People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process. It's not a problem specifically with OKRs, it's a problem with the whole concept that if HR can just put in this one simple system then doing so will be magically motivational and the whole company will go to ludicrous speed.
There is no replacement for good people. Not in leadership positions, and not in IC positions. Recruit for strengths, hire for culture, train for gaps. No process, least of which OKRs, can make up for recruiting weak people, people who don't fit your culture, or people not interested in personal growth (i.e. filling gaps).
The first time my company decided to implement OKR's I told my manager that I'm already motivated by my own standards, and using OKR's as a carrot on a stick that I know it's deliberately and exclusively out of range is absurd.
He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.
I worked at a company where every year we'd decide we were going to do OKRs or something similar, and we "were going to do it right this time".
We'd spend weeks in meetings coming up goals and things we could measure, and end up with something like, "increase foo from X% to Y%". Here, "foo" is a placeholder for something or other, but the X and Y are not. We would literally leave them as variables, under the impression we'd fill them in eventually.
A year later, we'd look at them again and see that we never filled in the numbers. Then repeat. It was pretty wild.
My struggle at work is usually _reducing_ my standards for quality, performance and customer satisfaction to match those of management & colleagues, because caring more than everybody else is a recipe for burnout.
I've worked with people that say the same thing, and they are usually very smart and high functioning.
These type of people really need to work on their own startup where they can dictate the quality of work vs selling the product. It's the only way they will understand how to make the compromise between high standards and other long term product decision consequences.
I find the out of range goals to be very demotivating. During the quarter they will hold our collective noses to the grindstone telling us to get this stuff done and hit certain dates and numbers. Then maybe once a year they will say they don’t expect us to hit any numbers that are set, in typical OKR fashion.
If a game is setting me up to fail, I don’t want to play that game. My productivity has gone in the toilet ever since our management started pushing their brand of OKRs.
I don't understand, isn't your team coming up with your OKRs yourself? If you have a manager who is assigning you OKRs, that's a management problem.
In all the teams I been in we have whiteboard sessions where come up with ideas. Then we slowly move ideas into the ones we want to work on, our Objectives.
Then for those Objectives, we set a qualifier to determine if that thing was done, the Result. Next we rank these Objective/Results by priority and we remove ones that will probably not get done, boom OKRs. Not difficult.
Our OKRs are being dictated to us from several levels of management above us, who don't really understand what we even do. I know how it should work, but it's not the reality I currently live in, which is all part of the demotivation.
I see this type of backlash against process a lot here. But I don't think 'just good people' is the answer. A lone hero can do a lot, maybe a band of them kick real ass, but it doesn't really scale beyond that nor does it last. Furthermore, even the best make silly mistakes, you need to have a lot of mechanisms to both prevent and mitigate against the consequences of failure if that is important to your business.
Just imagine operating a hospital on the maxim that you 'only' need good people and process is evil. I know this is a bit of a straw man, I just want to make it clear that eradicating all process in favor of 'good people' isn't the answer.
So what is? A good process can really help a lot in working together. I've worked with a mix of medium to good people, who continuously adapted the process to make it work and it helped, a lot. Medium people can do good work. And good people don't have as many obstacles.
It is essential that the people who are responsible for executing also have the mandate of adopting or at least adapting a process to their context. A good process can save a lot of brain cycles and prevent all kinds of organizational waste. Its like automating away a lot of the overhead of working together and achieving goals collectively.
But if the script doesn't work for a use case or with certain parameters, you better change it or just not run it to a fault.
I'm not trying to say all process is bad and I'm not sure where you got that from my comment. So to clarify: instituting process only makes sense when you have consensus across teams that need to collaborate with each other on what that collaboration is supposed to look like. In other words, process only makes sense when people agree on what needs to be done and what to do. In a hospital setting, processes can be tremendously helpful in ensuring that supplies are restocked, that someone is always on-shift, that patients can be transferred from one department to the next without needing to know who exactly is on-shift. There is consensus on which supplies are needed and that departments need to have people on-shift. Mission clarity is almost built-in: patients need to be treated, and that treatment needs to happen as quickly as possible after it is determined that the treatment is necessary.
Performance evaluation, a lot of the time in corporate environments, but especially in engineering, has no such consensus. It is not even possible to achieve such consensus when people are not clear on what they are supposed to do, which is because the business is not clear on what it is supposed to do, which is actually a good thing because we learned, decades ago, that making year-long plans in an attempt to achieve that clarity ended up ossifying businesses instead of letting them be responsive to market conditions.
So no, most businesses are not like hospitals, where the notion of "responsive to market conditions" is completely ludicrous when demand is inelastic, prices outpace inflation year-over-year, most customers are dissatisfied with value-for-cost, and there is almost no accountability to the customer with the rare exception of malpractice suits.
