brett's got experience from three thousand clients, so you know you're in safe hands. We will definitely spend some time talking about driving this change on the ground so that you actually succeed in scaling your gold program.

In all, we do budget about ten minutes for the q and a, but not a separate section at the end. These, like I mentioned, I will weave in through the course of the conversation.

Alright.

We're totally ready to get right into all of these questions that the community has pinged across to us.

Brett, let's get you warmed up with a thirty thousand feet, question to take part proceedings today. And I think I'm gonna choose

Chapter

What Makes OKRs Stand Out?

what makes OKR stand out from the never ending list of goal setting methodologies that we have flying around today.

Nothing. So and and the reason I say that is I I always say that rule number one of OKRs is there's no rule number one.

So way back, you you cited our experience with Kaplan and Norton. The issue we had back then so this is the late eighties, early nineties.

Remember, we didn't have any issue, any concepts of leading and lagging measures and all that kind of stuff back then. We measured everything financially. And the dilemma is the financial system doesn't capture how we create value these days. So think of this this web session.

You're offering it for free. Does that mean it has no value? Well, of course, it has value, but dollars don't see the value it adds. And so those instruments that we were using back at Harvard trying to measure the performance of organizations wouldn't work, and we were stuck because of GAAP, generally accepted accounting principles.

We did only do stuff for the financials that passed the rigorous tests, the rules of accounting.

And so even with the bell scorecard, but even more so with OKRs, we have to emphasize there are no rules. You don't have to do them any particular way. And so your your question's a trick question of saying what makes it different. It's not.

It's the sum of all of the parts. You get to choose what part of OGSM you like, what part of balanced scorecard, what part of EOS, what part of, agile management. And you can cherry pick and build your own, I don't wanna say Frankenstein monster, but your own OKR system that cobbles together the best practices that are appropriate for your organization's needs, your culture, your capabilities. So maybe what differentiates it is the fact that it is, the sum of the parts.

It's not a a specific approach that you must follow in order to achieve success. And I just wanna embellish that a bit to say, if you ever talk to someone that says you must do OKRs that way, move on to the next authority because that person is trying to, bully you with authority as opposed to help you achieve a better outcome.

So many layers to that answer, Brett. Let me let me kind of start to scratch beneath the surface a little bit. If I am charged with, you know, my CEO tells me, that I need goals in my organization.

And now I'm on this search for, hey. Which framework do I start with?

Let's let's first look at what would your advice to me be? How do I zero in on the best framework, given that there's a plethora of these now?

Well, so, your boss didn't give you enough criteria to answer that question.

All these frameworks are all based on the simple premise that we set some sort of thing I want to achieve, call it an objective, a goal, a rock.

And and and part of the humor there is each author takes the same concept and gives it a new name, changes the font, and then pretends it's a new idea. It's not. It's all based on Drucker's management by objectives back in fifty six where he says, you know, we need an objective that we managed to. Who would have thought? And then we need a way to indicate if we're moving the right direction, whether you call it a key result, a metric, a KPI.

Don't care. It's just data as it substantiates that we're achieving it. So your boss asking you choose a goal system doesn't give you enough traction to be able to choose which one you should chase down.

And in what situation would you highly recommend going in for OKRs if at all, to me if I'm the same in the same example?

Chapter

Advantages of OKRs

Well, so my model is that they're all an evolution of the same thing, and each one brings something new to the table.

I think what OKRs have added to the table is a couple of really important things.

One of which is, the idea of pace. So back when we did the balanced scorecard work as an example, we could maybe get quarterly data and maybe the departmental level. Whereas now we can get data literally down to the second, down to the individual in real time. And we've got the computing power that you could literally do it from your watch or your phone. So we now have that ability for much more depth and detail.

So if I take a look at any of the other frameworks, they don't work in that level of depth and detail. Now that doesn't mean you need it in your organization, but if that were one of the criteria that your boss came to you with, that gives you that that extra little piece of juice.

And the ability to drive from the entity down to the individual is important. Now

Chapter

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of the Parts

it's important that the whole you understand the whole is different than the sum of the parts. So if I'm gonna measure an organization, I might use a net promoter score as an example to tell me how that company is doing.

Now if I added up what every single employee did, I could not come up to that same net promoter score. So the whole is different than the sum of the parts. So at some point in time, as I cascade that strategy down from the depart from the corporate to the department, to the team, to the squad, to the individual, the criteria shifts a bit. And the way it shifts is in a couple of dimensions.

One is the time horizon gets shorter and shorter. So the CEO is looking out one to five years. By the time I get to someone at a call center, they're looking out one to five minutes. Their time horizon is shorter.

So the KPIs are shorter. The objectives are shorter. So it's the iteration.

Some people call the cascade. Some call alignment. Somehow, there's a relationship between what we do and that corporate success, but I cannot do that in a mathematical formula.

So what does that mean? As I choose a tool, I need to understand what is the cadence of my business? What is the speed at which it needs to work?

And I wanna touch on that for a second. I always think of, like, an old watch with gears in it. Some gears move once a second. Some move once an hour. Some move once a month. Your departments have different cadences.

Your IT department might have a daily stand up, but marketing might not meet except for once a fortnight.

So back to your boss's question, as we take a look at what tools are appropriate, you need to understand those time horizons, the complexity, as I cascade the strategy down and how far I wanna cascade it down. And am I, doing top down, bottom up, a bit of both? And so that might help you choose between tools,

Chapter

Your Existing Framework is the Right Framework!

but, again, I don't think there's any one tool that's the right answer. Mhmm.

My personal preference is to see in the organization what's already in use. So, for example, if the organization's already using the balanced scorecard, let's leverage off that those terminologies and words. If they're already using OGSM, let's use those or the four disciplines of execution. They're all frameworks which are similar.

We don't need to get rid of them. They all have this objective. They all have metrics. They all have initiatives.

Mhmm.

And it's very disruptive to the average employee you might wanna do that if you're trying to show some major transformation. And so going through that bigger ceremony is important.

