Christina Wodtke: recommendation

Transcript context

…Amazing. I haven't heard that before. What would you say is kind of the atomic unit of an OKR? So, people talk about, "We're doing OKRs, we're not doing OKRs". What's the line between we have goals and a plan, and we're actually doing OKRs as a concept? Gosh, what is the atomic unit? That's a really lovely question. I would say, "What am I doing this week to get closer to our goals? " If you could answer that question, you could give up all the OKR stuff, but if you just asked the question, "What are we doing this week to get closer to our strategic goals, our longer term goals?" That is the very heart of it, because there's the tomorrow problem, like my kid will do his homework tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes. It's always tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. So, what are we doing right now? And I find that it's really useful to tie it into temporal landmarks. By that I mean that there are things like birthdays or New Year's or Mondays or quarters that are already built into the world. And so, we piggyback onto them and we say, "Okay, it's Q1, boom, we're going to stop. We're going to take a breath, we're going to look at everything and we're going to say, 'What do we actually have to do?'" Raising your head above the noise is really vital. "And then this quarter, remember we have a mission over here and we have a vision and we have a strategy. Okay, this quarter's all about, what?" And you move towards that. I know there's a lot of talk about outcomes and I think that's absolutely right. It's really critical to think about outcomes because that gives you flexibility on how to attack the problem. But the biggest question is, why? Why do we get up in the morning? What are we trying to actually do? Are we making a difference at all? And if you can say, "This week I'm going to do this," and then at the end of the week you say, "Oh, that worked or that didn't work," and you can try something new or keep going. That's just invaluable. That is really interesting that your answer wasn't like its outcome or some key results and 70% of success is goal, that there's something more fundamental, which is just being very clear on what you should be doing next week and we should be focusing on now. And that translates into what kind of the OKR process ends up being.…

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