Christina R Wodtke: Radical Focus
EPISODE 202
Radical Focus tackles the OKR movement and better goal setting through the powerful story of Hanna and Jack’s struggling tea startup. When the two receive an ultimatum from their only investor, they must learn how to employ Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) with radical focus to get the right things done. Will they be able to accomplish the few critical actions that will save their startup? Or will they end up mired in distractions and choices as their time runs out?
Christina Wodkta pulls from her experience with Silicon Valley’s hottest companies to teach practical insights on goal setting in fable form. How do you inspire a diverse team to work together, going all out in pursuit of a single, challenging goal? How do you stay motivated despite setbacks and failures?
Ready to move your team in the right direction? Read this book together, and learn Wodtke’s powerful system of decision-making to create your focus and find success.
INTRO
Christina and Chad Mcallister discuss the book and why it starts with a fable
The value of a good story (2m38)
HOW TO STRUCTURE
Weekdone calls out some problems and mistakes which are likely to happen to us all
How to avoid common problems (2m26)
Christina and Chad Mcallister give us what mistakes people commonly make, and tips to maximise our OKRs
3 common mistakes (2m18)
OUTRO
Christina talks to ‘What Matters’ on how you flow OKRs through your organization
Empowerment (3m01)
READING:
Fadical Focus: Christina R Wodtke
If you would like a short bite-sized read you can find it here on Blinkist.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the Moonshot's Podcast. It's episode 202. I'm your cohost, Mike Parsons, and as always, I'm joined by Mark Pearson Freeland. Good morning.
Good morning, Mike and listeners. It's a pretty exciting day today as we get into, not only show 202, but also episode two of our current series all about achieving your goals.
And that is a lot of twos, and I tell you what, numbers and accountability, measuring goals, objectives, and key results is what we're all about today.
That's right. Today, listeners and subscribers, we are diving into Christina Wodtke Key's Radical Focus, Achieving your Most important Goals with Objectives and.
Results. Mark. This OKR area, this movement, we began last week with John doerr's measure what matters and today we're now digging into almost like an extension, of OKRs and understanding a little bit more around how we can not only set them and do them correctly, but also some of the problems that maybe you and I and our listen.
Could encounter along the
way. Yeah. I think what's installed for us on this show is that almost Mark, it's in the title of Christina Wodtke’s book, Radical Focus, and I believe this may be one of the biggest reasons that we should all practice OKRs. Is, it really helps you determine, distinguish, define what really matters, and pour your heart and your soul into those things.
And what's on the other side of that is feeling deeply satisfied and fulfilled with your work. Cuz you're working on the right stuff, you're working on the good stuff, and as you plug away, you see yourself making progress, starting to get momentum. This is all on the other side of implementing, practicing and using OKRs.
That's a big promise mark,
isn't it? When you break it down like that, how many of us have sat either in our office or working from home and perhaps nervously or anxiously wondering, am I working, Am I prioritizing the right things? Am I working towards the common goal? Am I aligned with my managers or my teammates that.
Story that we can tell ourselves just leads to, I I guess a feeling of discomfort, doesn't it?
Yeah. How many times do we, have we found ourselves being in a team, going, What earth is that person doing? Or why are they taking the company in this direction? It's that, Lack of understanding or that disconnection between stakeholders.
It's such a nasty energy because let's be honest, Mark, if you're like, we're looking at the activities of one of your peers or the company overall, and you have serious confusion, doubts, misunderstandings about what they're doing, It's demotivating, isn't it?
It's entirely demotivating. It's demotivating for you.
What's possible is you'll then go and talk to maybe another colleague and say, Okay, hey, I just wanna double check. Am I doing the right thing? What's so and so working on Mark?
I think you're being too nice. I think you're like, What the hell am I doing here? Yeah, this place sucks. When is five o'clock?
I'll go down the pub. It takes your energy on the other side. If everyone is sailing in the same direction It's just got that magic about it. It's like watching Golden State Warriors play and you're like, These guys are gonna win. I can feel it. I can see it. Yeah. And they look so cohesive, so aligned.