But for most organizations, I just put it down as I'm just gradually leveling up what we already do.

Alright. I'm I'm gonna attempt to paraphrase this and then because I'm almost kind of drooling at the corners of my mouth right now to jump into four or five different aspects and moving parts I heard you say, Brett.

First up, I think my biggest takeaway is if you've got a goal setting framework that everyone understands has become universal common language, stick to it because the magic is not in the framework itself. You like OKRs because they came in possibly most recently, so they've almost taken the best parts of other frameworks, but they still kind of stick to the same core anatomy of having a qualitative inspirational objective, a measurable metric, and how you're gonna ping that metric through initiatives or a plan under that.

Yep. The the second thing that, you know, I kind of take away is the magic is in building the cadence, and I'm gonna come into the cadence side of things, you know, as we double click into some of these aspects. What I also understood is it is critical to essentially understand the quality of the key results of the objectives that you are setting down.

Changing the framework won't improve the quality. Focusing on the quality, understanding, especially in today's day and age. I think you bring out a very important point that we are spoiled by the number of metrics that a business can report on, with all the tooling that's available to us today in comparison to, let's say, when balance scorecards and MIS has first became popular.

And last but not the least, what I understood you say is be very, very careful around how you are cascading these metrics.

Sometimes they will seem like simple arithmetic and find you'll find it easier to cascade from the business to the individual. Other times, you will need to use some first principles and common sense that these are something that possibly have collective accountability or indirect impact. And I think you beautifully used the the example of this kind of a webinar not having a direct revenue metric associated with it.

So I'm gonna now get into the next phase, which is the design phase of our playbook, and start getting Just before you do that, I'm gonna cut you off for a second rudely and sort of add a a little bit of embellishment.

So for humor, I would say, you know, I've been saying to my wife for a long time that if I bought a better set of golf clubs, my game would improve.

Mhmm.

And, of course, she normally laughs because she realized it's not the golf clubs that's the problem. So it's not coming up with a better OKR system that's a problem. It's how you swing it that's the issue.

The second part I wanna touch on just for clarity for the listeners is, there's a bunch of stuff that you do that your

Chapter

Above the Radar and Below the Radar Work

boss wants to see. I'm gonna call that above the radar work. There's also a bunch of stuff that's below the radar, stuff that you need to do in order to be successful, but your boss is never gonna see. Maybe that's, you know, going to training.

Maybe that's, hiring better people. Maybe that's, you know, working with your colleagues. Stuff that's not gonna show up on anything that the executive looks at. But if you don't do it, you're not gonna be successful.

So understand that as you're building that cascade, that hierarchy, there's stuff that you do that does need to be on your so think your car. Your car collects a bazillion bits of data. We only show you three, speed, gas, and the check engine light thing. All the other stuff is back there, and the mechanic needs to understand it and deal with it, but you as a driver, keep it simple. So the idea is, as you cascade it down, there's stuff that's below the horizon, below the radar that you still need to do. It just isn't gonna be on your your boss's report.

Yep. Yeah.

Brett, I'm thank you so much for that segue because, I think I'm gonna start off with

Chapter

Cascading OKRs

one of the most common challenges that we that we've heard from our community around OKRs, which is cascading OKRs. Now you mentioned you like OKRs especially for businesses that have a fast paced cadence, which is almost ninety percent of the organizations that exist today.

But very often, in the attempt to very meticulously cascade OKRs stock down, organizations end up spending months and quarters to actually reach the ground level, by which time they've lost out on the magic piece of the OKRs, which is the fast paced cadence to reiterate those goals, and and based on, you know, all the dynamic things happening around in the market and your strategy. And I know you've done some really, really deep work in terms of helping clients understand the difference between top down cascade cascade how to become better at cascading OKRs.

Take less time. So is is the answer. So here's the thing. You should, for any scope of work, any department, any organization, if you take more than five days in total, in other words, start on Monday.

If you're not completely done by Friday, you spent too much time on it. Mhmm. Here's the point. There's no magic to this.

Every organization already has a strategy.

So I don't need to create a new strategy. I just need to take that poster off the wall and use it. Mhmm. I've never bumped into a company that said, hey, Brett.

We don't have enough data. Can you find us something else to report? In fact, it's quite the opposite. You got way too much data.

How do I filter out what I look at?

Yep.

You already have performance meetings.

You already have an organization chart. We're not inventing anything. We're taking bits and pieces that you've been thinking about for the last five years and building. So think of each of those elements as like a building block, like a Lego block.

And all we're gonna do in the five days is build that little wall, and then next week, we do a different department. We build another chunk of the wall, and, eventually, we can join those chunks of walls together. So I don't need to, and and by as you said, there's part of the problem of taking too long is a couple of things. OKRs fail for the same reason as any other system, lack of leadership commitment, lack of education, but they fail for reason unique to themselves, and that is they crumble under their own weight.

We add in so many objectives and so many key results. The cost to feed the monster is bigger than the benefits it gives back to you. So we use speed as a forcing function to keep it simple.

When we come to the day so literally, day one is strategy. Day two is understanding the what you contribute. Your department contributes to the strategy. Day three is write your OKRs.

That only gives you one day, six hours to build your key results. Well, I can't come up with two hundred and forty. I can come up with maybe twelve, and they're gonna be my best ones. So I don't have time to lobby for all the other stuff. So we use time as a forcing function to keep it simple. So if you spend too much time, naturally, it gets more and more complicated, and then the burden of feeding that is bigger than the benefit gives.

Now to double click on that for a second, imagine the leadership team is like a a jet airplane at full altitude. At thirty six thousand feet, I see a lot of scope, but no detail. Again, build that in a week. Then I drop it down to twenty thousand feet, a departmental view.

I see less scope in more detail. Again Yep. Build that in five days. Then within the department, I take it down to a squad, ten thousand feet.

Again, I see even less detail sorry. Less scope and more detail. Do it in a week. I get down to the individual.

I see infinite amount of detail, very limited scope, five days. So the idea is I don't do the whole organization in five days, but each chunk is done quickly as a forcing function to keep it simple.

