PRACTITIONER GUIDE

OKR 720
Objective Key Results
Creating 720 Strategic Alignment within
your organization

www.Fox-Three.com
OKR 720 Ver 2.0

Objectives & Key Results

The Objective Key Results 720 framework is a purpose built OKR

framework used to align organizational strategies in all directions from SLT's
to new hires.

Unlike many business models, OKR 720 provide a practitioner based

approach to extreme organizational focus and transformation

OKR 720 is inspired by and built upon the same foundations as the widely-
adopted Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) system, but have been carefully
designed to address the specific friction points and missing features that
many organizations face when attempting to roll out OKRs.
OKR 720
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Starting Points
If you're new to OKRs, we recommend
starting with the following articles:

Rethinking Performance Management 01

Building a Goal Network 04

Defining a Networked Key Result 05

Additional Reading
Once you're already somewhat familiar with NKRs,
you can quickly jump to any particular topic of interest
using the links below:

NKR Championship 08

NKR Partnerships 10

NKR Squads 11

NKR Collaborations 12

NKR Lifecycle 13

Performance Forecasting 15

Documented Learnings 16

Weekly Learning Huddles 17

 Rethinking Performance Management

Rethinking Performance Management

In any large organization, ensuring that the right people are consistently working towards solving the right
problems at the right time is a never-ending challenge.

The obstacles that arise from this challenge are well-understood by most business leaders. But because they
show up in many different forms, and are interpreted in many different ways depending on where they crop up
within a company, it can be difficult to spot the common thread that ties them together them.

What issues in particular make-or-breaks a company's ability to achieve breakthrough performance? Let's round
up a few of the usual suspects, while also taking a quick look at the often-overlooked (and surprisingly intercon-
nected) issues that lurk just below the surface of each of them.

Rethinking Performance Management

It is clear that a well-considered and concise set of company-wide goals can serve as a guidestar for decision
makers at all levels of an organization.

What is less obvious is that an organization can appear to be well-aligned from the top-down view based on its
objectives alone, while still losing momentum due to individuals and groups who act as accidental adversaries on
an operational level.

These friction points only reveal themselves once you take into account the many interdependencies that exist
between the various moving parts of the entire company, which tend to be far more dynamic and difficult to track
than the neatly drawn lines of the traditional org chart would imply.

Ownership and Transparency

It is well understood that without explicitly defined commitments and delivery dates, groups who depend on each
other's work cannot effectively coordinate their efforts.

What is often overlooked is that for commitments to be meaningful on a human level, they need to be made from
person-to-person rather than from department-to-department. And for the most part, the leader of a team or a
department is usually the wrong person to be handling the stewardship and coordination efforts around each
individual key result that their group is responsible for.

When coordination is limited to "Filing some requests that land in some other team's backlog, and then occasional-
ly nudging each other for status updates," it's no surprise that groups often fail to have shared understanding of
the cost of delay or the damage that may be caused by a broken commitment.

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 Rethinking Performance Management

Responsiveness to Emergent Risks and Opportunities

It is clear that rigidly sticking to a predetermined plan often causes more harm than good in environments where
volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) are the norm. In fact, responsiveness to change is one of
the foundational pillars of the Agile movement.

What is less obvious is how to optimize company-wide feedback loops so that emergent risks and opportunities
can be identified early enough to make a meaningful difference, without ending up in a runaway cycle of evalua-
tion that leads to decision fatigue.

If the many interconnections between objectives, key results, and the underlying human relationships within an
organization remain hidden from view, decision makers tend to be limited to making local judgement calls that
may make sense from their vantage point, without understanding how those decisions will impact the company
as a whole.

Coordination vs. Collaboration

It is well understood that an uncoordinated organization is one that tends to create a whole that is less than the
sum of its parts.

What is often overlooked is that coordination alone is insufficient for creating an environment in which the whole
is greater than the sum of its parts. Most large organizations have an endless amount of talented people on staff
that could achieve great things together, but because of a lack of discoverability of collaboration opportunities,
crucial connections never get made.

