Brett Knowles

Looking at management "best practices" as connected lines

The post explains how OKRs help organizations adapt to changing business environments and align strategy, budget, and performance.

Throughout the conversation, Brett shares insights and practical advice on leveraging AI and large language models like ChatGPT to enhance strategy execution.

OKRs are supposed to be all about focus. To truly achieve focus just one “Golden KR”

OKRs, aided by Microsoft's Viva modules, streamline strategy execution, enhance performance, and boost employee retention, making goal attainment systematic, efficient, and effective.

Executing a successful OKR pilot involves agreeing on objectives, selecting participants, planning and running the pilot, and assessing outcomes. And remember to declare victory!

OKR Pilots: A balancing act. Pros: early adopters, best practices, lower risk. Cons: limited representation, collaboration challenges, triviality. Learn and adapt.

Viva Goals from Microsoft is a magical tool that helps teams align priorities and fosters effective communication in remote work.

Microsoft Viva empowers organizations to do more with less by enhancing employee engagement, driving revenue, and reducing costs.

Happy employees are more productive - this is especially true if they find their work meaningful. Viva Goals combines meaningfulness and business goals with efficiency and optimized processes. This is how you sustainably improve the employee experience.

Viva Goals integrates with Microsoft Teams, offering familiarity, security, and innovation, empowering organizations to efficiently align and track goals.

ESG is becoming a regulated requirement - but it is just a category of OKRs within your OKR structure. This video explains the mechanism behind measuring ESGs through OKRs

In this series of videos I'll walk you through where that misinformation came from, why it is wrong, why you should include OKRs, and how to include OKRs

2023 promises to be “interesting times” based on are turbulent political, economic and operating environments, combined with the uncertainty/unpredictability of the impacts we will be experiencing.

Successful strategy execution requires more than strategic objectives and priorities. More than glossy diagrams... it requires a Strategy-Execution Roadmap (which will later inform what we do, our OKRs, and the Modern Management System). We will call this the “Strategic Framing” – like the framing for building a house. It is the framing that determines the overall structure, but all the details – wiring, plumbing, heating, windows, etc. still need to be added.

This is an Executive Summary of the Quarterly (or as needed) OKR Refresh process.

Here are some nifty tricks and ideas for running a virtual Quarterly OKR refresh meeting.

This vlog looks at Key Result target options and makes an interesting recommendation.

The management practices (and systems) in most organizations have not kept up with the stresses and uncertainty of our current (2023) operating environment.

This video walks you through how the right conversations turn an OKR solution into a culture building machine!

A selection of actionable goals for private sector organizations in aid of impactful ESG OKRs

ESG, SDG, CSR… making OKR sense of the acronym-maze

Reporting performance is getting tougher and tougher...as we learn more and more.

It is time to pull our support to employees out of our 1962 models of Job Descriptions, Annual Performance Review, etc.

Scorecarding ain't what it used to be...

Sustainability

The secret is out! Stretch goals may not be magic after all.

The biggest lesson for us is the "one size does not fit all". OKRs touch every aspect of an individual's work-life, and as such there are multiple attributes that can be built into your OKR solution..

If you are like most of the banks that we have worked with, you have everything you need to kill the annual performance review except one thing... the right mind-set!

Five great rules for Hypergrowth companies to pay attention to...

Agile needs to be more than how we manage a product-development cycle...it needs to be the management mentality of the organization.

I contend that OKR's are the first "crowd-created methodology" and therefore there is no one source to say any one of these ideas is right or wrong.

Strategy is all about guiding the choices of the organization - and so prioritization seems to be a key component of the conversation, yet there have been a number of heated debates about the value of prioritizing Strategic Goals.

\The Sustainability Scorecard we integrate the goals from established sustainability frameworks, such as B-Corp, UN's SDGs (Sustainability Development Goals), GRI (Global Reporting Initiative), SASB, etc. with the organization's strategic goals to create a Sustainability Strategy Map and scorecard.

Scorecards provide on-going monitoring of the organization's progress toward prioritized goals and target(s). We see the Sustainability Scorecard to be a monthly reports based on "hard" measures.

We now need to integrate this new best practice around measuring environmental and societal business impacts with the third "bottom-line"... business success. Best practices on measuring business success comes from the Balanced Scorecard body of knowledge. This article is the first step in that journey.

More detail about the Sustainability Strategy Map

A timeless question.... When we build a strategy and sustainability scorecard, should we start at the top (Mission/vision/strategy) build it down, or start at the bottom (what we are currently doing) and build it up?

Sustainability is different from the rest of our business in that there are well-defined goals that we need to achieve.

We are doing a "soft launch" of our new Sustainability Scorecard.

Different stakeholders are looking for different information from your Sustainability Scorecard. Over the years we have developed six broad categories of need and therefore scorecards:

The GRI - Global Reporting Initiative - are a collection of standardized areas that provide some level of consistency and completeness in reporting performance in the areas of societal and environmental impacts.