Chapter

Sequential vs. Simultaneous Implementation

That makes a lot of sense, Brett. And the question that immediately pops in my head is, does each of these five day blocks, do they need to be sequential, or can and some parts of these kind of start happening simultaneously once you've held out your company wide objectives, let's say, transparently to everyone.

Sure. So the question behind your question is organizations are complicated.

Now OKRs did not create that complexity. It's merely giving you a tool to make it explicit.

And so the implication of your question is, can I just sequentially go down and logically build that out? Well, that person down in that small branch office, will you know, that complexity already exists. They're already double guessing how they link up to the corporate strategy.

Yep.

That problem existed before OKRs showed up.

Mhmm.

So it's tough, but that's how it is.

And OKRs are gonna give you a tool to grapple with it. If I start down here, they're gonna use their current best guess of what it looks like and build their structure. Eventually, when we build the ladder down to them, they might need to tweak things, but they've built that muscle where the team understands about setting objectives and key results. And all I'm doing is setting new instructions to them about how to use that muscle that they've already built.

So we very seldom I would only say in about thirty percent of the time do we actually start with the executive committee. It's usually in some test area like IT or HR or some, test department like, innovation. That's where we started Google and their x labs. Yeah.

So it varies based on where the organization wants to begin determining what their set of rules are. Because that first couple of, one week blocks, you're kind of building the playbook. What am I gonna steal from Bell's scorecard, running a steal from OKRs, running a steal from OGSM. And by the time you're into, like, iteration three or four, we've now put some guidelines on for our organization.

They'll still evolve over the next nine months, but at least we've now done most of the early adopter innovation work, and we've got a playbook that we go forward from.

Alright. Perfect.

You you heard it here first. At the performance puzzle, if you're struggling with all the time, that it takes to actually cascade OKRs and are often finding yourself, missing out on all the high quality action that comes after setting these OKRs, give yourself a deliberate time constraint, especially if you're the old mitzvah.

Yeah. So as you can tell, I love metaphors. I think this is a bit like learning to ride a bike. Your teams cannot, in a boardroom, figure out how to ride a bike.

In the boardroom, you cannot build the correct OKR system. You can get minimal viable product. You can get something good enough to turn on. When you turn it on, that's where the serious learning happens.

So, over the next six months, about half of your key results and objectives will change. As you begin using them, people are gonna go, that is crazy. We need to adjust it. And now you end up with two things.

One is the solution gets better and better. And secondly, ownership shifts from those people in the boardroom to the entire organization.

And, frankly, I'd rather have a lousy solution the whole organization owns than this thing that's intellectually brilliant, but only the leadership team owns because that will die very quickly.

Chapter

Adapting OKRs Over Time

What I'm hearing you say there, Brett, is OKRs aren't one and done. You you shouldn't even aspire to write the best quality OKRs the first time or when you're actually in the goal setting period when you're kicking off a year or a quarter. You should give yourself the ability to be able to tweak them and make them better as conversations percolate throughout the organization. Have I captured the essence of what you said correctly?

Yeah. It's like, you know, you decided to go run a marathon. Well, for the first of a while, you're just gonna walk, and then you're gonna jog, and then you're gonna run, then you're gonna run further, then you're gonna run faster, and, eventually, you can do a marathon or or losing weight or getting in shape or whatever the change is that you're doing. You can't debate your way to it in a room.

You gotta get to some starting point and just begin doing it. And so I'm emphasizing that here that the complexity already exists. You've got all the building blocks. Get to something that you can turn on and begin using, and you'll be far more successful.

Chapter

How to Incrementally Improve the Quality of OKRs

Another thing that we see organizations actually spend a lot of time in, which leads to delays, leads to the OKR program never really leaving their lab and taking flight in their organization is poorly written OKRs. Now you touched upon a little bit on you know, we're spoiled rotten with all these metrics. There is a challenge on OKRs versus MIS and and understanding the difference between that. But, obviously, there is a large part of the world that gets OKRs right.

And, obviously, they didn't start off with getting OKRs right the first time they did it. What is the single best kind of ingredient or driver of incremental improvement in the quality of your OKRs for organizations who do get them right, you know, let's say over a period of time?

Well, so I think there's there's far too much concern over the quality of the OKR. I it's it's a bit, again, like, you know, learning during a marathon. Like, I don't care what your running style is. It will get better as you use it more.

So many and I I I blame consultants for this because they earn their money by helping you write OKRs, they make it look as difficult. It's not. So imagine this. All you gotta do is take the work that you do in the average month and divide it think of a pie chart.

Divide it into three equal chunks.

Chapter

Live Demo of Writing your OKRs

So let's play this game right now in front of the audience. We haven't rehearsed this. Go for it.

If we take a look at your job, your average month, what what are the three chunks of work that you do?

Create content, help, my sales team understand the use cases of the prospects, and help my customer success team understand, you know, the success that clients expect from our product.

So you just wrote your first three OKRs that took you, what, twenty eight seconds. Okay. Let's pick on one of them. How would I measure whether you're helping your team understand the application? What would I see more of or less of when you were working with your team?

Alright. When I'm working with my sales team, you'll see a better win rate because we're able to understand the prospect's language and marry that with features on our product. Yep. So, yeah, I guess I've already articulated my key result.

So the first key result. Yeah.

And if and if you wanted a second one, you'd say, okay. So that's the outcome. Maybe I'll see transformation. How many meetings are you having with them? How many people actually show up for those meetings? Are they asking brilliant questions or really stupid quest like, the issue is that wasn't tough.

Yep.

That was not a hard chunk of work to do. And so getting your knickers in a knot about how you write a correct OKR is lunacy.

Anyone can do it at the drop of a hat.

Now part of the trick is to keep it simple. So we always say the objective should just have the verb and outcome. So develop your team. Right?

Verb is develop, and the outcome we're looking for is that team. Done. So and I don't want this big long embellishment. People often write a whole sentence.