To solve this problem, it isn't enough to simply encourage employees to explore opportunities to connect outside
of their own team/department/etc. Instead, there needs to be some sort of sense-making framework that helps
people find relevant and impactful opportunities to connect with one another. Although some innovation does
come from the serendipity of chance encounters, building a sustainable collaboration culture requires a much
more systematic approach.

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 Rethinking Performance Management

What do all these issues have in common?

The common thread that ties together these seemingly unrelated performance management challenges is that
each involves a point of friction that is either completely invisible or difficult to reason about from the traditional
top-down view.

In our work on the NKRs framework, we've discovered that although most companies have well established
processes for organizing people and information into hierarchies, and also for dealing with local performance
optimization, few if any have systematic approaches to performance management which take network effects into
account.

And so the underlying premise behind NKRs is that although hierarchical organization is useful for some forms
of coordination, true collaboration also requires active cultivation of the many other kinds of connections that
exist within a company.

When the many invisible and dotted lines that exist within every organization are brought out into the light, each
individual ends up with a better sense of how their own actions impact the company as a whole. They no longer
suffer from a fear of making decisions in the dark, because they have a clear map to follow which tells them who
to talk to in order to grow, and who to talk to when new risks and opportunities emerge.

It is through this subtle yet transformational change of perspective that a company can truly become greater than
the sum of its parts.

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 Building a Goal Network

Building a Goal Network

A company is defined by its enduring sense of purpose. That purpose, in turn, is expressable through a clear and
concise set of long-term goals.

But goals alone only provide a general sense of direction, they do not and cannot tell the individuals and groups
within an organization how to get to where they need to go.

To make progress towards a goal, it must first be broken down into strategic objectives that are both limited in
scope and capable of producing an impact in the near term.

Objectives answer the question "What particular approach should we try next to move closer to our goal?" but
they don't clearly define who will be responsible for doing what. They also typically do not answer the question
"If we're successful, how will we know?"

In practice, objectives are a strategic alignment tool. They constrain the field of play, but they do not on their own
provide much in the way of operational guidance.

An effective way to bridge the gap between an objective and a meaningful plan of action is to break the objective
down into a small number of well-defined key results. By taking an objective and capturing its essence via quanti-
tative metrics, it becomes possible to have a unambiguous understanding of what the definition of success looks
like.

In the NKR system, each and every key result has a single champion who is responsible for facilitating and
tracking the work done around that particular result. It is also a standard practice to form intentional partnerships
whenever achieving a result depends upon support from an external group.

In a traditional implementation of the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) methodology, it is possible to see how
objectives translate into specific metrics, and monitor progress around those objectives. But when using
Networked Key Results, it is also possible to see exactly who to talk to whenever new risks and opportunities
emerge.

For every long-range goal a company has set for itself, NKRs reveal in realtime the specific group of humans who
are responsible for driving it forward, and how they depend upon and support one another. They are no longer
hidden behind dotted and invisible lines, but instead brought to the forefront where they can go beyond basic
coordination and instead work together in a truly collaborative way.

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 Defining a Networked Key Result

Defining a Networked Key Result

A key result is an outcome-oriented metric that answers the question "If we're successful at achieving this particu-
lar objective, how will we know?"

A networked key result is a key result that also explicitly defines its human-to-human interdependencies, in order
to answer the question "Whenever new opportunities or risks emerge around this key result, who needs to know?"

Start with personal ownership

Each and every networked key result is facilitated by a champion, who is responsible for coordinating the efforts
of partners and collaborators to achieve a particular business outcome.

The champion's role is to turn aspirational ideas and hopes into clearly defined and attainable business
outcomes. They begin by building consensus within their own group about what the definition of success looks
like for a particular key result, but that is just a starting point.

After the champion determines who will contribute what and what success looks like from their own group's
perspective, they turn their attention to the partnerships that will need to be forged with other individuals and
groups throughout their organization in order to drive their key result forward.

Recruit partners and collaborators

For each situation where a key result cannot be achieved without the contribution of some outside group, the
champion is responsible for finding an official partner who will commit to specific deliverables and timelines which
become part of the key result definition.

Because most truly impactful key results do require cross-organizational collaboration in some form or another,
this role of recruiting and coordinating with partners is one of the most important responsibilities that champions
take on.

