Why OKR doesn’t work
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.
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.