Well, that's what our human brains need to to feel compelled, but I'm not merging all that stuff. It's what is the essence. So there should never be the word and. There should never be a comma.

Now I'm making it sound like these are rules. They're not. They're just guidelines that we've learned help keep it simple Mhmm. So that people could understand it.

And so the idea of three chunks of work, verb, outcome is all there is to it. The key result should always start off with a symbol. You know, dollar sign, hash sign for, like, number percentage, and that forces me to have a specific measure. Right?

So you said, you know, a deal closing rate. So that's percentage deals closed. Mhmm. And that forces you to get a key result.

So this is not complicated. Don't allow a consultant to tell you it's like a month's worth of work. Yep. It it took us minutes to figure it out.

Now the bigger question is, are those three chunks of work the right three chunks of work? So either I can do this top down where I can take the strategy and go, what do you need to do to align to it? Or I can do it bottom up, or I do both. And if you do both, you see a misalignment.

Chapter

Top-Down and Bottom-Up Alignment

Leadership wants some stuff, and you're not doing this stuff. Now either the stuff you're doing that adds value that leadership forgot about, and I now need to add it in. Yeah. Or there's stuff you're doing that no longer adds value.

So maybe in your organization, someone else has taken over training the sales staff, and you should move on to something else.

Yeah.

So it's a two way conversation, both top down and bottom up. But, again, it's not complicated. You can find this out in a ninety minute workshop where the disconnects are and what you need to do about it.

Brett, I think what really hits home, you know, in in the last bit of what you said is, again, staying with with, you know, that that particular aspect of why is it taking us so much time to set up your OKRs organization wide.

Leaders shouldn't feel the pressure of getting all the key results right because this is an this is almost an activity that could be equally eye opening for them in terms of getting information from folks who are out in the field, actually solving problems in front of the market. Is am I correct in understanding that? Do you see that have play out with your client organizations? No.

Now, you know, it's evil to smoke cigarettes these days, so we don't get that data. But it's in a spreadsheet somewhere. Right? When you launch the OKRs, there's always someone in your team that goes, excuse me, but I've got way better data in this spreadsheet I've been keeping for years. No one's ever asked for it, but I've been collecting because I needed to do my job. But that would be way better data than what you're looking at.

And so what do you do? You swap it out, and it gradually gets better and better. So but there's no way you're ever gonna find that piece of data until that person's involved.

So the dilemma is this. When you're building OKRs,

Chapter

Managing the impact of Ego on OKRs

one extra person sneaks into every meeting, and that's Maslow. People's ego shows up, and they need to paint a picture of what a great job they're doing for the organization.

Mhmm. So the biggest thing you need to do is to get Maslow out of the room and just tell us, you know, honestly, what you're doing so that we can jointly make sure that we're taking advantage of your great skills best way possible.

Yeah.

Brett, I am gonna double click into the mass flow piece because there are quite a few questions that we received from the community on that front, which is the topic of folks trying to sandbag OKRs and the various kind of fads that have flown around in terms of solving for that. Gonna park that for a second. I'm gonna stay with, you know, the quality of the OKRs, stay with the example that you put me on the spot, a little bit with. But, you know, staying with my example of improving win rate, just like you mentioned, win rate might be one of the metrics that can kind of show me if I'm doing well on that particular part of my role.

But there are fifteen other metrics, and and you names a few of them. Right? Am I how many meetings am I taking? How law how many meetings per prospect am I taking?

That that means the efficacy and the quality of the solutions I'm creating, so on and so forth. And and very often with the quality of OKRs, you know, they start seeming like laundry list, more like, you know, stuff that you should have as a business MIS rather than actually showcasing the razor sharp focus and prioritization for which you scale a gold program.

What's what's

Chapter

Prioritizing Metrics in OKRs

your suggestion or advice, let's say, to me writing my OKRs or to a business team struggling to strategize or prioritize between, what you at the top of the call mentioned, lag versus lead. You know, when is it a good time for me to go ahead and pick up the most impactful outcome metric versus, let's say, maybe this next couple of quarters kind of focus on the lead metrics as I build out to the outcome?

Sure.

Well, so the first part is, again, think of your car. I could measure miles per gallon or kilometers per liter, whatever metric you want, as a rough indicator of how that car is going. Now that doesn't tell me if it's bad, whether my engine's not tuned, my tires are flat, my teenage boy is driving like an idiot. It doesn't tell me what the cause is.

It just says of all the things in my life, that's something I need to pay attention to. Same thing here. We're not trying to diagnose the problem. So I can use a a an indicator in your example close rate that is at miles per gallon.

It's the overall generic metric. And if it goes sideways, then you're gonna drill into the detail.

So, that sort of answers

Chapter

On Lead and Lag Measures - Yay or Nay?

the first part. The lead lag thing, I and, actually, I was responsible for helping create that concept. I regret now because every department's lagging measure is the next department's leading measure. So for example, your close rate.

So what is that?

Post something is your lagging measure, but that's a leading measure for the implementation team that need to go off and get something done. Yeah. So as soon as I talk lead and lag, I'm naturally bifurcating the organization.

So what we like doing in the OKR world is having a shared key result. Let's have a key result that goes from your first contact with an opportunity to when they're successfully working your solution.

And so that includes all the selling process, the development process, the implementation process, the training process, the launching process. Now we're all aligned and going for the same outcome. Mhmm. Just like many components get the miles per gallon in your car.

So we're looking for those metrics that aren't leading and lagging, but rather spanning because many of the problems as Romer Brace described are in the white spaces between departments. You finish your sales cycle. You go done and dusted. I'm going off for the next one.

And the poor implementation team, now they've gotta pick up all the pieces and figure out what are the promises you gave and all that kind of stuff Yep. Because I've done a a lag lead sort of thing. So I still need to be able to, get some visibility of the work I'm doing in immediate outcomes and the longer term outcomes and so on, but the lead lag thing has has gotten a life of its own that's beyond the benefit of the organization. And what it's really doing is is it trying to say, it's now your problem.

And so that's where the metric begins to be a bit evil.