In the process of building and clarifying the working relationships around their key result, a champion may find
that there are individuals from other groups within their organization who are interested in helping out but aren't
necessarily willing to make a formal commitment. In these situations, champions are encouraged to invite those
individuals to sign up as collaborators to their key result, so that they can be kept in the loop about its progress
and be recognized for any contributions they make along the way.

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 Defining a Networked Key Result

Define what success looks like

Networked key results are defined as quantitative metrics, using a three tiered scoring rubric:

A score of 1.0 represents an amazing and game-changing outcome, i.e. the moonshot criteria.
A score of 0.7 represents a major achievement, i.e. something that feels like a bit of a stretch goal but is still
firmly within reach.
A score of 0.3 outlines the minimum expected outcome if everyone simply shows up, gets their work done,
and honors their commitments.

Defining criteria for each of these scoring levels causes all those involved in contributing to a key result to
intentionally examine the space between "business as usual" and extraordinary success.

By limiting scoring to a small number of preset levels rather than simply defining 1.0 as the moonshot and then
measuring progress as an arbitrary value between 0.0 and 1.0, there is greater clarity on how a score maps to a
measure of success. It takes away the guesswork involved in wondering what exactly "68% of the way to a moon-
shot" would even mean, and provides a common language for communicating about performance across organi-
zational boundaries.

Measure and monitor performance

Once a networked key result has been published and commitments are locked in, it transitions from a planning
document into a performance monitoring tool.

The champion for each key result works together with their partners and collaborators to ensure that the current
level of achievement as well as the projected final score for their key result is kept up to date on an ongoing basis.

The exact process for staying in sync may vary from organization to organization, but we recommend starting with
a lightweight weekly huddle combined with a shared log of documented learnings that anyone involved in a key
result can update in realtime.

Because NKRs explicitly map out the connections between the result to be achieved and the individuals who will
be driving that result forward, they are naturally well suited for predictive forecasting. Everyone involved in
driving a key result forward knows exactly who to talk to whenever a new risk or opportunity emerges, and this
enables key result champions to build consensus around expected outcomes as well as the level of confidence
the group has in obtaining those outcomes.

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 Defining a Networked Key Result

Stay connected to the big picture

Individual key results may be laser-focused on a particular outcome, but they are also intrinsically linked to broad-
er objectives that ultimately determine how a company advances its most significant goals.

Because NKRs are specifically designed to take network effects into account, they create feedback loops that
amplify faint signals which might be otherwise lost in the noise.

PG 07
 NKR Championship

NKR Championship

Long before a networked key result is published, it is essential to ask “Who will champion it?”

By default, this role won't be assigned to a group's leader, but instead will be filled by an individual within the
group who is then empowered to focus on driving that particular result forward.

The champion isn't necessarily responsible for doing most of the work around a particular key result, but they are
expected to put on their producer hat and make the right connections both within and outside of their group to get
the job done.

NKR Champion Responsibilities

Consulting with collaborators and partners to determine what an amazing outcome looks like for their key
result.

Securing specific commitments and delivery dates with partners in order to ensure smooth handoffs, and to
communicate business impact.

Defining the scoring criteria for their key result, using a three-tiered quantitative scoring gradient that clearly
distinguishes between a minimum acceptable outcome (0.3), a major achievement (0.7), and a breakthrough
performance (1.0).

Providing a weekly status update about their key result which include updated forecasts, early warnings
about impediments, and documented learnings that may inform future decision making and working practic-
es.

Aggregating the big picture story around their key result to be shared in multi-group reviews at the begin-
ning, middle, and end of each quarter.

Coordinating within their group to determine timelines and allocation of effort around their key result, adjust-
ing plans as needed to optimize for overall performance at the objective level.

Serving as the point person for the key result they’re championing, accepting feedback and getting
questions answered as needed both within their group and throughout the organization.

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 NKR Championship

Additional Notes

The ideal NKR partner is likely to either be in a management role already, or in a highly autonomous individual
contributor role. The fundamental shift that is necessary to make this role work in the NKR system is the ability to
think in terms of managing commitments to other humans rather than simply “completing tasks and projects” that
then get thrown over the wall.

