Why OKR doesn’t work

ALTUĞ BİLGİN ALTINTAŞ
2 min readSep 8, 2022

--

The OKR is a nice approach to combining strategy and operations, but the OKR approach might negatively impact your organization’s ability to learn.

Today, being a learning organization has become more important than anything else because it is necessary to constantly learn in order to be able to solve the problems encountered in order to meet the ever-changing customer demands and produce solutions to these problems.

Contrary to popular belief, it is essential to become a learning organization beyond being Agile.

From what I’ve observed, the use of results-oriented OKR can undermine the organization’s most valuable asset: continuous learning.

OKR types — Thanks to Katie Anderson

With the process-oriented OKR, you can detect where there are errors in the process steps, take precautions, and solve the problems by constantly learning at the end of the work.

Result-oriented OKR, on the other hand, has a logical output. Have the goals been achieved? Or not ? If it succeeds, you are great, but within the organization there is no information on how this is achieved so this success does not become sustainable.

Organizations working with result-oriented OKRs will have less ability to learn continuously than organizations using process-oriented OKRs.

OKR is very popular and should be used very carefully. The problem is not in the OKR approach but in not looking at the goals through the lens of the process with PDCA cycles.

Valuable information is hidden within the processes. Be aware of your processes and constantly improve them.

Thanks.

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

--

--

ALTUĞ BİLGİN ALTINTAŞ
ALTUĞ BİLGİN ALTINTAŞ

Written by ALTUĞ BİLGİN ALTINTAŞ

Business Agility lover, TDD guy, clean coder, non-stop learner.

Responses (2)

Write a response