Right. I think, that's that's

Chapter

Lateral Handshakes, Shared OKRs, and Accountability

one of the simplest explanations of what's been made out to be an extremely complex concept under OKRs called lateral handshake. Look at your business value chain. There are direct accountabilities, and there are shared responsibilities.

And just don't shy away from creating shared OKRs as well as what I hear you say. And you really can solve for lateral handshake. But I'm pretty sure there are some double click insights to that that you'd like to add when it comes to lateral handshakes.

Well, of course, you know me by now. So one thing is I always want a singular point person, someone who I go to if my closing ratio is low. Now they don't own all those processes, but that's one point person I can go to. Or if you use a racy model, it's the a, who's accountable for it.

Now multiple people, multiple teams are collaborators or are they are responsible, But I do want one point person only because, otherwise, leadership becomes chaos and the organization becomes a bit of an anarchy. So you do wanna put some guidelines, and that's just my preference. It's not a rule. You can make it up yourself.

Many of the OKR software tools allow you to have multiple owners and multiple collaborators, but the the evil part of that is it makes it more chaotic to manage the organization.

Absolutely. I'm gonna switch to the second question that I had parked because you'd mentioned, you know, Maslow entering the room. And, given that OKRs have a CFR cadence as well, which is something I'm gonna double click on later. But Mhmm. Everyone wants to

Chapter

The Problem of Sandbagging OKRs

look good in these update meetings. Everyone wants to look good, you know, and and chooses OKR sometimes. Cherry picks them from that perspective because Maslow's entering the room every time they're talking about it.

And the common common term that, you know, in the last few years we've seen flying around, surprisingly never saw that when balanced scorecards were around is sandbagging, people picking up the convenient OKRs. And one of the things that I have noticed in fact, a lot of questions that we get, you know, from the community are around, hey. We solve the sandbagging problem by essentially making the focus of my OKR program just strategy execution, not driving or assessing or improving people performance.

Is it true that goals and OKRs should have only one objective, or should they be two sides of the same coin?

Well, so you threw in words like goals and objectives. I'm not sure I follow the thinking, but the the root of what you're saying is, and I I've known John Dewar since about nineteen ninety nine, who I believe is a root cause of this problem of saying OKR should not be using rewards and compensation. In what world, I would say, John, does it make sense that I've decided my strategy or these important objectives, and I'm gonna measure everyone on something completely different? In what world does that make sense?

It only makes sense in a world, John, where you've never actually run a company. Like, you can't say this is what's important to your organization. You measure something else. So the issue is a completely different one.

In first off, in terms of the concept of sandbagging, I don't think that's possible these days. In the old days back when I had hair, okay, nineteen eighty two, you could write a false sales number, and it would take months before the organization realized that you had lied, that you sandbagged the number. If you on your closing ratio, if you reported a wrong number in your organization, how long would it take before someone discovered that?

Barely a few minutes.

Yeah. If they weren't paying attention, probably down to the second.

In other words, it is impossible these days to sandbag a number because It it literally boils down to the speed of the, the bandwidth of the Internet.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's so it's it's a wrong concept. But even if you could, the problem isn't that you could sandbag.

The problems with your culture, where the employee thought I'm gonna sacrifice the organization for my own personal benefit. Well, you better solve that problem because I bet you they're doing may way more damage than just sandbagging. They might be stealing your clients. They might be getting this ready to set up their own business.

They might be stealing staplers from the office. I don't know what they're doing, but it's a cultural issue where I think sandbagging is gonna serve a benefit. Whenever I have these problems, I I go back to my family life. And what would happen if one of my children came home from school and lied to me about the math score they got?

Let's say they're really doing badly at math, and they tell me they're doing great. They're sandbagging the number. What is the consequence of that? The consequence is the kid manages to stay free until the report card comes in, then there's hell to pay.

Yep. Right? And in the meantime, I'm not helping the kid get better at math. If on the other hand, the kid came home and said, hey, dad.

I don't get this math stuff. I need some help.

Now is their boss, as their leader, don't I wish I was their boss, as their parent at least, I can do something to support them. As an employee, if you're having a problem and don't tell me, in my mind, that's a fireable offense. If you're having a problem and I don't help you, that's my problem. But you've gotta tell me you have a problem. I need to set up a culture where it's okay to say I've tried everything I possibly can. Here's the thing. If you're not achieving their objective, it's for one of five reasons.

Either, you're you just don't have the skill set. You don't have the knowledge, the experience. So let's put it in from the team and get some more ideas on how to solve it. Problem number two, I need more resources. I'm doing a year end inventory, and I need more people to go do that work. I just need more resources.

Number three, maybe I need to change an upstream or downstream problem. So maybe you're back to your closing ratio. I need to change the order entry process so I can get it done faster or get it done online so I'm not wasting salespeople's time to it. Well, you gotta go change an upstream renouncing process.

Mhmm. Or maybe it's just a team decision. We all need to know about it. Or lastly, I don't have the resources.

We have to agree to change the key result. None of those reasons are because I'm failing. In other words, if it's red, back in school, we thought it's because I'm failing. In business, if it's ever red, if you're not achieving your target, very seldom is it your fault.

It's things outside your control because we all work hard. So this idea of sandbagging is based on bad culture, and I need to change that mindset.

But it's a crazy idea because you can't sandbag these days anyways.

Absolutely. So if, you know, myth busted, Brett, first up, part of the myth, which is essentially delinking your OKRs from people's performance assessment, performance improvement won't solve the problem for sandbagging. But then on the flip side, Brett, what advantages do you see of actually, you know, driving the second objective of an OKR program being performance assessment for people, being performance improvement for people.

Well, so part of this is the mystique that somehow you're supposed to guess the right target number. So let's say back to your closing ratio. Man, we're having lots of fun with you. Let's say your closing ratio is twenty five percent.

Wait. You made that number up. Now when you begin tracking it, you might find it's actually closer to fifty five percent. Mhmm.

But if I didn't start tracking it, I'm never gonna learn what it really is.