And that in great businesses as well. When everybody's on the same page, all the boats sail in the same direction. The important thing is not only do you feel good, Mark, when you're clear on your own objectives and the results you need to get, but when you understand your peers, you can help them support them, and everybody can see how their contribution ladders up to the business achieving its.
I'm ready to jump in, Mark and hear from Christina Woodkey. Where should we start?
I think we, what we should do is lay the foundation for Chris Christina's book, Radical Focus by hearing from Christina herself. The book is actually orientated around a fable of a couple of individuals who are going out to start up a tea company.
What we're gonna hear now is actually Christina introducing the book and discussing why it starts with a fable, as well as the value of a good.
You wrote a book, A Radical Focus, achieving your Most important Goals with Objectives and key results, which sounds like it could be an OKR book. How is this different than other OKR
books?
It was the first OKR book , so I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, because I was definitely out there very early. I'd been, I had left to sing good and was helping some startups, and I just saw how useful OKRs were for everybody. So I thought, Oh, let's just put it into the world, see what happens.
And what happened is it sold rather well. And then, Lamar's book came out and John Doerr's book, of course, but my book is very different in that it starts with a fable, a story, and it's basically a fictional case study based on various startups I'd worked with. And I've just found that people learn really well from stories.
Not only that, they learn things that you don't even. Possibly intend to teach. I used a story to tell, teach about OKRs, but I've had people come up to me and say, Thank you for your book. I now know how to fire someone. is a pleasant, unexpected side effect. And then the second half, of course, is more of the very practical.
Here's exactly how you do it. And I think that's another way that mine is very different, is that a lot of business books are all stories of various things that people have done. You finish reading it and you're like, Okay, now what do I do? And my goal was always to say, Here are the best practices. It's not a religion.
You can do what you want, but these are the things that have been proven to be helpful.
I love that story aspect, right? Grounding and a fable. That was one thing I appreciated about the one minute manager and Hulu, my cheese and those sort of things a long time ago. Yeah. And crafting what you want to communicate in the fable.
I'm curious, since you did that, how has story shown up in your work are you a person that use a story to communicate, to reinforce
point? How do you do? Oh, I do it all the time. Even in industry, of course, I used it for more marketing purposes, but also just to get people excited to really accomplish difficult things.
So by telling stories of successes of times when you thought you were going to fail, it really helped the team stay motivated. And now that I'm a teacher, I actually teach story structure to my students because it's a very useful thing if you are even writing something as simple as a report or creating a narrative game.
There are lots of uses of story and of course I founded the nonprofit Women Talk Design that's now run by Daniel Barnes, and we teach story as a form of presentation because the goal of Women Talk Design has always been to get more women on stage. So story is part of every part of my life, I
guess.
Mark, she's a teacher, she's an author. She started a nonprofit. She's like the busiest woman in Silicon Valley, but. I just, the real power of this book, Radical Focus is in fact that it starts with a fable. Prior to getting into some of the practices we're gonna discuss, they mentioned the One Minute Manager, which is one of our favorite books.
But it also reminds me of Dan Millman's, The Way of the Peaceful. Warrior and Socrates, right? Yeah, that's right. One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard, as well as our peaceful warrior. You're right, These stories and these authors who released them, I think have cracked quite an interesting tactic. And the one that.
I'm particularly gonna focus on Christina's for a second. It is obviously Christina's, cuz we're looking at her book. I think the value of the story is that Christina's revealing, which is for those listeners who want to dig in a little bit deeper. It's a fictional story about Hannah and Jack who have a small tea supply company that almost fails and they have to learn how to grow that startup and eventually figure out the ultimatum to get a sole.
To go out and make some substantial changes. I think the point of utilizing Fable or a story to drive a narrative around practicalities on utilizing some of these frameworks and tools is that all of us, when we hear the story, can put ourselves into that situation and therefore go in one consistent direction.
