Now what is our problem here? How can we avoid the two extremes: too great bossism in giving orders, and practically no orders given? I am going to ask how you are avoiding these extremes. My solution is to depersonalize the giving of orders, to unite all concerned in a study of the situation, to discover the law of the situation and obey that. Until we do this I do not think we shall have the most successful business administration… …With scientific management the managers are as much under orders as the workers, for both obey the law of the situation. Our job is not how to get people to obey orders, but how to devise methods by which we can best discover the order integral to a particular situation. - Mary Parker Follett
The Situation
Mary Parker Follett was an American social worker and management theorist in the early twentieth century. Her work chews through the eternal management conundrums of "the art of getting things done through people" without destroying the people in the process of getting the things done. One of her most famous articles was on The Giving of Orders - which discusses exactly what it says on the tin. She doesn’t so much wrestle with the problem of hierarchy as knead it like dough. Her solution to the challenges of imposing orders on others is to displace the challenge from individuals to their environment. The critical thing is to understand “the situation” - the context in which everyone is working, the goals they have, and the challenges that block those goals. What she wants people to focus on is a common understanding (a collective sensemaking if you wanna get fancy) of these things that then orient managers and managed in the same direction and allow them to work on that. To “play the ball, not the man” as I believe they say in sports.
The Practice
Similar ideas surface in Chapter 11 of Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management. In it, Drucker outlines what became known as “Management by Objectives” (MBO). As no self-respecting Viennese intellectual would dream of wrestling with anything, Drucker slices up the problems of hierarchy, direction, and alignment with the kitchen-hardened knife skills of a professional chef. Drucker wants to use MBO to avoid 3 sources of misdirection (or sometimes legerdemain):
Functional specialists focusing on “professional excellence” at the expense of overall organizational outcomes;
Senior managers failing to convey the prioritization of their intent in a flurry of orders;
Organizational systems seeking local optimization at the expense of overall organization success.
Hence the focus on clear objectives that align to the overall organizational goals and cascade down through the organizational hierarchy. However work and effort needs to be put into these objectives and they require discussion back and forth between layers in an organization. He doesn’t discuss overall organizational goals in this chapter (although they are discussed earlier in the book) but objectives are things that require care and attention.
Google and Bono
Which brings us to OKRs or Objectives and Key Results. OKRs have become a very fashionable management tool over the last decade - with advocate and venture capitalist John Doerr claiming that they are responsible for the success of Google and... Bono*. OKRs focus on establishing an Objective which should be Audacious, not Business As Usual, and the highest priority that your team has for the next 30-90 days. A number of Key Results are then identified. The Key Results should be 3-5 quantifiable outcomes that form a roadmap for how to get to your Objective and a way of tracking progress made. Where they can work well is as a prioritization and focus tool. They can help gain collective agreement around the situation. However they have problems. Roger Martin and David Hurst outline their issues with them and their articles are well worth reading. I want to raise my own concerns below.
Goodness Gracious How Audacious
I don’t think the focus on “audacious” goals is going to age well. It fitted very well with a world of cheap money where the low cost of capital meant that even ludicrous projects and companies could secure funding. If you didn’t promise interplanetary domination, people thought that you weren’t trying hard enough. Don’t get me wrong, ambition is good. But many Objectives were set without the scaffolding of whether they were possible, plausible or probable. The OKR movement encourages team create OKRs that they think they only have a 70% chance of reaching. Everything is a stretch on the OKR pilates reformer machine. Which ends up being confusing for teams, with the underlying question: are we being set up to fail?
I suspect that Audacious will get downgraded to Ambitious.
Objectives Without Strategy
I’m not going to spend too long on this one because Roger Martin goes in deep but an Objective is not a Strategy. Understanding the situation is about more than just setting an objective. For too many organizations, setting a BHAG (Big Hairy Stupid Audacious Goal) as an Objective was considered a replacement for thinking around Where To Play and How To Win.
The OKR Jungle - External Disconnects
In theory, OKRs are all about organizational alignment. In practice, what many organizations end up with is a thicket of disconnected OKRs. Teams create OKRs but do not align their OKRs with each other. Remember Drucker’s third source of misdirection - groups not aligning with each other but only focusing on their local goals. Unless people from different teams talk to each other then inevitably there will not be alignment around OKRs. The OKR alignment process should force teams to talk horizontally across the organization. But too often, silos are simply rolled up to the top.
One Thing Does Not Lead To Another - Internal Disconnects
Even within OKRs themselves, it is not always clear that the Key Results will lead to the Objective. It is often less a roadmap and more a series of picnic spots on a hillside. This can be because the creation of OKRs is seen as a rote activity to be undertaken to meet a managerial request so little attempt is made to have a solid causal chain and people external to the team do not understand the nature of the business well enough to critique causal claims. In many organizations, action is prioritized over understanding.
Finally
I do think that conducted properly, OKRs can help organizations make sense of their situations and prioritize the actions they need to do. But I also think that they have been over-zealously sold and uncritically adopted. So I would encourage you to spend some time on your situation before leaping into action. If you haven’t checked the landscape, you may be leaping into a crevasse…
*I'm glad that we have finally established who is to blame.
Not The Situation we are looking for. He’d probably wrestle with something tho.
Nail on the head with this section:
"the creation of OKRs is seen as a rote activity to be undertaken to meet a managerial request so little attempt is made to have a solid causal chain and people external to the team do not understand the nature of the business well enough to critique causal claims. In many organizations, action is prioritized over understanding."
I've mostly seen the OKR template being used as a cover for cover for cohesive action and accountability in situations where there is no cohesion and where the participants in the OKR process are just paying lip service to the process - no belief or commitment.
Having read at least 100 business leadership books over time, I find the book Measure What Matters by Doerr where he introduces OKRs is as badly misinterpreted and applied as any other (not saying you did that here) Half the time I hear some leader talking, realize which book they are referencing, and then just wait 30 seconds for them to totally miss the point.
Doerr talks about how OKRs need to be aligned. In fact, so much of his book is about just that. But I found at a Tech SaaS I worked at....they trail mixed the book (only took the bits they liked or could understand) The actual hard work of coordination when by the wayside, and the goal of a BHAD meant that "If we don't make it, we'll just change it" So it became a circle-jerk every quarter.
I find almost all leadership falls victim to three main fallacies that I capture here. These fallacies are also the failure in application of all these books. And all these books are, by and large, trying to overcome these three falacies.
https://polymathicbeing.substack.com/p/direction-energy-and-accountability