Mhmm.

Then you can try different techniques. You're gonna try, I don't know, doing more web sessions, and it goes up to sixty five percent. Then you're gonna try more face to face, and it goes down to forty five percent. Well, now I can begin to experiment with my system to figure out how to go make it better.

But at no point in time can you meet with your boss and go, you didn't hit twenty five percent. Mhmm. In addition, the world changes. You made that guess at twenty five percent based on a certain economy.

Well, COVID comes along, and now that's no longer a reasonable estimate.

Or the whole market takes off, and it shouldn't be twenty five percent. It should be seventy five percent. So in no way can that target ever be a hard target. And if you don't make it, I'm gonna deduct your pay from that percentage.

It's meant to be the beginning of a conversation, and that's why you need those frequent CFRs, frequent check ins. You know, once a week, we should be touching base, and you should be going, you know what, Brett? I tried this, and I'm getting my my closing ratios a bit better. And I'll go, well, tell you what.

We'll put three web developers on it, and we'll help you get that benefit faster. Or you'll go, I tried the web thing. It doesn't work. I'm gonna go back to face to face.

Great. We'll worry about getting you a bigger expense account so that you can do more face to face work. The idea is the cadence of business is fast enough. I can't wait till the end of the quarter or the end of the year.

I need more dynamic conversations. So now my think of the headlights of your car. They only shine out a limited period of time. As you set that target, you're only confident for maybe a week or two because there's so many things that happen beyond that.

So we believe that we're gonna get these numbers I can commit to a year in advance. That's ludicrous.

And so that's the paradigm we need to break there. The idea is your guess is for the next two or three weeks, and we're gonna check frequently and keep updating that as we go forward. The issue isn't do you hit the number. The issue is are you using that as a fulcrum to learn and perform better?

Absolutely. And and what I hear you say there, Brett, you know, brings up,

Chapter

How to Solve the Two Lists of Goals Problem

one of the most common and difficult questions, literally. It is surprising that it comes across as frequently as it does, but I think it's only natural. As organizations have linked, have have kind of carried on with role based scorecards or KPIs or balanced scorecards, which were very neatly kind of linked to their rewards program, And they've kind of find themselves saying, alright. These KPIs aren't don't have the same kind of rhythm and cadence, and I need to move to OKRs. They end up having two lists of goals for, large parts of their organization.

Right. What's your suggestion to me? How do I kill these two lists of goals? Or maybe maybe you've seen it work somewhere.

Never. Never. Never. Never. Never. Ever. Other than that, no. So because it's like driving with two dashboards.

Yeah.

Like, I've got one dashboard over here with my speed on it, and they went over there with gas. Well, now I'm never looking out the road because I'm looking at this stuff all the time. So the issue is this that many people so in the business, I have both run the business and change the business activity. So business as usual, day to day activities.

I still need to keep my finger in the pulse. You still need to be tracking your ongoing closing ratios and how many customers are going in the pipeline, how fast they're moving through the pipeline. That's run the business stuff, and you better keep your finger in that pulse. Because you know what? If that pipeline dries up, it doesn't matter what great strategy you have because you can have no money to pay for it. So you now I don't need as many metrics there. I need perhaps more fidelity, more detail around the change of business stuff because that's new and and different, but I cannot ignore the run the business stuff.

Furthermore, any of those strategic initiatives that you're working on, their entire intention is to make the run the business stuff different. Again, back to our example, we're gonna give you two web developers to, build a better web to get the order entry online to make it faster. I'm not consuming salespeople. Well, now that project to the web developers better be linked to the key result of the number of hours it takes a salesperson to close a deal or the number of transactions done on the web. Like, I should, with that project, have a key result it's impacting. And those key results inevitably are those run the business measures.

So, yes, I'm gonna do all these exciting projects, but I have to keep my finger on the pulse so they're run the business stuff, and often they run the business stuff are in fact impacted by those projects. So but many, many, almost a hundred percent of organizations begin thinking it's only changed the business stuff. Why? Because the more senior you are in the organization, the more time you spend on change the business.

So if the executive team is launching OKRs, they're all change the business stuff. That's where their focus is. But eighty percent of the people are run the business day to day, and they're completely dissociated from those objectives. They've got no relationship to the change of business stuff.

Yeah. So we need to make sure that we, you know, McDonald's is one of our clients. We know that you've got it between when you place your order and get the food, needs to be three minutes.

If it's two minutes, you can't tell the difference. So that's a waste of resources to get it faster. And if it's four minutes, you're mad. So there's a number I I don't wanna stretch target.

I don't want two minutes because I'm wasting resources. I don't want four minutes. I can make my I hit that number. That's my committed number.

That's all I need. And I know that from the store level to the city level, to the territory, to the region, to the country, up to corporate. That one is one of those things that ladders all the way to the top. I still have to measure customer satisfaction differently, but the issue is some things ladder up, most things don't connect directly.

There's a line of sight, there's a relationship, There's that below the radar, above the radar stuff I talked about. So it's a complicated system. I just need to make sure that I have enough run the business data that I know that I'm still roughly hitting three minutes.

Mhmm.

Then I could worry about the the change of business, new items on the menu, new drive throughs, new play areas, all the other stuff we wanna do, but I better keep track in that three minutes or bad things are gonna happen.

Now this is super useful. Now, Brett, you've convinced the organization that two sets of lists and two sets of goals just makes no sense. No one can have a compartmentalized brain that these are the ones I need to ping for my compensation. These are the ones I need to ping to make my CEO happy, literally.

But then the

Chapter

Do I Need to Turn my OKRs into a Scorecard?

next obstacle that I see organizations find, and we get a lot of questions on this front is, I thoroughly worked out the math behind having the linkage between my scorecards, the weighted average scores coming out from my scorecards, how much of the pie will slice, and how much of that pie will I get into my kitty.

Does that mean I now need to, at the end of the year, turn my OKRs into a scorecard, or is there a simpler way?

