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...

The tendency most people have is to cascade OKRs down an organization chart. Functional teams can certainly benefit from OKRs, but the greatest potential value lies in orienting people and OKRs towards customer-facing goals and products. Cansel (pronounced djan-sell) has developed a way to visualize this diverse and collaborative pattern of OKRs in your organization that she calls the "Solar System." 

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Chuck Whetsell is an old friend and classmate, an accomplished Rolfer, body worker, therapist and meditation teacher. In this episode we take a deep dive into the nature of somatic intelligence. In times of rapid change, cognitive flexibility - our ability to change our mind and see things differently - is absolutely critical. But the mind can't change itself. Chuck's perspective is that we can only get out of our heads by cultivating somatic intelligence, which can only happen through...

Christian Ulstrup is an MIT graduate and startup founder turned OKR consultant. He has gone further than anyone I know in the field using AI as a productivity tool. He'd be the last person to say that AI can generate strategy, but has found ways to make the process faster and get the best out of the humans. He produces new content on LinkedIn every week with his latest thoughts on how to use the best AI tools for developing strategy and OKRs.  As he says, in AI there are no experts, only...

Giles Crouch is a  Digital Anthropologist and Marketing Consultant who produces provocative (and prolific) content on culture and technology on both Medium and Substack. Giles is a student of how culture absorbs technology, and he predicts that before long, AI will actually become boring. He talks about how earlier technologies like the telephone have gone from being bright shiny objects to just part of the woodwork of our lives. He cautions against having too many wild expectations for AI as...