The end result is a sense of shared responsibility: With a clear understanding of how particular deliverables and
their delivery timelines will impact business outcomes, and a direct person-to-person tie between a key results
champion and a horizontal partner, work becomes collaborative and symbiotic in nature.

This role is perhaps among the most critical of all the different roles in the NKR system, because it serves as the
interface point between NKR champions and the rest of the organization.

PG 09
 NKR Partnerships

NKR Partnerships

Most networked key results are not directly achievable by a single individual or group. Instead they require some
degree of horizontal coordination between groups who may not share the same objectives or priorities.

Because even tightly scoped dependencies can make or break a group's ability to achieve a particular key result,
NKR champions actively recruit partners in external groups who make and track commitments around specific
deliverables and timelines.

NKR Partner Responsibilities

Coordinating with NKR champions during the key result definition phase and throughout the quarter to
ensure that realistic expectations are set around what can and cannot be accomplished via their partnership.

Making specific commitments around what will be delivered by the group they are facilitating, and when it
will be delivered.

Assisting NKR champions in coming up with branching plans where needed, making sure that there is a
backup plan in place for any high risk work.

Monitoring the work they’ve committed their own group to as it flows through backlog, providing updates to
the squad on an as-needed basis.

Helping others within their team see how their work is supporting a meaningful business outcome, so that
they can feel a sense of accomplishment when it ships.

Providing meaningful feedback and insights that NKR champions will factor into their weekly forecasting
around KR scoring and confidence levels.

Additional Notes

The ideal NKR partner is likely to either be in a management role already, or in a highly autonomous individual
contributor role. The fundamental shift that is necessary to make this role work in the NKR system is the ability to
think in terms of managing commitments to other humans rather than simply “completing tasks and projects” that
then get thrown over the wall.

The end result is a sense of shared responsibility: With a clear understanding of how particular deliverables and
their delivery timelines will impact business outcomes, and a direct person-to-person tie between a key results
champion and a horizontal partner, work becomes collaborative and symbiotic in nature.

This role is perhaps among the most critical of all the different roles in the NKR system, because it serves as the
interface point between NKR champions and the rest of the organization.

PG 10
 NKR Squads

NKR Squads

Although NKRs can be used effectively in any sort of organizational structure, they work best when carried out by
interdisciplinary squads that self-organize around a specific and meaningful mission.

Squads use their mission statement as a connection point between the company's top-level strategic goals and
that which is personally meaningful to a particular group of dedicated collaborators. It serves as the local guide
star for determining what objectives and key results to pursue, and reveals the Big Why behind the daily what.

Each squad typically has a squad leader who is responsible for:

Facilitating objective selection and definition within their squad on a quarterly basis.

Recruiting and coaching champions who act as stewards around particular key results.

Ensuring that the champions in their squad have everything they need in order to regularly contribute
documented learnings and participate in weekly huddles and forecasting ceremonies with others in their
squad.

Handling inbound and outbound alignment endorsements which establish links between objectives in the
organization's goal network.

Making connections throughout the organization to assist champions in identifying potential partners and
collaborators who can help move their key results along.

Working with other squad leaders, executive sponsors, and other key stakeholders throughout the organiza-
tion to participate in periodic multi-squad reviews that happen both between quarters and around the
midpoint of each quarter.

Interpreting and refining the squad's mission statement over time as the squad continuously rediscovers its
true purpose within the organization.

While some squads may stick around for the long haul, they are amenable to being formed just-in-time as well,
allowing organizations to quickly shift their focus to take advantage of an emerging opportunity, to respond
rapidly to a market threat, or to navigate through a complex shift in regulatory requirements. The adaptable
nature of squad-based teams also allows for squads to grow, shrink, and merge in response to internal shifts
within an organization; As core missions evolve, the organization’s group dynamics can change along with them.

PG 11
 NKR Collaborations

NKR Collaborations

NKRs provide a clear roadmap of the specific near-term outcomes that can advance a company's most significant
long-term goals. This information, when shared actively and openly throughout an organization, serves as rocket
fuel for igniting a culture of creative collaboration.