I you certainly do need to be tracking those numbers, and I'm a a scorecard fan. So yes. But, again, back to whether I'm, what's that that expression from Yogi Berra if you're not keeping score, you're just, you know, practicing or something like that?

You know, if you're trying to lose weight, you're trying to run a marathon, you're trying to quit smoking, you gotta keep score. Mhmm. And part of keeping score is just a Hawthorne fact. Because I'm measuring it, I'm paying more attention to it. So, yes, you do need some ledger sheet to be physically tracking it and going back to it.

You also need the ability to, converse with your teammates and brainstorm and have those conversations. It's a social structure as well as a technical structure.

Chapter

How can AI enhance OKRs?

The only thing I'd add on to add complexity to the conversation is AI.

So the concept of saying you can only have few objectives is because our tiny little inferior human brains can only handle so many things.

AI does not have that limitation.

So AI can look for relationships that we don't expect and may not be built into an OKR. So the best example I can think of is Anaheim Busch with their beer commercials last year where they used a spokesperson that damaged some market.

And billions of dollars of damage to their valuation occurred. Why?

Because it wasn't anyone's three objectives.

But you know for sure social media would have gone off the scale long before it hit the financials. There would have been a whole bunch of Facebook pastes and and Twitter and all sorts of stuff like that. But that team that was tracking that stuff never talked to corporate saying, we're seeing all this stuff going on. So we have this earthquake happening that no one's reporting because it's not part of someone's three OKRs.

AI does not have that limitation. AI is gonna go, there's a whole bunch of abnormal activity going on. And when I take a look at cause and effect, there's a series of ads were written two weeks before, maybe there's a relationship. So it doesn't need us to structuralize that that framework, that mathematical relationship you just described.

AI can take a look at things that seem to be disparate and understand relationships. And we've had that happen with three clients now where we've seen, for example, a bunch of trouble tickets show up for no reason.

Yep.

Absolutely no reason at all. Well, it turns out that sales had relaunched a product that had been closed six months earlier, but they needed to make their year end numbers. They start selling this product that's completely unsupported and has all sorts of now problems with with other updates to the system that went on, trouble tickets show up.

There's no OKR that tracks that because someone did an unexpected activity. No different than when COVID hit or something else. So, yes, the framework of OKRs does a good job of capturing business as usual within a normal set of assumptions. We still need to rely on AI to gather stuff that are beyond that narrow model and quickly adapt the model to include those events that in hindsight seem logical.

All super useful. You know, while listening to you, Brett, right, throughout, you know, we've heard about some myth busting aspects, which is the magic's not in the framework, give yourself a time constraint, and get the OKRs in whatever shape and form outside, out of the gates.

But what's really sticking through or coming through is whether you'd like to drive strategy execution or improve people's performance leveraging OKRs, you need to break the mold of the set and forget style of goal management per se. What's really coming through without us having already kind of spent some time in airspace about it, and I'm really, really keen to get into that piece.

What is your suggestion? We heard from when it comes to you know, when you have an issue with your goal management system, don't look at the framework. Don't use changing the framework as the transformation excuse in your organization.

What I'm hearing you say is do everything it takes to get people to discuss those OKRs on the cadence that makes sense for that part of the business.

Now my challenge is if that is the objective of my transformation, to improve or make my goal program successful,

Chapter

How can Organizations Make CFRs a Part of their Culture?

What are the simple ways in which you've seen scaling this habit of checking into OKRs, having the right conversations?

Oh, let me use John Do as example because I'm pretty sure a lot of the people looking at this webinar would have read measures what measure what matters, where the book spends equal amount of real estate on CFRs. How can organizations make CFRs a part of their cultural fabric?

Well, so I think the root of it more think of any meeting. So a meeting, whether it's one on one or a team, should be a piece of machinery where problems go in, answers go out.

What we see though is often the wrong problem goes into the wrong meeting. What does that look like? The team spends forty minutes debating something that should have been solved in ten minutes. Why? Because I'm missing either the point of control, the point of authority, or the subject matter expert. And it doesn't matter how long you debate it, you're never gonna be able to solve the problem. So part of making a CFR correct or any meeting is make sure that the right topic goes into the right conversation.

The second part is how do I process that information in the team? So you've set the agenda for this meeting, these web sessions. You go through these steps.

The problem solving steps in any meeting, whether it's a CFR or a team meeting is discover, discuss, decide. Discover is let's have a subject matter expert and brief us on the topic. So you think you see a problem with an employee. Let's first talk about what it is you see and what they see so that we agree what the real problem is because often, the symptom is different than the root cause.

Discuss. Now we need a risk free way where all sorts of crazy ideas can get put on the table where we can come up with alternative ideas. And we need those crazy ideas because you weren't able to solve it with your own brain and then decide. What is the criteria by which we decide?

Is it, veto power the boss gets to decide? Is it, majority rules? Is it unanimous? And make those rules in advance.

So now that's a structure that works even if we're doing a one on one. Or if we're having our weekly team meeting or if we're having our monthly executive meeting, that structure is always maintained.

And it's almost like a coin sorter where the right problem goes into the right meeting. So let's say we're having a daily stand up and someone says, hey. I gotta take tomorrow off. I gotta take the kids to the dentist.

Not a problem. I can solve that in this meeting. The next day, someone goes, hey. We need to hire someone else.

I can't solve that in a twenty minute stand up. That gets punted to the end of the week meeting. Mhmm. Wednesday, we've got a cross functional problem with the other team.

Well, I can't solve that in this team meeting. Let's call it a cross functional meeting. So the idea is with those, it's about setting a culture of conversation and making sure that the conversations happen in a risk free structured way, whether that's a one on one, a small team, or a big team. And now that becomes a cultural attribute that will even happen when you bump into someone in the hallway.

You bump into someone in the hallway, and they're suddenly gonna unpack that for you. And we actually suggest three questions. What, so what, now what? What happened that caused this issue?

Don't give me more numbers. Just tell me what happened. Your closing ratio is down and you go, well, the problem is we have a problem with this this this product. That's what happened.

