Transparency, Accountability, & Alignment (EP.06)
Last Updated
February 7, 2020
If you don't know where you're going — personally, professionally, as a team, as an organization — you'll have a hard time knowing if and when you ever get there. In this episode, we explore ways to create more transparency, accountability, and alignment in the workplace with tools like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).
Guests: Nicola Carpenter & Erica Seldin
Co-Hosts: Tim Cynova & Lauren Ruffin
Guests
ERICA SELDIN is an organization designer and coach to leadership teams that seek purposeful growth and change. Erica founded the organization transformation consultancy August to spark movements toward a new way of working and organizing inside the world’s most ambitious companies. From global enterprises including PepsiCo and Colgate Palmolive to civic institutions like Planned Parenthood and NYC’s Department of Education, Erica has guided leaders and teams to design operating models better suited for the 21st century. Her approach is supported by over a decade of experience in organization development, digital transformation, and grassroots organizing.
NICOLA CARPENTER works on the People team at Fractured Atlas, where she finds ways for tools and processes to better align with the organization’s purpose. She believes in tools so much that she sets personal OKRs every quarter. Prior to joining Fractured Atlas, Nicola worked for a variety of arts organizations including MoMA PS1, Walker Art Center, and Heidelberger Kunstverein, and she still has a particular love for museums. Originally from Minneapolis, she received a BFA in Art from the University of Minnesota and continues to stay creative through knitting and sewing clothes. She is currently in too many book clubs, but still somehow finds time to read books about organizational culture for fun. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @colacarp.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast about, well, that. On this episode, transparency, accountability and alignment, who's doing what when and how can we know that the work that we're doing on daily basis is actually helping move our organizations forward? My former mentor once told the younger me, “If you don't know where you're going, personally, professionally as a team, as an organization, you'll have a hard time knowing if and when you ever get there.” On this episode, we'll explore ways that we can create alignment, accountability, and transparency around doing the right work rather than that vague sense of more or better, or working hard until we're exhausted figuring that that must mean we're doing the right work.
Tim Cynova:
We're joined by Erica Seldin, co-founder of August Public, an organization transformation consultancy found online at aug.co. Side note, if you're a fan of People Operations and organizational design, and have yet to fall down the rabbit hole of their public Google drive, you've not really lived it. Joining Erica is Nicola Carpenter, currently the associate director of People Operations at Fractured Atlas. You can find their complete bio's in the episode description section. Later in the episode we'll again be joined by our podcasting's favorite cohost, Lauren Ruffin, to get her thoughts on the topic. Both Erica and Nicola have dedicated quite a lot of time and thought to this topic, so I look forward to digging into this with them.
Tim Cynova:
Erica and Nicola, welcome to the podcast.
Erica Seldin:
Hi Tim, happy to be here.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yeah, I'm excited to be on the podcast again, especially with Erica. I was telling Tim that I feel like the last time that Erica and I had a conversation, we talked both about literature and missing books, and then also just philosophically what is compensation for work. I'm just really excited about this conversation about, okay, I see where it goes.
Erica Seldin:
And I think if you, Nicola, somebody that I run into just everywhere that I'm doing something that I care about. So it seems like you have these naturally intersecting interests with mine and you show up one place and I'm like, “Of course, Nicola is here.” And then you show up another place. I'm like, “Well, obviously, Nicola would be here.” I'm happy to be here in chat with you about this topic, something that I don't think we've ever discussed, but-
Nicola Carpenter:
I think that's true.
Erica Seldin:
-that I know that we both care about, so.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yeah, thanks for bringing us together.
Tim Cynova:
It's exciting. Great. Let's start high level. Erica, when you hear transparency, accountability and alignment, what comes to mind for you?
Erica Seldin:
What comes to mind for me is that so many people are doing this wrong. Everybody wants transparency, everybody wants accountability, everybody wants alignment, and yet there doesn't seem to be a common way or understanding for how to achieve those things. And creating accountability is something that I spend maybe 75% of my time talking to people about and yet it seems like they still don't want to believe that it is actually as simple as just writing it down and being transparent about what it is that you hope people will do, and then actually following up on those things that you've written down.
Erica Seldin:
We also have a saying in August about alignment, which is replace the word align with magic everywhere you see it and it would be more appropriate. Like we just need to magic on that topic because actually it's the case that alignment is not something that should be a goal of ours, but it's something that we might get if we do a lot of other things correct. Otherwise, it's just like saying, let's magic it.
Tim Cynova:
That's terrific.
Erica Seldin:
My co-founder, Mike Arauz gets all the credit for that.
Nicola Carpenter:
Now I just want to add magic into everything.
Erica Seldin:
Yeah, yeah.
