So what exactly do OKRs represent? Are they a reflection of your vision, strategy? mission perhaps? Or are they something else entirely? - Its taken me some years to fully form this answer. For the longest time I couldn’t reconcile how Vision, Mission, Values, Strategy and OKRs work together. What follows is how I think about this topic today.

To me, the Primary purpose of OKRs is Strategy Deployment. Strategy deployment is the process of aligning all functions / activities in a company with its strategic objectives. With this definition in mind, you can start filling in some of the details:

1. Mission, Vision, Values and Business Strategy are all inputs to OKRs

2. OKRs are a reflection of the strategy at your level of the org

3. OKRs do not include tactics / projects or specific tasks

To make OKRs work well as a Strategy Deployment device:

1. Start with a clear articulation of the Vision, Mission, Values - Which are often crafted / documented somewhere, but seldom used to inform actual work.

2. Next, work with your managers to understand the Business Strategy - and you’ll often find there isn’t one. Depending on whom you speak with, you might hear something different. This is a critical step. Do not proceed with OKRs if you can’t get alignment on the higher level strategy. (I’m not saying you need a good strategy - just a strategy. Some high level hypothesis / leap of faith assumption your company is pursuing).

3. Now comes the fun part - Combine Top-down and Bottom-up OKR planning to craft OKRs that align with the strategy, and have buy-in from different levels. (Most conventional wisdom prescribe some arbitrary ratio of top-down and bottom-up, I think its nonsense). The most intuitive method here is “catch-ball”, armed with a draft of the OKRs, go down the hierarchy, and then up it. Revising OKRs at each level until OKRs at each level are in sync with one another.

4. Creating an operating rhythm where KRs are tracked as a regular course of business, tactics are chosen based on progress made on the KRs, not through some pre-determined list of projects / tasks.

When you consider OKRs as a strategy deployment device, you stop blindly cascading your OKRs (making KR of the higher level into O of the next level), stop obsessing over using OKRs for performance management, stop trying to cover everything your team does into an OKR. Instead you’re more concerned with aligning your teams to tackle the most important problems facing your business.

In short, if you use OKRs for Strategy Deployment - you just might benefit from it.

To learn more about strategy deployment:

Book: Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise: Developing Competitive Capabilities and Managing Profit - Not an easy read. This book is not about OKRs, its about Lean Strategy Deployment, using some very specific and different tools from OKRs. However, the meta processes around strategy deployment are better explained here than any OKR book you’ll ever pick up.

Book: Beyond Strategic Vision - Also not an easy read and not about OKRs. Walks through strategy formulation, deployment and execution. If you can silence your inner voice saying “oh this doesn’t apply to my business”, you’ll learn a lot.