I think when you are faced with maybe just a framework on a piece of paper, You might interpret it slightly differently to me, or maybe if I'm looking at a value proposition canvas, I might start in a different place to you. And I think the value and the power of Christina's book starting and being directed with this, let's say Fable, same with Ken Blanchard's woman manager in the Peaceful Warrior, is that it allows all of us to go in the same direction, which is funnily enough, exactly what the value of an OK.
A good set of OKRs is because it's driving us towards change in one consistent direction, isn't it? I'll tell you who else is enjoying all of those goals, objectives, and all of that direction from setting their North Star for shooting from the moon? Mark, that is all of our members.
Ah, that's right Mike.
And look, every week we're seeing our moonshots members and families grow. We've gotta make sure we still remember the individuals who have been with us, not one. Not two months, but 12 months, as well as all of our brand new members who join us each week. So without further ado, please welcome Bob, John, Terry, Ken and Dimar who've been with us for over a year.
Mike Gee. Then Marja and Connor, Rodrigo Yasin, Lisas. Sid, Mr. Bonura and Paul Bur, Calvin David and Joe Crystal and Ivo Christian, Hurricane Brain and Ella Kelly, Barbara, Bob and Andre, Matthew, Eric, Abby and Ho Joshua, Chris Kobe, Deborah Lasse. And Steve Craig. Lauren Javier. Daniel, Andrew, Ravi, Yvette, Karen Ann Raul, Welcome all of our patron members, our family.
Thank you for supporting us day in and day out, we can week out. Your help and assistance really does enable us to pay our bills and keep the moonshot chip going in a good direction. Yeah. Thank you
so much for your. Support. We're very grateful. And if you are listening right now and you're thinking, I'm digging this moonshot thing, I wanna shoot for the moon, I want some radical focus in my life, you can head to moonshot.io, click on the members button, and you get all sorts of goodies.
You get to be part of the team. You get to actually Listen to a whole other podcast that we do, the Moonshot's Master series, which I love doing with you, Mark. And you know what? Probably bringing it home is all that lunar powered good karma. So tap into it, head to moonshots.io. Hit the members button.
You can do it. It's literally the cost of one cup of coffee a month. That's it. And you can be a moonshots member. Now, whilst everybody is considering that mark and whilst they are charging their engines ready to hit their OKRs. There's a couple of challenges that you might face once you lean into accountability and setting goals, isn't there?
That's right. We started to really dig into OKRs with show 2 0 1 with John dos, Measure What Matters, and obviously we are focusing into Christina's book today, so for all our listeners and members who might be listening and thinking, Okay, I get it, I see the value. But I'm struggling to maybe get it off the ground, or maybe I've done it for a couple of months, maybe three months, and I, something's not right.
I feel like I'm running into a problem. Is that usual? Is it not usual? I'm not sure. Today, Mike, we're gonna really open up the box. Pandora's box into OKRs to really understand and uncover what those common problems and mistakes might be. So first of all, we're gonna hear from, again, another moonshot's favorite who we uncovered last time as well.
Week done, who's actually gonna go a little bit deeper into some of these problems and mistakes, and also reveal to you and I and our listeners how we can try and avoid common problems. Number
one, your objectives are too challenging or not challenging enough. You might think your team completing a hundred percent of their objectives is great.
However, you may be setting goals that are too easy. Objectives should be ambitious, but not too difficult. You should expect to achieve about 70 to 80% of a given objective in a quarter. Number two, not reviewing your OKRs on a regular basis. You and your team should update the progress of your key results regularly.
OKRs should be discussed every week, and it's suggested to create a weekly ritual around OKRs to review them with your. Otherwise, at the end of the quarter, you might find your way off track. Number three, you have too many objectives or key results. Too many objectives or key results can take the focus away from your priorities.
Teams should have a maximum of three objectives per quarter. With up to three to five key results per objective. That way the amount of work will be much more manageable and far less confusing. Number four, your key results are not measurable. Key results should be numeric. They're what makes your objective measurable.
It's important to remember. Objectives are your big ambitious goals. Key results measure the achievement of an objective. And weekly plans are the daily tasks and initiatives you do to reach your goals. Number five, not keeping the big picture in mind. This problem comes when personal objectives are not written to support team and company.
