Public meeting / OKR / Individual OKRs - exploring the challenges for a high productive individual agenda when goals may require new learning, willpower, breaking habits, creative energy
Reference
- Reference meeting: "talk — creativity goals and effort — feat. Edwin Locke feat. OKR 4234eb9c-73fe-4ebd-949c-735b7a404471 Friday, January 31⋅3:00 – 4:00pm"
- Parent project: Course OKR and culture / "index: talk: okr e2662d0f-9209-40b9-be2f-93c1514ef419"
- Parent project: "index: talk: Creativity and effort c808ae73-36cc-4ec7-881c-f4d0fc14c3aa"
- Participants: Marcio S Galli
- Text language: en-us
- Tags: OKR, Goals, Effort, Willpower, Feedback, Pulses, Time Pressure, Goal setting, Determinist, Planning, Reviews, Peer Alignment, 1:1, Objectives and key results
- Document status: Copyright, draft.
Context
- This was a letter written to OKR folks, the group behind Measure What Matters book by John Doer
Summary
Defining a great agenda, with a great project goal derived from a great mission and vision, is not everything. The reality is that the individual, the entrepreneur in this case, will be subject to other forces; just like her future business will be impacted by side forces. To name one force that affects her agenda at the individual level — willpower. Now, all great entrepreneurial career will face the force against change, or learning. Therefore, it's very rare that a great idea and a great business will grow when the leading team is not ready; when the individuals can't run effectively their personal agendas.
In this context, I feel that I found a great talk from Edwin Locke, on creativity. He covers amazing points at the individual level on what it takes to run a successful creative journey.
Linking OKR with the forces to support an individual to perform towards goals
Letter title — The individual challenges to advance goals in a road with uncertainty where effort, willpower, and creative energy needs to be high so continuity and belief is not jeopardised
Hi again MWM folks,
So after reading WMW and also Radical Focus I tried a few things — at the personal level as an entrepreneur — and faced some challenging realities. But of course I was partly well-trained. I knew that getting it right would be a challenging thing. I knew, for example, that in places such as a growing company, with structure and team dynamics, failing and fixing the process was part of the reality for getting OKR things right.
Having this idea made me have an idea for how challenging things would be considering the realm of an founder-entrepreneur — the individual that is living the search and discovery phase, with hundreds of (not people) threads, or ideas, or topics and areas to look at. The individual that is mainly responding to herself — such a complex job to getting anything related to OKR right. This is the scope of my search at this moment. Figuring something related to OKR applicable to the founder-entrepreneur living discovery.
Now, with this scope prepared; I will jump straight to a precious material I have found and a work that seems to provide good resources to what could be OKR to the personal level.
It turns out that I did stumble in the work of Edwin Locke about one year ago — I even wrote to him as I wrote to you guys. Eventually, I found again another of this talk — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqAh3-_9HOo "Creativity Comes from the Subconscious — or Does It?" by Edwin A. Locke — which apparently seemed to not have a relationship with OKR. As I moved forward, I had some moments of wishness to write to you. But I was like, "no, this is just me being too excited." Then I let it go. The motivation had to do with Edwin covering topics that seemed to support the basis, or a foundation necessary, for one individual to be ready to execute what would be a personal OKR — similarly to the level of cultural foundation that seemed to be important for a company to be ready to execute a company OKR journey. But these were feelings or things like intuition. I didn't write to you.
But today, when watching the second part of his video, I suddenly reached a point under his section "implementation" and Mr. Edwin said?
https://youtu.be/HqAh3-_9HOo?t=3225
"Now, when you get to implementing, you need goals for implementation. the book on my list by John Doerr, Measure What Matters,... "
So this was the moment I finally moved my butt to write to you. And I will for now close this email with some partial implementation that I have for my solo entrepreneur week's structure related to OKR — of course nothing here is final:
It turns out that I had to create a " company division " or a top-level goal, or goals, related to body and mind and health state. This came from the need to recognize other parallel goals, other life goals, mind goals, body goals.
It turns out that my personal OKR agenda had to, for example, include things like "resting" after some brain intense learning activities related to project goals. I felt that my prior failed attempt underestimated or ignored this other sides.
I will close for now, but I think and hope you got a sense of the direction that I am exploring here. And I hope this resonates with something on your side or on the side of people that you know are working on.
The ultimate goal of this line of inquiry is to be able to make OKR real because OKR is tying group goals with the individual. So, you started it. And there is no way on earth to have great individual or group goals without exploring the individual being system. Put in other words, the solvency of the business OKR system needs to be based in the solvency of the individual.
I will throw an example — ma|pa-ternity leave goals.
Marcio