What matters now?

How to use Objectives and Key Results to narrow your focus on what matters and overcome your fear of failure.

What matters now?

Baltimore, Maryland 2019 — Mural by Escif

If you are reading this now you are probably taking a renewed look at what you find important, thinking about your past routines and wondering what the future holds for you. You may come to the realization that you might not have ever had a destination in the past; you were along for the ride -secure in the thought that hard work would somehow payoff and all you had to do was hustle. That mindset lacks direction and sadly, before we were all forced to stop and pause, it permutated popular culture along with the belief that everyone who was somehow in charge of charting direction, navigators if you will worked harder and held all the answers — in short there was a sort of blind faith that the system would take care of you and that the way things were would be the way they would always be. Surprise things don’t work that way and blind velocity in the wrong direction will get you far but the result may not be what you expected.

Right now maybe the best time to look into a goal setting framework to give yourself and your company direction and focus attention on what matters. I don’t know about you but I’ve found that saying no and singular focus on the main objective is critical for success. This is even more important for those in a leadership position as you are carrying more than yourself so you have a responsibility to those following you to do your best to stay the course.

As a bonus, the framework described below will create a culture where ideas from those that are actually doing the work can surface and shape the business. If done right you will find the team focused on a singular goal but like all frameworks it’s not a cure-all for underlying issues and if anything it will only exacerbate these issues. Remember there are no silver bullets or shortcuts so let’s dive in.

I would like to introduce you to Objectives and Key Results or OKRs for short, which is a system that I’ve used to achieve alignment across teams towards a common goal focusing more on the main takeaways that I’ve learned and less on the history and origins (for that check out John Doer’s site What Matters or Google’s ReWork site).

The Basics

These are important, I believe that making a mistake in any one of these areas will at best just derail your goal setting initiative and at worst change behaviors in ways that you never could have expected.

  • The line from our OKR training that resonated the most with me is that objectives are “where you want to go” and key results capture “how you are going to get there”. Do your OKRs reflect this?
  • Objectives and Key Results are aspirational — we’ve all heard the saying — shoot for the moon and even if you miss you’ll land among the stars — your objectives should be a moonshot. Why is this hard? Fear of failure — it’s natural most people have an aversion to failure, however, in an ironic twist it’s that fear that prevents them from dreaming bigger and making the big bets that may not pay off but if they do they would be life changing.
  • Objectives and Key Results are not fire and forget — you will need to have check-in’s and track progress — there is no substitution for clear and open communication! Think of it like this, if you are trying to PR a race time — you will certainly track your speed as you train weekly and not just before race day — after all how would you correct your course during training without that constant feedback.
  • Objectives and Key Results are not meant to capture the “business as usual” or day to day tasks. This is another area where I’ve seen issues as everyone tries to capture all of the work that a team is doing in the Key Results, remember this is not to be used for capacity planning.
  • Key Results need to be quantifiable, however, through this exercise you will come to a quick realization — you don’t know the baseline numbers! Data without context is meaningless so you will find yourself inevitably working through a quarter maybe two grinding out baseline metrics when you would rather be making improvements. Don’t despair and don’t give up!

Careful

You will need to assess your current leaders. Be honest with yourself here — not everyone will be able to embrace OKRs without changing how they view those who work for them and the importance of the work they do. I’ve never seen anything innovative come from being overly prescriptive and rigid. If this is how your teams operate now then you may find that not only will this exercise be difficult because it forces you to define only what matters it will test your leaders ability to trust their teams.

I hope you are curious enough now to look into this framework and start focusing on what matters now.

By Joshua McDonald on June 25, 2020.

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Exported from Medium on August 26, 2026.