Another topic from the book Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results that stood out to me is the idea of a weekly confidence rating for the OKRs. The idea is that every week whomever owns a key result reports on their confidence that they’ll achieve it on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being 100% confident (e.g. a value of 5 / 10 would mean 50% confident that the key result will be met).
Think about that for a minute: how often do you do a serious gut check as to whether or not you’re going to hit your current goals. Weekly? Monthly? Never? This idea of not only assessing the confidence that you’ll hit the key result but actually quantifying it on a weekly basis is great for team alignment and communication. How often have we heard someone give regular updates about their project or goal only to realize too late that they’re not going to hit it?
The next time you really want to drive accountability and clarity in your organization, ask for a confidence rating for each goal’s metric or objective’s key result and track it on a weekly basis. Watch as things improve and people are more focused.
What else? What are some more thoughts on weekly confidence ratings for OKRs?
David Cummings on Startups 