Hey, happy Monday.
How nice to find you in the newsletter of STRTGY.
We have just entered the last 30% of the year.
Perhaps the most intense one.
It certainly will be for me because I am closing the editing of the book, which in the meantime, just on my birthday reached and exceeded the necessary quota for crowdblishing on Flacowski’s site.
I must confess that I had underestimated the complexity of the matter, and yet this did not demoralize me, far from it. It highlighted my inefficiencies. It prompted me to question, often completely redesigning them, much of the processes I had put in place to manage this project.
A job within a job that is giving me great pleasure. In fact, I can say without a doubt that the pleasure of working on it has increased as the difficulty has increased.
In particular, I experienced on myself that motivation increased the moment I questioned my self-assigned OKRs.
Now I happen to lose my perception of time and find myself spending 4 to 6 consecutive hours at the computer without feeling fatigue. So I decided to get to the bottom of this, reverse engineer what increased motivation for three reasons:
- Write a more useful book,
- To allow my collaborators to have the same pleasure
- And allow you to do the same.
You will be able to say “I was there.”
OKRs more than a methodology are a movement made up of people who want to give deeper meaning to work and why not to life in general. I don’t know about you, but I also use OKRs in my personal life, it was talked about here on LinkedIn.
Some of my clients confessed to me that it was precisely because of OKRs that they were able to grow even during the pandemic.
One KR that I have seen appear consistently is reducing turnover. A result that can only be achieved by working on corporate culture.
Writing MAKE PROGRESS has restored my time to delve into the scientific rationale behind the effectiveness of OKRs.
I wondered why as the difficulty in the activity increases, the pleasure of continuing to give one’s best increases, and what implications this has for the way one works.
More importantly, can I build a system that allows by-design for as many people as possible [in the company] to experience this feeling of focus and progress?
In the follow-up section I want to talk to you about just that: how to build an experience worth having and why it is not we who fall out of love with work, but work that is not designed to make us better and happier.
ALWAYS MAKE PROGRESS ⤴
Antonio
● OKR / Why do they work? The scientific explanation
4 mechanisms for always working in the “flow”
Progress is the glue that holds people together. In fact, two lovers break up when today is the same as yesterday and there is no hope that tomorrow will make them feel like a couple that has built something more.
In the office it is the same. When do people mature the decision to seek other challenges? When the current ones no longer provide an opportunity for advancement.
So many organizations have suffered the visible effects of great resignation as well as the more insidious and insidious effects of quiet quitting, that is, the phenomenon-described by the many articles on the Web-that leads employees to say who-does-it and to limiting themselves to working the minimum necessary to keep their jobs while they look around or simply catch their breath. Written like this, it sounds like it’s all the fault of bored employees who have taken the high road.
I think it is exactly the opposite.
Quiet quitting as I see it is just a way to regain work-life balance, avoid burnout, and invest our time in something that makes us alive. Finally, employees have figured out how not to be victimized by managers who are unprepared to handle a new situation, both physical and emotional.
Some bosses, instead of thanking their employees for not abandoning their jobs and independently regaining the necessary motivation, simply reacted by “warmly” inviting everyone to return to base-because the emergency is over-thus thinking they would fix everything, including the performance deficit.
I have a feeling that they will soon find that those who will most readily accept the return will not be the strongest but those with the fewest options who, frightened by inflation and high utility bills, will find it more convenient to leave the home heating off when they are at the office and the children are at school. Thus the famous Nash equilibrium is reached: when playing with bureaucracy, no one really wins.
Decades of scientific research have led to decoding the mechanisms of motivation. Leaders who care about their team’s progress-and people’s well-being-can use them ethically instead of the stick and carrot that doesn’t work.
Let’s face it. We get better and better at designing better and smarter products, but we don’t spend enough time designing how well our companies work. Foggy roles, unstructured onboarding, process-threats, absent feedback, expectations and control.
Let’s put it this way: for any entrepreneur and executive to design a work environment where people are comfortable is an opportunity they would be foolish not to take.
The unpronounceable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the world’s foremost expert on that feeling called “flow,” which is that state of mind we experience when we are immersed in such intense activity that we lose track of time and ourselves.
From his studies-and numerous others-it is clear that the happiest people are not those with simpler lives, fewer worries or more money-as we might think-but those who are able to get into the flow more frequently.
These people also happen to be the most productive!
So can we design a work environment based on these principles that enables people to elevate the quality of their experience?
Yes, as long as we build a system with these four mechanisms:
1 / Clear goals aligned with one’s vocations
Goals assigned from above are not as motivating as those chosen independently. The more the strategy is understood by everyone, the greater the alignment will be. If you are not satisfied with the proposed goals, don’t impose, explain again.
2 / Constant Progress Measurement
Checking the progress of the activity creates “addiction” and allows you to maintain focus longer. Identify those metrics that move fast enough to create momentum.
3 / Frequent Feedback
Leaving people in silence is a good tactic to see them go. Many managers ghosting unintentionally and not giving proper importance to one-on-one moments. Pre-schedule appointments in which to learn and offer support to each other to correct the course of activities.
4 / Incrementally more challenging activities in line with skill growth
When things are easy, the brain saves energy and performs them automatically–like driving–and boredom takes over particularly if you have no goals to achieve. This doesn’t mean you have to do new things all the time, but do them better and better. Define what better means.
These are the founding principles of OKRs and constitute the scientific reason behind the effectiveness of the methodology that we can now strip away the hype and finally take seriously.
What do athletes who through training overcome the limits of their bodies have in common? Artists who perfect their technique to reach new levels of expression? Professionals who surpass previous levels of success?
They are able to enter – naturally – into the flow. It means they are able to experience a continuous feeling of discovery that transports the person into a new reality where it is always possible to learn, to improve, to push oneself to new levels of performance.
They challenge themselves on activities that allow them to force the focus of their energies by leveraging the transformational power of their goals.
Just ask someone who has climbed a mountain or finished a marathon-or someone who has given birth-how different the people at the start are from the same ones at the finish line.
In business, unfortunately, because of the endless backlog made up of tasks that are all urgent, the unclear priorities, the hierarchy that makes authority clear and merit nebulous … we are driven by inertia. There are no challenges but projects to “deliver” that instead of transforming people consume them.
OKRs help build “stronger” organizations where people have access to experiences that are aligned with their goals and growth at the individual level is in tune with those of the organization. A healthy organization is one that allows as many people as possible to develop increasingly complex skills.
Just writing down the goal and key outcomes is not enough to achieve this, but adopting all the habits–1:1, daily, weekly and monthly check-ins, strategy refresh–that make up the most comprehensive toolkit–available to the most ambitious leaders–to adopt OKRs to their fullest potential.