Or vice versa. Management should be communicating with team leads, the role they play in the bigger picture, and employees should understand how their activities help achieve team goals. Make sure to have a meeting when OKRs are created so you can move everyone in a unified direction.
Is a lot in that.
To unpack, Mark, the first thing for me is, This is not something when you write an OKR that you put it in the filing system, say, I'll come back to that in a quarter. I think particularly when you start out with these, you really need to actually return to your goals daily, weekly, worst case scenario every couple of weeks because you may have set wildly ambitious or.
The wrong goals. You need to be able to calibrate on that. And in that clip they were talking about potentially only having three OKRs. I'm gonna be pushing that and say, look, if you're starting out, set yourself one objective and a few key results and build from there. I would always look to make the habit change as small as possible to get the maximum effect.
You can always ladder up. Mark, what have you found when you think about OKRs and setting objectives for yourself, how do you review them? How do you keep yourself accountable to them? I think
the I think first of all, when you're setting some of these objectives, like we were just hearing in, in that clip, you wanted to be pretty ambitious and.
You wanna almost only be able to achieve 70%. I think a common mistake that I've seen with teams, including myself, will be setting a, an objective that. Is going to not be something you can reach at all. So a mistake. Yeah. Too ambitious. Just ridiculous, right? Yeah. Obviously,
And what happens, Mark when you have a goal that's just ridiculous.
What, how does it feel when you're way off? How,
how motivated does one feel when you are so way off, yeah. And what happens is it grows descent amongst colleagues, yeah. So and so's not pulling their weight. We've got this crazy target in mind. How are we gonna reach it? It's very not only disorienting, but pretty frustrating.
And that's not how you want your team to be. Is it? I think the value of a good OKR is to we've been discussing align, so having something that feels, ambitious. We wanna wake up in the morning and get going. Yeah. And work hard, but he's gotta, you've gotta be able to see, I think the end in sight.
And sometimes the mistake I've seen is having something so ambitious that you're never going to achieve it. And that's pretty. It's
disappointing. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that we saw that Tim Ferris really focused on is the reason a lot of people fail with personal transformation is, they say, Hey, I wanna lose like 40 pounds in a month.
Exactly. I, I want a six pack in six weeks.
I wanna run a marathon in four weeks.
Exactly. All of those things. Set yourself up for failure. I think on the measurable part, I really want to emphasize the measurable thing. So imagine, let's use a sales goal. We wanna increase sales for a business by 10%.
Like a key result for that would be to do five customer calls a day. That's a result. Okay. . Now what's really important about that was the, what we've done was emphasizing there, it needs to be measurable. If you had said, do lots of client calls how do you know if you're on track? Yes, exactly.
So this is really key. Cause what you can then do is say you know what, We actually. We actually need to do six calls a day because when we did five, we got a lift, but we didn't get 10% increase. We only got like a 6.5. So then you can start calibrating and fine tuning the business engine and your personal engine because you can, with that measureability, it becomes more black and white as to are we on track or not.
The other interesting thing that was in that clip was this idea of supporting the bigger goals. Yes, this is huge because if Mark, if what you. Are doing what I am doing in order to have our business to have our team achieve its overall goal. This is a really important connection point because let's play it out.
We could have very well written stretch goals and objectives with measurable key results, but they need to be working in harmony together. They need to have some synergy when you look at them together, you and I would contribute to the overall goal, said differently. Avoid a situation where everyone's got great OKRs, but they don't join together to get the result for the overall team or business.
, and actually this is really tricky because this is where you need to negotiate between different teams in a larger organization, how they contribute to the goal, how you as a smaller team within a larger organization contribute. And actually there's some trade offs here and maybe there's some co-dependencies.
I can achieve my goal. If you guys in the tech team don't give me some tech to do. So you see how there's this interconnectedness. Now, what's crazy, Mark is often without OKRs, we never talk about the dependencies within different segments of an overall company or different departments in a company.
We don't often have those discussions. So what OKR does is it triggers those discussions because you have to look at the businesses OKRs. Then each department's OKRs and then there's like this whole alignment practice that needs to happen. Once you have that as a kind of a conversation as a language.
