When Your OKRs are Bad But You Need to Commit to them Anyway to Save Face

Look, there comes a time in your career where you realize you're going down the wrong path but you don't want to look stupid, so you run forward confidently.

Let's paint you a picture: you forgot the deadline. Your OKR's are due tomorrow and you are presenting them at the Quarterly Business Review where a lot of the company executives are going to be challenging your process and making sure the case for your OKR's is air tight. (If you followed our OKR Guide, you should have an air tight case.)

But for this example, let's say you built OKR's and they are off the mark significantly and you are getting challenged heavily on your Objectives or Key Results and how they relate to the organization. Your superiors are hitting you left with questions on things like relevance, impact, and your approach.

You have failed… or have you? This is the part where I want to introduce the method called "Digging In".

To properly dig in, you start off by questioning their questioning of your approach, relevance and impact. They may make some remarks about their position and clarify their questions, but this is the part where you tune out and enter your "Mind Palace".

In your Mind Palace, you enter a zone of pure zen and insight. Lights are on, but no one's home. What the casual observer sees is you standing your ground and thinking deeply on the leadership's answer. Inside your mind, however, you are hard at work.

You're in your mind palace and what you are looking for is any relevant metrics you can create that help align your goal with the organizational goals. Quickly come up with 4 believable numbers; 68.3, 14.2, 9.4, and 42.7 is what came to mind today.

Now, you need to search for some arguments that could pepper in those metrics and come up with some conclusionary statement that uses those metrics. What you're really looking to do here is close the conversation out. To do that, you need to effectively say that your path forward is the right one, but also gently let the leadership know that you've done investigation into their path previously as part of your discovery and would see some negative impact based on their proposed changes.

Lets give it a try together:

"You see, if we continue focusing all our efforts on the Farsblargen, we will realize a 68.1% growth to our minimal conversion metric, which is 14.2 currently. What you're suggesting, we've considered before during our Prime Metric Discovery sessions. If we are able to enact those particular changes, we'll see a 9.4% drop and that's over last year's Net Promoter Score Deviation Quotient of 42.7. That's why we need to pursue this path."

At this point, the executives should be impressed with your preparation and off-the-cuff metric spouting that they will get off your back and retreat with their tail in between their legs. You've won the battle today, now you'll need to bring a similar methodology for when you implement these metrics onto your team. More on that in a future post!

I hope that you found this how-to guide valuable and will lead you to having some successful meetings in the future!

Thanks

Zack, the Little Bringer (of Product)