Nicola Carpenter:
Just replace other silly words just with magic.
Erica Seldin:
Right. Like do you want to have a magic about that instead of meeting?
Nicola Carpenter:
Yeah. That's good.
Tim Cynova:
People who are more excited to come, “Oh, I don't know what this is about, but it's going to be magic.”
Erica Seldin:
That's right. That's right. It's going to be magic.
Tim Cynova:
You don't want to miss the full staff magic.
Nicola Carpenter:
That's right. Replace work with magic and then you would never say magic shouldn't suck, you know? Right.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. So much to think about already just a couple of minutes into the episode, Nicola, when you think of those things besides magic, what comes to mind for you?
Nicola Carpenter:
Yeah, I mean I like a lot of the things that Erica mentioned. I feel like when I think about OKRs especially, I sometimes get stuck in the how does it happen? How do we do it? How is the phrase? But when you step back and think about like what are you trying to do at work? I mean, okay, so we're a non-profit so I feel like it's especially prevalent to say what are we trying to do? I mean, I know that that's true for companies as well, like people who have purposes, but I think that in non-profits, especially presence like okay, what are we trying to do and how do we do that?
Nicola Carpenter:
And if you don't know where you're going and you don't know what you're doing to get there, I don't know how you're going to get there. Like you mentioned in the intro, but also, I mean I think that so many other companies that I've worked at has been… I've gotten hired, they tell me, “Okay, this is what you do,” and then I do that, but I don't really know why I'm doing that and I don't like doing things if I don't know why. At Fractured Atlas, especially with the OKR process, knowing the why behind pretty much everything that I do is incredibly helpful to be encouraged to actually do the things.
Erica Seldin:
Yeah, that's a great point. I think that you brought up OKR, something that I know we want to talk about on this subject. And I think that creating this connectivity between what we're trying to achieve, why we're trying to achieve it, and then how we're going to get there is what's so powerful about this framework. And it helps to connect those dots for each individual, but then also for teams. And the added layer of making those things as OKRs are your what, your why, and your how transparent all of a sudden unlocks this connectivity between each team member of teams and gets to a place where you're actually creating maybe the magic or the alignment that we're striving for.
Nicola Carpenter:
And I think so what we used to do was thematic goals, and I've nothing against Lencioni, but I don't love thematic goals. And I like to tell the story that we had this thematic goal number three, and it went by probably five different words. If you look in past meeting minutes, there's five different words to describe the medical number three. And we had a party at the end of thematic goal number three where we had t-shirts. But I, to this day, kind of could explain what thematic goal number three is, but there is no way that I could explain how my work at Fractured Atlas fit into thematic goal number three.
Nicola Carpenter:
And I just feel like that's a missed opportunity and now I'm like, “Oh no, do I actually remember what my OKRs are this quarter?” I mean, but I like to think that now in my work that I know how my work aligns with what the company is doing and I hope that that's the case for a lot of people in the organization. And I feel like that is the case. I mean, we've heard that people say that that's what they get out of it.
Erica Seldin:
I hope that the tagline on your t-shirt for thematic goal number three was been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Because it sounds like that was what happened there with that particular goal.
Nicola Carpenter:
I don't remember what it said was TG3.
Erica Seldin:
TG3.
Tim Cynova:
And that was the last thematic goal that we had in the organization, which led to OKR. It was an iterative process though. It went from… At Fractured Atlas we've never had a strategic plan. We've had strategic priorities and strategic priorities memos, and those were pretty high level. I'm not sure how my day-to-day works. So then it's like, all right, let's try thematic goal, and you did a couple of those and then it became, “I'm on the leadership team and I'm not sure how my work impacts this, so let alone everyone else in the organization who's not in this room.”
Tim Cynova:
Which led to, “All right, well, let's try OKRs because that seems to cascade.” I guess it depends on the organization. There are smart goals, there are smarter goals, there's thematic goals, there's strategic plans or is everyone sitting in the same room talking about what you're doing until someone passes out?
Erica Seldin:
Totally. I'm sure you're both familiar with James Clear on atomic habits, and this is something that I love on this topic. And my favorite thing that he says is both winners and losers have the same goals. So it's true that both winners and losers, the goal is to win, but some people lose. And why is that the case? And I think that one of the things that's great about OKRs are about coming up with a different framework that gets into more nuance both for individuals and for teams. Then the actual goal itself is that it helps us to break down the difference between winning and losing beyond just this idea that we all want to win.
Erica Seldin:
It sounds like that's the progression maybe that you've made here. And I'm curious, does every team have OKRs and then individuals also have KRs? Are individuals accountable for particular OKRs? How are you thinking about that? And maybe just we should quickly, for all of the listeners, explain that when we're talking about OKRs, we're talking about objectives and key results. And so when I say KRs I mean the key results that ladder up to a particular objective.