And building on something you've just said, Mike, around waiting on maybe another team having a dependency unless you have this moment of alignment where everybody can. Either review where their teams are going, I can review how my small team is playing a part. I think what happens and probably happens particularly in maybe larger age, in larger businesses, but I'm sure happens in smaller ones as well, if you don't have opportunities to.
Review the objectives as well as the K that some of these teams are working on for the greater good. You look towards another team, and I think again, you get pretty frustrated with them. You say, Oh so and so hasn't delivered the tech that I need in order to go and achieve my work. How come?
Why not? Yeah. And maybe the tech team weren't really aware that they needed, or maybe they're working on it, but they didn't realize how urgent it was because you can't do anything until you actually have what they need to deliver. And then all of a sudden that would lead to maybe we need to change the OKRs, cuz the work that tech team's gotta do.
Quite a lot, and so we can't assume we're gonna have it day one. It's gonna come in 60 days, but that's where you start to get the alignment and then you're working together. Then you become more cohesive, then you become more aligned. It's pretty good, right? Once you see how this starts to calibrate individuals and teams.
It's pretty powerful stuff, isn't it? That's
right. In that clip we were hearing about having these ambitious objectives, re reviewing them regularly, I think is their key piece here, isn't it? That's the trick to being and staying aligned, not only with your team and maybe the greater broader business, but also with yourself.
And look, Mike, I'm guilty of it. I'm guilty. Having OKRs set and maybe deprioritizing the opportunity to review them and see how I'm tracking in favor of business as usual. I'll put it to one side. I know it's important. We're doing a show on moon shots all about it. We know it's important, but I need to go and deliver X so I'll deprioritize it this week.
That's, I think, gonna be one of most common. Occurrences.
Yeah, it reminds me, strangely, this is gonna be a bit tangent or Mark and so you can think, what is he talking about, ? But it reminds me with getting things done how Dave Allen says look, basically your head is not designed to hold all this information, right?
So yes, you need to have lists and to dos and tasks and so forth. I think as humans, I think business as usual is rather tempting. Isn't. Oh, I
mean, it really it's one of the things that you and I, when we work together, we often see, isn't it? Yeah. Businesses get into patterns. We also, the habits, the things that we pick up on, if they're positive, is 1% better every day.
If they're negative, it's probably gonna be 1% worse every day. in the words of James, Clear? Yeah.
I think what we do is it becomes really. Cozy and comfortable just to say, Oh I'm busy, am I? But you don't really ask question, am I working on the right things? Exactly. Am I delivering enough value?
Yeah. So you can coast a little bit. And I think if we admit to ourselves, that's human nature. Just to take the foot off a little bit and What OKRs do is give you a vehicle that's objective, to give yourself a little bit of pepper, a little bit of zest to get back on and actually push yourself a little bit.
Otherwise, it's very easy to say, Hey, yeah, I had a busy week, but you haven't really thought about. Am I really focused on the things that matter? Have I created as much value as I could? And for me on the other side of this is wrapping up the week. Feeling deeply satisfied because, you really put in some good work.
You, you gave things a good nudge on your OKRs. , And I think if you use OKRs, I actually believe that. Experiencing deeper satisfaction and fulfillment in your work is one of the side effects of what seems like quite, quite a clinical approach to your work or to your personal life by setting, objectives and key results.
I think actually there's a lot of wellbeing on the side. On the other side of this. I,
I totally agree. I think one of the. Effects of some of these problems that we're hearing is that people feel as though they aren't satisfied. Yeah. Oh, I haven't reached it. Maybe it's too ambitious, or, Oh, I haven't reviewed them.
Therefore, I'm not sure whether I'm working on the right work. I think that's gonna be the key benefit that you and I and all of our listeners can take away from the idea of utilizing OKRs because you feel reassured. At the end of the week when you come together with your colleagues and you review them and say, Oh, maybe you do it by yourself.
