Transcript

MYLES OGILVIE:

OKRs, they stand for Objectives and Key Results. If you read publicly what that stands for, we refer to them as Outcomes and Key Results because it's more clear. It helps people to focus on the outcome rather than the particular milestone or goal. So thinking about the outcome and how you will measure that outcome. And with key results, we advise you separate them into leading and lagging indicators.

And that is a super important ninja move for people trying to measure value to separate your key results into leading and lagging indicators. Traditional projects benefits management have usually focused on lagging indicators. Benefits realization, stuff that happens after the project is completed. So they're absolutely useless telling you whether you are building the right thing because they don't materialize until the project is completed. And if you built the wrong thing, they never materialize.

So lagging indicators is the impact the value you hope will arise, having made your investment, but the leading indicators are the super powerful ones. So that is where you're looking at behavioral change. The shift, for example, when Uber is coming to life, you're having a shift in behavior of people from instead of hailing taxis, they're now keying for them on their phone. That's a behavioral shift which has happened because of what that organization did.

And that you can start to measure that behavioral shift in terms of what it is that your enabling. If you enable a small slice of value, are you seeing some behavioral shift as a result of that value, that thing being deployed? So this could be if you are thinking of a new offering, a new student course, for example, are you pitching that on the internet? Are you detecting the downloads?

Are you detecting the interest levels? What's the smallest slice of behavioral feedback you can get to detect whether the thing that you're trying to do is heading in the right direction, is of use. And so that's your leading indicators. And if you have enough leading indicators, then they should start.