Generally, an objective should only have key results that the company and teams know they can achieve. This category of OKRs is often called committed OKRs.
Goals should be based on what you want to accomplish in the future. If your goals are just maintaining the status quo, they are not ambitious enough.
Focus
The best way to ensure that you’re setting ambitious OKR is to focus on key results, which represent any valuable change in a team or the organization. Objectives should be high-level goals, with three to five measurable key results associated with each.
Having ambitious and achievable OKRs is critical, but you also need to keep teams motivated by tracking progress and identifying bottlenecks. Otherwise, people will lose interest in the process and won’t stick to the goals that you’ve set for them. To maintain motivation, make sure you celebrate success when objectives are met. This could be as simple as having a team lunch or giving everyone a small gift. It’s a great way to boost morale before setting another ambitious OKR for your team.
Alignment
The OKR method provides a way for teams and an organization to align around a small set of carefully chosen priorities. This alignment is crucial to achieving ambitious goals.
Alignment is achieved through a clear communication protocol and through the use of focused Objectives. The Objective title should clearly define the outcome that you are trying to achieve. The key results then help to quantify the goal and provide a measurement protocol.
To ensure that everyone is on the same page, each Objective should have one DRI who is responsible for ensuring that the objective is completed. The DRI can be from a team or from another department within the company. This helps to avoid confusion about responsibility and promotes collaboration. This is especially important when working on aspirational or committed Objectives.
Commitment
When an objective has been committed, it reflects the top-level goals that have been agreed upon for company success. Those objectives and key results are prioritized for success, and people, resources, and schedules get rearranged to accomplish them.
These goals are measurable, and they should be ambitious, but not too far out of reach. The best goals push the team to step outside of their comfort zones, and this is what motivates them to strive for the goal.
Learning OKRs are great for teams that need to learn something new. This is typically an objective that answers, “What will we need to know in the next cycle?” The learnings can then inform a committed or aspirational OKR in the following cycle. Learning OKRs don’t have to be aspirational and should be measurable, but they must be meaningful for the team.
Tracking
In order to measure your progress, you need a system to track the key results. One option is to set up a quarter or semester-long schedule to grade your objectives (getting 70% to the goal is considered good in OKR world), review and learn, and then establish new goals for the next period.
You can also try a collaborative process with your teams instead of a top-down approach for creating OKRs. This will enable your teams to own the process, giving them a different perspective and helping you achieve your goals.
Make sure that your key results delve into numbers and metrics, much like a KPI (key performance indicator). Finally, be clear about how each objective functions within the larger framework of the company’s overarching goals or mission.
Stretching
Having a stretch goal forces you to look at your daily habits and create a plan that will help you reach your goals. Whether or not you meet your stretch goal, the process of trying will provide valuable personal development in a variety of ways.
In order to be considered a stretch goal, your OKRs should make you and your team uncomfortable. According to Doerr, your key results should have a 70% success rate, or be higher than business as usual.
This makes it important to discuss the potential risks associated with your stretch goals and how you can address them. Among the most common risks is losing focus on your primary goal. If you’re pursuing an ambitious goal, you can combat this by talking about it often, visualizing it, and making sure the goal is front-of-mind.