Once a company's goal network is in place, anyone in the organization can explore it in search of initiatives that
they are personally interested in contributing to. And because each and every published key result has a dedicat-
ed champion, there is no guess work involved with figuring out who to talk to in order to discuss a potential collabo-
ration.

Although the specific guidelines around NKR collaboration will vary from organization to organization, nearly any
arrangement that can be made between a key result's champion and an indivdiual who is ready and able to
contribute to their key result is worth considering.

Collaborating on NKRs is an effective way to get noticed and appreciated for your contributions that help the
company achieve its most signficant outcomes, no matter who you are or what your job title is within the
organization.

NKR Collaboration is very flexible and can take on many forms. Even if you aren't necessarily the one "doing
the work," if you fill a knowledge gap, connect ideas and efforts across boundaries, identify a problem that
may put a key result at risk, or resolve an impediment, you're making a meaningful contribution.

As a collaborator, you are effectively a free agent, someone who is not necessarily part of a particular team
but chooses to contribute in some way to advance one of their key results. Anyone in the company—individu-
al, team member, manager, even the CEO—can choose to contribute to any key result at any time.

Collaborations don’t have to be huge; in fact, contributors can find opportunities to make multiple contribu-
tions across many NKRs throughout the organization without becoming overwhelmed. Sometimes even a
single phone call can provide the knowledge or information that a group needs to overcome an impediment
or make a tactical breakthrough.

By sharing some documented learnings around your contribution and/or participating in the weekly
huddles around the key results you contribute to, you'll inevitably end up making meaningful connections
with others in the organization who you might not have otherwise come across if you "stayed inside the box"
of your daily work responsibilities.

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 NKR Lifecycle

NKR Lifecycle

There are five phases to the NKR lifecycle: Planning, Publishing, Mid-period review, Retrospective, and Reboot.

Planning

During this phase, objective statements are written up and then defined in terms of their key results. Cross-function-
al partnerships are established, and groups coordinate loosely with one another about the broad strokes of what
they expect to be working on throughout the quarter.

In this early exploratory stage, squad members are encouraged to start from an aspirational mindset and then
conduct a series of reality checks before publishing their NKRs. In doing so, squad members challenge
themselves to explore their own capabilities, what resources they have available, what resources they might
need, and what they’ll need from others in order to drive their key results and advance their mission.

Publishing

As the publish date approaches, squads check and recheck their key result definitions, clarify their objectives,
confirm their commitments, etc. Where appropriate, internal or external coaches can also provide some recom-
mendations and insights into how to prepare effective NKRs so that they’re ready for publishing.

Once all the NKRs have been published, squads explores the NKR goal network to create a single link between
each of their objectives and a complementary objective of another squad. In some cases, squads may also link
their objectives directly to the company goals (which would be subject to review by executive sponsors).

As objective links are added, it is up to squad leaders to review and endorse inbound links to their objectives as
either being tightly connected, loosely connected, or not at all connected. This process is intended to kick off
alignment conversations between squads, which may lead to opportunities to collaborate, share knowledge, and
coordinate around related efforts.

Mid-period review

Based on recommendations from the organization’s NKR Architect, related squads get together for a group review
around the middle of each quarter.

Each squad gives a brief 5-7 minute structured presentation based on the following script:

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 NKR Lifecycle

State the squad’s mission

Read each objective for the period

Talk about one or two key results where there was major positive movement. For each, spend about 30-45
seconds talking about progress and summarizing big breakthroughs, etc.

Talk about one or two key results where there have been complications or impediments.

Extract a relevant warning if possible to share with the other squads.

Spend a few moments discussing the current scoring level and predicted final scores for each key result
presented, as well as the confidence levels for those scores and the rationale behind it.

Describe the next steps to continue moving things forward.

As each squad presents their progress reports, questions can be collected from all those in attendance and
then distributed to each squad for further discussion after the event.

Mid-period reviews are essential to the NKR process because they help establish the notion that NKR-centric work
is an ongoing discipline, not just something that you set and forget at the beginning of each quarter.

Retrospective

After the quarter has wrapped up, a similar progress update meeting is held.