Have I have, I worked on stuff this week that was positive. Oh, this is great. I'm so far closer towards that big, ambitious objective of mine. I feel great, and that happiness, that wellbeing, that confidence that I think can come with knowing that you're working on something that really matters. Is undeniable, isn't it?
If you have the the road paved with we are learning about OKRs, if you've paved it in the right direction, it is quite a relief,
isn't it? And I think we're so into this idea of self-accountability being like, So liberating. We're gonna listen now to Christina Woodkey also talking about from her experience, what she's seen as the common blockers, the common mistakes people have when trying to use OKRs.
Set and forget is probably the most common mistake people make. They spend a lot of time getting the exact words of the okr perfect. And they take too much time doing that. And then they don't have the weekly meetings, And if you skip the weekly meetings, you're gonna forget what your OKRs are and they're just not gonna happen.
So why would you spend so much time getting your language just perfect to just. Not follow up on it. That feels very silly to me. And I would say bad or quickly written OKRs that are, that you have Monday and Friday meetings about are gonna be significantly more successful. For example, I have a group of women, small group of women who we sent our OKRs to each other, and I had this one woman, she was like, I don't know, I haven't set them yet, but I'm thinking about doing this.
And within the last two years of us sending each other our OKRs. And she never sent an okr, but she would talk about what she was trying to do and what she was thinking about every Monday we sent these out and she ended up leaving her current profession, going independent, doing the same job, realizing she was better for another job, and now has a full slate of clients doing her own company.
And it was just because she constantly touched base and remembered, Oh wait, I don't want to be stuck in this job forever. I don't want to be unhappy doing my everyday work. So I think holding to the cadence is really important. It's good if you can write good OKRs, but it's almost less important than just constantly reminding yourself you want better.
So that's one big. For sure. I think too many people use OKRs as product management. Get those tasks out. They belong in a roadmap. They belong in a pipeline. I'm a huge fan of pipelines rather than roadmaps, because then you have a long list of potential products. Projects, excuse me, and then you're rating them.
Based on impact and effort and confidence is actually going to work. And then when you say, Okay, what are we gonna try next? Move our numbers. You have this, robust list of things you could be doing with a roadmap. I think you often get overcommitted to, we have to do this at this time, and then the OKRs and the projects drift away from each other.
And that's what I've been seeing a lot. And then, like I said, the last one is, Our OKRs is the magic silver bullet that will fix everything in our company. And the answer is no. No, they really aren't.
Mike, we are hearing again some great mistakes, or let's call them misinterpretations right? Of utilizing this framework.
And I really wanna just dig into something that Christina said there, which was more in the first tip that she was breaking down, which is remembering. Your early decisions, that accountability to refer back to where you were when you were planning them. Which then avoids in my mind the emotions that can come with the business as usual work.
Yeah. So to, to say it differently, if you are focused and you build this f. Alongside your colleagues perhaps, and you know what you're gonna go and work on. If you can then go back and refer to them in order to almost remind yourself, Hey, remember this is what you're working towards. This is the big goal.
You can then realize when you're getting a little bit off track, maybe something's pulling you in a direction that. Taking you away from that big goal and that objective, then you can catch yourself and say, Oh, hang on. No, I don't wanna go and do this because, oh, I'll go in the wrong direction.
I'll waste a lot of time. Let me bring myself back towards that North Star. And I think that's where the real benefit can come in, where that confidence. That you are working on the right things, that you feel happy with the decisions that you're making, whether they're personal or work orientated. I think that's the big takeaway from Christina's lessons there for me.
How about you?
Yeah, it was interesting to listen to her is it seems like the positioning of OKRs is really important, that it's a good way of working out what matters. It's a good way of working out where are we going to? But it is not the roadmap of how we are getting there. And don't try and put everything in there.
She's saying it's not the be all and end all. And I think it's almost like here's a vision of where we are going. And then under that is your pipeline, your list of ideas or your initiatives. And they, those initiatives can be reorganized according to your objectives and key results. We were using this example of.
Hey we need something from the tech team. Maybe it could be decided, Oh, let's just use a SAS service so we can get it off the shelf and start immediately, and we'll deprioritize that for the tech team so they can work on other things, right? . Yep. That's an example there, but the decision on a project level is a separate.