There are basically four zones of influence an organization has on sustainability in the world.

We deserve clear visibility of our sustainability efforts through a powerful OKR solution.

The Sustainability Scorecard is unique - it is easily built with established building blocks...and then its continued success is entirely in the hands of every employee!

Here's a simple case study / How-To video

Too many frameworks. Too many agendas. No real action-oriented measures. )-:

Many organizations come to us with confusion about where they should start their journey to sustainability…or worse yet, think that they must go into a long and protracted sustainability-planning cycle before getting underway with making a difference!

In today's business environment, sustainability has never been more important.

Sustainability OKRs make sustainability everybody's everyday job.

The Sustainability Strategy Map and Scorecard allows you to restate the same measures in different frameworks...UN-SDG or GRI or <IR> or B-Corp... and for different stakeholders - regulators, employees, customers, suppliers and others.

Using PowerPoint in your Performance Meeting is like driving through the rear view mirror......but all you can see is outdated still photos!

You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes Well, you might find You get what you need

We need to level up our business operating system (BOS) to create a single system that is continuous from strategy development through to day-to-day execution.

KR is that they are the results of the activities that are done within the organization towards the related Objective, so if the related activity is done by a team, the KR should be associated with the team, not any one individual. We call this a shared KR.

Key Results are just a few KPIs that have been 'elevated' to the level of appearing on leadership's dashboards.

The Seven Elements of Performance-Related "Work From Home Fatigue"

In this article we share what scientific research says about the root causes and underlying psychology of these symptoms

In this article, we are primarily focused on the aspects of our new ways of working (web-meetings, WFH, etc.) related to the organization and personal performance

The methodology for building OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) has more in common with the Scrum framework than you might think. In my opinion, much of the confusion is caused by the lexicons used in the two practices.

Business ain’t what it used to be! For the first three or four hundred years, all a business had to do was make money.

In this article, we introduce you to our proposed broader model for how to assess the capability/readiness of your organization's OKR approach

OKRs and Financial Planning are two sides of the same coin.

Performance conversations occur across the organization - it's time they looked at the same data.

Building awesome OKRs will not drive business success without the right culture within your organization.

You cannot use a Key Result for both Navigation and Compensation at the same time.

Until you use an OKR, you have no idea if it is the best OKR ever or the worst OKR ever.

"You cannot get in shape by going to the gym for 9 hours. You get in shape by going to the gym for 20 minutes every day. Consistency beats intensity." Simon Sinek

80% of the benefits that OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) generate come from the conversations that they trigger.

"surrogation" - confusing what's being measured (the 'O') with the metric being used ( the KRs).

What if there could be a common dashboard for your business, just like how (after many years) we developed a common dashboard for cars?

How can we shape top-level OKRs with the business which contain sensitive financial information which could increase the risk of insider trading as we are a publicly listed company?

This is a relatively new term - Definition: Employee experience encapsulates what people encounter, observe or feel over the course of their employee journey at an organization.

Implementing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is tough, as they are the convergence of corporate strategy, personal ego, and a healthy mix of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, so take it in small steps.

Culture is one of the key drivers of organization success - yet it is considered a nebulous mix of ideas, actions, and events.

Management is not what it used to be - you are now dealing with more different things at a faster rate than at any time before. No wonder you feel stressed!

The current realities and thinking, including OKRs (Objectives & Key Results, like at Google), the abundance of (big) data, the faster pace of business in 2021 than 1962

Clear roles and responsibilities are a critical success factor for any strategy. Without them, activities can quickly derail and stakeholders are left trying to pick up the pieces.

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are all about measurement of performance and meeting objectives. They are a company’s best ally in the search for success. But if we set OKRs arbitrarily without specific Objectives and/or Key Results, we’d just end up with incomplete results and won’t be able to measure their impact on our organization.

Organizations are suffering from ever increasing employee dis-engagement, turnover, lost productivity and customer dis-satisfaction. Research indicates that this engagement issue is costing us over 100% of our base salary cost per year!

Socializing OKRs is like a conversation - it takes time. It progresses in small steps that gradually build a deep understanding.

Employee performance metrics are fundamental to see how employees are executing their job. This is a quick overview of best-practices.

OKRs create a culture and mindset around the importance of performance and the web of interconnectedness between every department, team, and, eventually, person. Every successful OKR implementation will naturally seak the membership of every person.

Learn about the seven key requirements of the framework you can use to increase your productivity (or reduce your work effort.)

I've picked up five 'categories' of things that if you can do as a boss, you can level up as a leader.

You know that quarterly/ annual meeting you have with your boss to discuss your performance? It does not work! All I'll say on that is "garbage in, garbage out. But the good news is there is a far better alternative approach to use...