So what? What's the implication? If this continues, we're not gonna hit the quarter end number. Now what?

What do you recommend?

You have that simple three sentence conversation about any problem, and then you can decide, do I need to go into this bigger discuss this other and or are we done? So it's a matter of having a better structure to how we communicate and then setting the cadence and the and the culture to make it easy to have those conversations, whether it's in a meeting or in a hallway.

If I had to paraphrase that, Rhett, first up, every organization has a cadence of certain meetings. You need to know where to bake in, you know, the conversations of the CFRs around the check-in so that it doesn't feel like additional administrative burden. The second piece is clarify the agenda for each unique meeting and stick to that agenda so that people can prepare those questions or their discussion points beforehand.

Chapter

Actionable Tactical Aspects in Meetings

Actually discuss the solutions in the meeting, or even kind of segue or park certain discussion items which aren't relevant to the agenda for, you know, the the meeting in which the agenda it actually makes sense. So so those those are some very, very actionable tactical aspects.

What I also think I'm gonna cut you off one more time because I'm concerned that some listeners might be left behind.

You're talking about CFRs. Mhmm.

CFR is another example of something that's been around forever. We've had conversations about performance forever. John Doerr made up a new word to sound more clever. It's just your your ongoing check ins, and it's an example of goals versus objectives versus projects versus initiatives. It's just another term for something that already exists in the organization.

Got it. Got it. What you're saying is, folks, again, don't worry about the acronyms, the framework, whether it's OKRs, OGSMs, CFRs, whatever it is, set goals and get into the daily habit of keeping goals front and center. Get into a certain cadence, org wide rhythm as it makes sense to discuss those goals so that you actually progress on strategy execution as well as improving individual performance. And I think if I marry this with what you said earlier that your goals have to have to form the basis for individual performance assessment, performance growth for individuals, Automatically, they start participating in this rhythm of meetings because the what's in it for me is answered rather than it feeling like a compliance exercise because my CEO asked me to do it or my chief strategy officer asked me to do it.

I know we're a little bit over time, and this has been a super power packed session, but I have one last question from the audience. And it is gonna take us back forty minutes into the conversation, but this just shows you how many organizations are struggling to get this right, Brett.

Chapter

Challenges in Implementing OKRs

It vindicates me a little bit with my top questions. The question is, our CEO and a few VPs have been advised that OKRs are important for us to kind of adopt, and they've asked HR to present an implementation plan. However, we have always struggled with even writing basic smart goals. How do we go about training the organization across levels to write good OKRs now?

Well, so, you know, part of it is, you know, we often ask HR to help us out doing that. And that may or may not be the right answer. Yes. It deals with people, but people who chose to be in HR aren't necessarily systems thinkers. That's why they chose HR. If there are systems thinkers, there'd be accountants, there'd be programmers, and so on. So think about whether that's the right team in your organization.

The second part, though, is, again, we all live our lives with objectives. Our objective was to get together for this webinar and have an hour free. You had leading indicators about whether you're gonna actually make it on time, lagging indicators, and so on. We live our lives day to day, so there really shouldn't be anything that you need to train people about.

Mhmm.

So it's more a matter of helping them get a little bit more structure about what they already do. So my example of and how long did it take me to train you? Like, even you learn in a second. Like, three chunks of work.

And the folks listening, if I can, anyone can.

Yeah. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. I'm just kidding. But, you know, the principle is there really isn't anything to train.

Don't make a mountain out of a molehill. This is work that we already do. We're just giving people a little bit more structure so that they can get a slightly higher quality outcome, and it'll just keep getting better and better over time. So don't make it into a big training thing.

Brett, I am gonna kind of let you go with one last loaded question, which is related to the one that that you just answered because, you know, I've been a keen student of all of your work in content. And folks watching this, I highly, highly recommend following Brett on LinkedIn, YouTube, and everywhere that he posts content.

Chapter

Quality Improvement through OKR Discussions

And and I read and I picked up that one of your biggest learnings was that when organizations started getting into the habit and the rhythm of discussing or checking into OKRs, be that one on one with their managers or in group meetings, the quality of the OKRs and the quality of the ideas coming from these meetings started improving significantly. Would you like to throw and shed some light on that? Because I think that immediately also debunks the myth that if I put all of these people into a classroom, tomorrow morning, they're gonna end up writing better SMART goals and OKRs.

Well, so here's what we observed. We observed that if you're using OKRs, you actually have fewer meetings. Why? Because I don't meetings are no longer show and tell.

People aren't showing for spreadsheets and introducing the in information to you. You can read it in the newspaper or your OKR system a day or two before the meeting and do your preparation work. So I need fewer meetings because I don't need to be spending all my time doing show and tell sessions. Mhmm.

The meetings end up being shorter, about thirty seven percent shorter. But most importantly, the recommendations that come out of the meeting escalate from a thirty percent viability up to seventy percent. So viability is are the recommendations the team gives you. Can you implement them, and will they make a difference?

If you are in a standard meeting where someone drops that spreadsheet in front of you, the viability of the recommendations on average is thirty percent, three zero percent. If, on the other hand, you get that data in the OKR system two days ahead of time, the viability of recommendations goes from thirty percent up to seventy percent.

What does that mean? It means you got fewer meetings, the meetings are shorter, and the stuff that comes out of them is much higher quality.

And those are benefits you get literally beginning week number two. I don't need to you know, it's gonna take you two months before you see a productivity, tangible productivity gain or tangible employee engagement gain, but you'll get those hours back literally the next week.

And I think I'm gonna marry this, with what you said earlier. These conversations, discussions become safer for the people involved. Mister Maslow exits the room, and that, ever ever looming kind of myth around sandbagging certainly doesn't exist. Brett, that's our time for today.

Thank you so much for taking time out to share back with the community. Thanks everyone who joined in, and I'm really, really excited for our entire community to consume, you know, all of your insights asynchronously as well. Wishing everyone all the very success with their OKR programs, and a great day ahead. Thank you, and see you on the next episode of the performance puzzle.

Thank you.

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