I'm not sure your idea of "No Processes" works at significantly large orgs. Sure, hiring the best and filling gaps works on small/medium orgs, but once you get to 3k+ (Made up number) I find it hard that this will work.
No matter how hard you try you will never get the best people, and may not even want that. Sometimes you just need soldiers and soldiers need process.
I think everything just has to be a large arbitrary tree of branches, with tasks going into subtasks until they are small bites enough to be divided amongst teams. Then you measure how these tasks are going and if required you change the tasks or branches.
Everyone can move around the tree to see which team is responsible for which task and how any task on the whole is progressing.
Well, that is quite top-down and organized. If it works, then great. But I wouldn't push everything into such a plan.
On the other hand, I've worked in such a disconnected 'bottom-up' org that after about 8 years, finally the CEO told us he didn't like the business model we had been developing and specializing in. The end result was like 90% of senior devs resigned. We were clueless. Maybe a little goal setting would have helped?
I haven't ever seen anything like I described implemented the way I'd like to see if and the way I think it would work, so maybe it wouldn't work, but intuitively it would make most sense to me and I can personally imagine it working.
Couldn't agree more. It's a fantasy that there is a magic wand or a system that can make anything and anyone efficient and productive at everything. I agree with the author, some process is needed to have a group of people on the same page, but it's not the driver of good results.
In my experience, these ideas - broadly detailed processes, not just OKRs - are pushed very strongly by ambitious people who don't want to actually work or get good at something. So they push the idea that we should have processes everywhere that solve problems on their own.
I think this is mostly the case except that it’s not about weak people, personal growth or even mostly about culture. If people aren’t willing to go the extra mile for you, that’s on you honestly. If you’re incentivising and looking after your people they’ll feel like they have a stake and be personally invested.
I don’t think anyone would argue that investment banks have great culture from the outside or be motivating their people by the virtues of their higher purpose etc. but the incentives are there, and they work very effectively to get people’s commitment.
> People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process.
As much as anything else, standardization & bureaucratization & Taylorism are most generally forces of stability & predictability & control. A well.managed company does not go extra miles. It goes exactly as many miles as the company said it would. If everything is working well.
In bad times and in desperation, extra miles are what keep things together, what plugs leaks and patches tares.
I believe so strongly in extra miles, in going overboard, and pouring in extra. In making things better than they had to be. But these extra miles are, in my view, owned & done by individuals. Extra miles are what competent happy craftspeople do when they are enjoying their craft; embellishing & exceeding.
The extra mile is almost always a person's own thing. It is almost never something management or the org can pursue. The org can set conditions: create space & permission & happiness. And when these positives align, then we see real extra miles.
> There is no replacement for good people.
And giving them time and space to put in some extra miles.
Same thing with SCRUM or all the other bullshit that people who can not actually bring anything to the table use to justify their payroll, while only making things worse for anyone else involved.
SCRUM is a great starting point for a team with dependable and medium to high performing members. It's important to remember that it is not a rigid framework, it is a starting point and a process to iterative improve the process. At some point you transcend SCRUM as we know it, and completely own the process. But there is not consultants salaries or SAFe in that, nor is management often completely on board with it, which means it is doomed from from the start, or at the very least crippled - earning the nickname "SCRUM-but"
If you view SCRUM as a rigid framework, you've already surrendered and completely missed the point of agile in general.
Just because something was formulated once, does not mean it's not evolving and not improving with learning and new findings. It's nearly 30 years old at this point. The SCRUM guide is vague, and only provides basic roles, event, and definitions. The SCRUM alliance explicitly state that SCRUM is a starting point, and following the Shu Ha Ri principle a good team will eventually transcend the starting point. But you need to be disciplined when starting and learn it as it is defined.
In my experience the main issue with SCRUM is actually with the team members. Either they're not dependable or too low performing to be give the freedom and self-management it requires to succeed, and management is not willing to foster the necessary environment and/or get the right people.
Also, every time some new-manager-on-the-block decides that we have to implement "agile" everything just goes downhill from there.
I don't even know what "agile" means anyway, what about "nimble" or "dextrous" instead, as long as people are not understanding each other, they all mean "let's fuck shit up every 2 weeks"
To me agile brings up a picture of Jean-Claude van Damme doing the splits.
Because that’s what it feels like trying to manage expectations from management va stakeholders whilst also having daily meetings to discuss our effort and how we can remain lean and agile all the while building up tech debt
People can for sure be motivated be simply, standardized processes, such as a % of revenues as commission. However, not everyone gets motivated that way and organizations could use different processes in places or also just say: we only want people motivated by X.
There is no replacement for good people. Not in leadership positions, and not in IC positions. Recruit for strengths, hire for culture, train for gaps. No process, least of which OKRs, can make up for recruiting weak people, people who don't fit your culture, or people not interested in personal growth (i.e. filling gaps).