Priority for All is Priority for None
Easily the most recurrent theme I encounter in my work with clients is that their people feel that there is too much going on at once. They report feeling overburdened and confused by the sheer volume of initiatives. Everyone is busy but little seems to be getting finished and that’s a situation that creates stress, contention for resources, conflict and burnout.
More work going on at once means longer queues and more complexity. Shoving more work into a system where demand already exceeds capacity can only further slow everything down. That might seem like a statement of the obvious, but still we see exactly this type of self-inflicted gridlock over and over.
It’s an easy trap to fall into, even with the knowledge that multitasking dilutes or even destroys focus. It can be difficult to resist the pressure to start immediately and too easy to fall for the seductive illusion of speed this creates. Most of us instinctively know that it would be better to say “not yet” and wait until existing commitments have been delivered, yet we can be our own worst enemies sometimes.
“It can be difficult to resist the pressure to start immediately and too easy to fall for the seductive illusion of speed this creates.”
When you have stakeholders to satisfy, finite political capital, commercial pressures and more, saying “yes” can feel like the easiest way to get through the day, even when you know that you and/or your teams are already stretched.
Prioritisation as a Strategic Discipline
This is where OKRs can help. They are a goal-setting framework used to translate strategy into focused and measurable action. The framework encourages deliberate focus on fewer things; ruthless prioritisation based on business value. The framework is based on the belief that tightly focused attention and energy is more impactful than diffuse, scattered activity.
Google co-founder Larry Page’s mantra captures the idea succinctly; “more wood behind fewer arrows”.
OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. Objectives state what we want to achieve, and key results state how we will measure progress. The enabling constraint that helps with focus is to limit both the number of objectives and the measures that collectively define success.
Done well, OKRs are a simple way to concentrate the attention and resources of the business on what matters most right now, and to get fast feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. In practice, they operate in cycles of create, track, review and adapt, typically yearly at company level and quarterly for departments and teams.
The leadership team shares their top-level strategic OKRs and then the departments and teams use those collaboratively to derive their own contributing OKRs. Initiatives come last. They are subservient to the key results and exist only to drive them. Initiatives that don’t drive any key results should be deprioritised. The net result should be a set of initiatives that collectively form a strategically coherent and transparent programme of work that provides a clear view of how it connects to the bigger picture and gets everybody pulling in the same direction.
The idea is to keep strategy central to the day-to-day decision-making, leveraging the motivating and uniting power of a clear sense of shared purpose.
That’s the idea, anyway! You’ll notice I said ‘done well’. There are plenty of ways to go wrong with OKRs; vague strategy, too many objectives, weak leadership examples, or poor discipline around tracking, to name just a few.
Crucially, discipline around prioritisation starts from the top. The OKR framework is about more than just how the objectives are communicated and formatted. It’s about behaviour change, and leaders need to lead by example. The framework won’t help much if leaders still insist on umpteen top-level priorities. If a culture of “we want it all and we want it all now” dominates, then simply throwing OKR theatre into the mix will likely have zero or even negative impact.
Slowing Down to Speed Up
It can be difficult for some, especially those under pressure, to accept that striking a better balance between multitasking and focused work actually means getting more done. Slowing down to speed up can seem paradoxical, but it’s not a new idea; less haste, more speed; slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Still, it often seems to get ignored or forgotten in business contexts.
Jeff Bezos learned this when an employee told him “Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon”. It made him realise that constantly bombarding the team with new initiatives was causing distractions and slowing things down. “I started prioritizing ideas better, keeping lists of them, keeping them to myself until the organisation was ready”.
When we talk about doing less concurrently, we mean getting more done over time, not less. We are advocating for increasing system throughput, not reducing effort. We mean enabling focus to improve speed, quality, impact & sustainability. And again, it has to start from the top.
Put simply, if you have many initiatives going on at once, and progress is painfully slow, pausing several and focusing only on the few most important will often result in more getting finished. Then, as capacity frees, you can pull paused work from the queue. It’s how you get everything sooner, prioritised by value. OKRs can facilitate this behaviour by introducing rigour around defining the desired outcomes and success measures, and encouraging shorter cycles.
It’s not easy. Changing habits takes effort. Prioritisation is hard and it can sometimes take difficult conversations. These things can be tackled with or without OKRs, but the framework provides a tried and tested method that has benefitted many very successful businesses.
So, whilst it might seem contradictory or self-defeating to add a change initiative like adopting OKRs into an organisation that already feels maxed out, the truth is that it’s more like the proverbial lumberjack stopping to sharpen his saw; yes, progress slows briefly, but over the course of a day, far more gets done.