During the retrospective, forecasts are replaced by final score evaluations, and impediments and breakthroughs
are evaluated from a historical perspective.

After the group retrospective, each squad asks themselves: How does what we’ve learned within our own squad
and from the other squads we’ve been linked up with impact how we’ll write our next set of NKRs?

Reboot

When the quarter wraps up, squads begins the planning phase all over again, but typically this involves some
amount of reflecting and resetting existing NKRs rather than simply starting from a blank slate.

Squads review the objectives and key results that were set from previous periods as well as any documented
learnings around them. They evaluate which initiatives ought to continue on into the next quarter, which should be
elevated or refined in some way, and which should be discarded or put on hold.

The reboot period is also where (in coordination with the NKR architect and/or executive sponsors), squads can
consider restructuring themselves to better meet the needs of the organization. This might mean refining a mission
statement, combining multiple squads into a single squad with a unified purpose, splitting squads up, changing up
members, etc.

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 NKR Performance Forecasting

NKR Performance Forecasting

Key results are not just “set and forget” at the start of a quarter. Instead they are reviewed on a weekly basis so
that impediments can be addressed and breakthroughs can be built upon, both locally and throughout an organi-
zation's goal network.

Performance reports for key results are expressed in two ways each week:

1. The current level of achievement based on the result's scoring criteria.

2. The estimated final score that will be achieved by the end of the quarter.

The current level of achievement is an objective performance metric, while the estimated final score is a subjective
assessment which is used for planning purposes both within the group that owns the particular result and through-
out the organization.

A typical NKR forecast might be expressed as follows:

"With five weeks left in the quarter, we've already achieved our 0.3 metric for this key result. We are 80% confident
that our final score will be 0.7 or better."

The quality of forecasting data is inherently limited by the information that is available about the specific risks and
opportunities around a particular key result. This fact is well understood by NKR practitioners, who use a combina-
tion of documented learnings and a weekly huddle to improve their ability to predict outcomes even in environ-
ments of high uncertainty and volatility.

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 Documented Learnings

Documented Learnings

Drawing from brain science and organizational psychology, the NKR system places the following six questions at
the heart of its documented learnings process:

What impediments are standing in the way of progress?

What important breakthroughs have I had recently?

What key learnings have I gained from my recent experiences?

What have been the high points of my work lately?

What is my next step, and what is the intended outcome of that action?

What shareable knowledge have I come across, and who should I share it with?

On an individual level, these questions are useful as a means of inspiring reflective and introspective thinking. But
in a social context, they have a much more significant impact.

For this reason, anyone who contributes to a particular key result is encouraged to log responses to any these six
questions whenever a new insight comes up during the course of their daily work.

Responses are then curated by the key result's champion and reviewed during weekly huddles, where there is a
natural opportunity to learn and grow together as a group.

An ongoing discipline of recording and sharing documented learnings also improves the group's forecasting
ability, which in turn strengthens the quality and relevance of information that flows through the organization's
goal network.

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 Documented

NKR Huddle

On a weekly basis, NKR champions get together with their partners and collaborators to review and discuss
documented learnings, update scoring forecasts, and make any necessary course-corrections based on whatev-
er was learned since their last huddle.

Although the exact format for a huddle can be customized as needed, NKR champions are generally expected to
carry out the following activities each week:

For each of the six standard documented learnings prompts, present a summary of the responses that have
been collected since the last huddle.

Celebrate the breakthroughs and high points that have happened since the last huddle, to remind every-
one present about the importance of recognizing and building on their wins.

Encourage participants to ask clarifying questions about any information that has been presented during the
huddle, so that gaps in communication or understanding can be dealt with before they accumulate.

Using the organization's goal network as a guide, make connections and/or schedule followups between
those who have logged impediments, next steps, etc. and those who might be able to help them in some
way.

Invite participants to share anything that may be relevant to forecasting, whether it's good news or bad news.

In addition to the direct value produced through these concrete activities, conducting weekly huddles greatly
influences group dynamics. Simply getting people together to discuss what they’ve learned has the effect of
reinforcing the idea that learning is an organizational priority, rather than just something you do in order to get
your job done.

PG 17
 Ver 2.0

NKRs
Network Key Results

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