Entity to that of the OKRs. OKRs are objectives. Where are we going? The vision, the what does success look like? But it's not how we are getting there. This is like a simple binary frame. Is it measurable? Do we make five calls a day? Six calls a day? What is behind that are all of the initiatives, projects, and to dos.
And I think what she's really saying to us is, let this be a guide. Let this be the lighthouse that shines to you, a place in the future of where you're going to always measures yourself against that. But it is not the project management tool. Yes. To be very simple here is not the actual project management tool because what in the end, what ends up happening is a bit like the dysfunction we have with our email.
We let email become our work prioritization tool, right? , we manage our effort and energy often. By email, and that's why Kount Newport wrote a book. Imagine a World Without Email, right? Yeah. Email is not designed to be workflow management prioritization introduced. However, most people are using it that way.
In the same way, OKRs are not your project management roadmap. They are your objectives, Your vision of where you're going and separate from that will be all of the initiatives that you're gonna have in order to get.
We briefly mentioned David Allens getting things done earlier. It's also reminding me, Mike of Atul Gowans the Checklist Manifesto.
Oh yeah. That is one of the tools, specifically Todoist, which was inspired by the Checklist Manifesto is such a valuable tool that I utilize alongside some of these other framework. That we've been discussing with pipelines, with OKRs, I don't think any of them are one stop shops, I guess you could call them.
One product that has absolutely everything. One framework that can answer all of your wildest dreams, right? I think, yeah. The truth that we're learning here is you need to utilize them in the right way and stack them up alongside. Other frameworks, tools, processes, systems in order to go out And be able to deliver,
isn't it?
Yeah. And I think, I spend so much time personally looking at, checklists, templates, tools Setting OKRs for myself, working with companies and helping them set them for themselves. It's all about finding the tool set, the stack of tools. Yeah. That work for you? I think for sure.
Having a vision. Of who you want to be as an individual, Having a vision of where your company is going to in the future. Having the means to measure that in OKRs, super important. And then you've got all of your templates, you've got your todos, you've got your jurors, your confluences, whatever's managing the how you work, and then the initiatives that, that's roughly the landscape that I see us all working in.
. And you just gotta play with what works for you. And if you are thinking about what works for you, you could also think about leaving a review or a rating of our lovely podcast, Mark. That's
right. Listeners and subscribers. We need your help. The way that moon shots can get into the ears of listeners from around the world and help us all learn out loud together, which is what we're all.
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It really does make an enormous difference and we can see the effect that it's already having. I can see all of our listeners who are rating us in Spotify, for example. The numbers are going up. So thank you very much for those who have already left us a rating or review. Let's keep it
going and let's think.
Kung fu boy number 10, who left a review for us very recently in Apple podcasts. Once again, the amazing Twitter handle and username are striking. Kung fu boy 10 like a hurricane brain right up there. Thank you so much for your ratings and your reviews. If if you're sitting.
Listening to the show right now, Open up the app, give us a thumbs up, leave us a review. We deeply appreciate it. And while you are doing that, sit back, relax, and enjoy this last clip from Christina Woodkey, the author of Radical Focus. And let's really take a step back to remember what OKRs are all about.
So how do you flow OKRs through or down across an
organization that big? Yeah. You don't. There was a answer, . I end up hearing a lot of stories about OKRs for some reason, and I was told the story about when. There was a CEO who really believed in OKRs, who went to Yahoo and, but also was a little bit of someone who wanted a lot of control, and so this individual wanted to check every single department's OKRs, but at that scale, it took about a month plus, which meant that.
Four times a year, the people were in limbo. They weren't sure what they should do. They didn't know what their targets were. And this certainly didn't serve Yahoo, which is a company that is very dear in my heart having been there and the Yahoo days which I, back in the original Yahoo people What you have to do is hire really well, fire very swiftly, give constant feedback.
And then if you have these amazing people who are constantly becoming more amazing, the company can set their OKRs than they can trust everybody else to do alignment. And again, I was talking about it as look at the company, ask yourself, what are I gonna do it? . If it's department it should be like 24 hour turnaround.
