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- The 2 Laws of OKR Self-Sabotage
Imagine this:
You’ve just finished co-creating a great OKR set with your team. You are confident its great because you followed all the best practices from that viral OKR thread:
It’s in sync with strategy.
You actively involved your team throughout.
It has some pretty ambitious Key Results targets.
According to the social media experts, all you need to succeed is unleash your amazing team on the tasks that will deliver the OKRs right?
Not quite.
Good HR intentions can cripple your OKRs.
It all starts when Harry from HR, casually suggests:
“What if we use OKRs for performance appraisal?’
This suggestion triggers two things to happen simultaneously. All the effective managers in the room collectively choke on their capucinnos and the naïve leaders beam at the suggestion. Why these totally opposite reactions?
But what’s wrong with the suggestion?
Every effective manager instantly recognises that Harry from HR’s innocent question as a trigger of a series of unfortunate events that guarantee the certain death of OKRs within 9 months.
There are two laws that explain the corrupting effect of (directly) using OKRs for performance appraisal:
Goodhart’s Law
Campbell’s Law
The later explains the former.
Goodhart’s Law:
”When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.”
Goodhart’s Law
Those stretch Key Results targets you convinced the team to agree might have the unintended consequence of sabotaging excellence. And it’s because of the second law.
Cambell’s Law.
"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
Let’s translate the effect of these two laws into OKRs:
Replace “social indicator” with “Key Results”
Replace “social decision making” with “Performance Appraisal”
Replace “social processes” with “organisational performance”
"The more [OKR] Key Results are used for performance appraisals, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the organisational performance it is intended to monitor."
Boom!!! That’s why Harry’s suggestion is so dangerous.
It transforms OKRs from something that aligns and focuses a team on a common mission into a driver of individualism and politics.
Some individuals (the good politicians) will win
Some individuals will lose
The team will lose
The organisation will lose
That’s why HR — despite their good intentions, is the natural enemy of OKRs.
4 Anti-Goodhart Strategies for Managers
Before launching OKRs, collaborate with HR to re-design the performance appraisal process thus:
❌ Don’t use individual OKRs.
❌ Don’t use raw OKR scores to appraise performance.
✅ Do set performance goals based on leading indicators
✅ Do use continuous feedback on OKR commitments as inputs to performance appraisal process.
Track both lagging and leading indicators for each OKR, and make it OK to change leading indicators if they’re no longer reliable signals of progress.
Place higher emphasis on weekly checkin & end-of cycle retrospective than the OKR score. The process is always more important that the result.
Be a better MANAGER to your direct reprots (ease off the leadership cool-aid):
Discuss OKR in 1:1s (plans, progress, problems)
Give behaviour-based feedback their commitments
Coach to regularly develop new skills & capabilities
Delegate outcomes to enable them grow & create capacity.
That is how to prevent your OKR program —- which starts with pomp and enthusiasm —from degenerating into full-blown OKR drama that fuels your slide to Mediocristan).
Until next time ... be BRILLIANT! 💎
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