Like people give themselves too much time to get in their heads. So it's okay, we're hitting the end of the quarter. We're gonna call the OKRs. I'm sorry. I know you're convinced you're gonna get that one sale that's gonna make you next week, but tough. We're calling 'em right now. We're doing our learning.
We're doing our retrospectives. We're gonna set it and hopefully the company will set it very quickly and that everybody else can say, What does this mean to me? . And that does mean that there might be some moments where the head of a business unit has to talk to a team and say your OKR doesn't quite match ours.
But that's actually faster than looking at every single one and saying, We'll get back to you with feedback. It's better to say, if we don't get back to you within a week, go to town. It's on us. , it's our fault and we trust you to make good decisions. You gotta let go and letting go is really hard.
And people have time being let go. Not in the fired way, but I, again, I'm gonna, speak to you as a vc. I, my I have a couple of really good friends who are in the investing space and they say, sometimes startups are looking for a boss. They just want somebody to tell them it's okay to do this and it's not okay to do that.
And a VC's not your boss. They're the person who believes in you and is betting on you, which means you have to learn how to be your own boss, which means that. When somebody comes to you, the manager, and says to you, Okay what should my OKRs be? You have to sit back and go what do you think they should be?
You just have to keep turning it around until people start building the habit of being empowered.
Mike. I think that's the key takeaway, isn't it? , as we reach the end of diving into Christina Wood key's radical focus, it's about the empowerment that can come with a good set of OKRs that you feel are not only correct for you, but also ladder up to the greater picture for your team as well as for the business.
Absolutely. I believe it. It just makes things so simple. You're getting on the same page and over time, you really, truly can fill not only empowerment for yourself, but the people that are working around you. Once they embrace the accountability and the clarity that comes from o okays, they'll become confident, self-motivated, self-directed, and there's a whole lot of good things on the other side of.
So hopefully Mark we've actually taken the inspiration from John Doer and got insanely practical today for our listeners to really help them uncover how to do OKRs properly. If there was one takeaway for you, if there was one thing that you would emphasize to anybody trying an okr, what would it be?
I think for me, week done, did a great breakdown or the five. Classic or key problems or mistakes that people often run into, but the one that he really caught out as the fifth problem that he identified was the fact that you need to keep the bigger picture in mind. Yeah. The fact that you were working towards a shared goal.
I think that is the big takeaway for me because it's probably very easy for all of us to go into our own self reflect. Place and think about what we want to go and achieve. But unless you've got that bigger picture in mind, I, you're never necessarily gonna know whether you're working on the right stuff.
And that's the key discomfort that I think can come from it. What about you, Mike? Which one is the big one? Key lesson that you're gonna go away and start trying to implement or teach others? Oh,
I like to emphasize that the results must be measurable. I recently received some OKRs from some folks that I work with, and they were like, Install this set up that I don't know how to measure that , so if we're gonna improve sales, if that's the objective, then make five extra calls a. Okay. How many calls did you make yesterday? Four. Okay. What is it gonna take to get to five? The measurability thing is huge for me and something that sounds incredibly simple and it really is in the end of the day, but it's almost like the discipline to stick with it, isn't it, man?
Yeah, it's the discipline. Stick with it. As well as to review it every week to make sure that you are being held accountable to it, isn't it? Totally. It's like anything, as long as we refer back, then we know that we are on that right path.
Mark, thank you to you. Thank you to our listeners and members as we gathered here today for show 202 listening to Christina Woodkey.
The author of Radical Focus, it started with a fable, but he got insanely practical. We talked about how to avoid the common problems with OKRs, reviewing them regularly, making them measurable, and remembering those all about the big picture. It's not the be all and end all, but it'll set your North Star.
And if you do that, Christina told us there would be a huge story of empowerment, of satisfaction and fulfillment on the other side of that. And that is what we're about here on the Moonshot's Podcast Being the best version of yourself. Learning out loud together and really hitting our objectives and key results.
All right. That's a wrap.