Tim Cynova:
Let's take a step back and explain how OKRs work. We've lightly touched on it, but Nicola, you managed the OKR process at Fractured Atlas. What does it look like?
Nicola Carpenter:
I do this a lot where I just assume that everyone knows what OKRs are because I feel like they're so embedded into my work life and personal life. I have personal OKRs-
Erica Seldin:
That you post on Instagram.
Nicola Carpenter:
I do, yes. I did not do it last quarter and I haven't done… I mean it's what, mid-January and I haven't done it for this quarter yet, but it's fun.
Erica Seldin:
Still plenty of time.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yeah, plenty of time.
Erica Seldin:
Plenty of time.
Nicola Carpenter:
But an objective, I like to think of an objective is why do you do what you want to do? It's aspirational, it's inspiring. It's what gets you out of bed in the morning. And the key result is a measurable way of how you're going to get there. I think that for each individual person, like what their objectives are going to be, what inspires them is going to be different. And also in the key results, there's lots of different ways to measure things, and I feel like we can talk about this a bit more.
Nicola Carpenter:
But at Fractured Atlas currently, how it is, and we've iterated a lot, but currently what we do is that the four-person, non-hierarchical leadership team sets organizational objectives. Usually, there's two or three, occasionally they have a little blurb about why it's important to focus on those things. Often, they're very similar from quarter to quarter, just with a little bit of tweaking to prioritize different things in different ways. And then the leadership team sets their objectives and key results, and then from there their direct reports set their own objectives and key results and further on.
Nicola Carpenter:
We don't have any organizational key results. I know that a lot of organizations do and it helps them, but we haven't necessarily found helpful metrics for the entire organization to work around. But we'd have found that the organizational objectives are a really helpful way to, as an organization, prioritize different things each quarter.
Erica Seldin:
And then how do you hold people accountable for their KRs?
Nicola Carpenter:
Everyone can see everyone else's. I think there's a little bit of that peer pressure of, “Oh no, I'm getting-”
Erica Seldin:
Shame.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yeah, exactly.
Erica Seldin:
Shame.
Tim Cynova:
Don't look at me. You know I got an 8% on that score.
Erica Seldin:
I didn't know.
Tim Cynova:
It's awkward now.
Nicola Carpenter:
And then we also have a dashboard that has the whole organization. What is our percent complete on an organizational level. And generally at staff meetings I share back what our organizational, the average percent completed across the organization is. And I always like to celebrate when it's more than past. And then we also have a BI team, so I feel like there's builds in a tiny bit of competition. I mean, not like it's a real competition, but some people like that side where they're like, “Oh, I'm going to make sure that my team wins and so I'm going to finish my OKRs more.
Tim Cynova:
By some people may mean Nicola.
Erica Seldin:
Yeah, I mean the person who creates the competition wants to win the competition. That's usually the case.
Tim Cynova:
But it's great because Nicola and I are on the same teams, so I appreciate that.
Erica Seldin:
Right, so winning all around.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Nicola Carpenter:
But also I want to say that we haven't said that the goal of an OKR is to hit 60 to 70%. Will you say the sweet spot is 70%? If you get 80%, that's not winning anymore, so-
Erica Seldin:
No, you're doing it. It's not a bad goal.
Nicola Carpenter:
-exactly. There's some added complexity in there. Exactly. I also am disappointed if I'm at 80%. I'm like, “Oh man, I sent some terrible key results this quarter and then I go the opposite direction, only finished 31% so.”
Tim Cynova:
And there are some teams who cross departmentally share some KRs or maybe an objective, and then some teams, within the team, they have similar ones that when they're creating it rather than having a specific this is the team objective or KRs. And we've iterated, I think we've already on four years now. Three or four years that we've been doing it. Every quarter we've changed something about the process.
Erica Seldin:
That's great.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yes.
Erica Seldin:
That's great, and it means that it's working for you all, so that's also really wonderful. It's a good testament to the value of the tool. And always our journey has been a bit different. I think that we came to OKRs late in the game and I would say somewhat skeptically, but we enlisted OKRs at a moment when we needed to really focus. And we were doing a lot of different work across a very small group of people and we realized that it wasn't adding up too much, it wasn't adding up to enough.
Erica Seldin:
And this is one of the downfalls of self-organization that I've seen being part of a self-organizing business now for almost a decade. We have a bunch of different experiences of how the organization works and it tells us what it needs in lots of cases. And in this particular moment, we were many people working on many different teams against many different goals and not getting anywhere, really to say it quite bluntly. And I think that we realized that if we just wrote down the few things that we thought that we could do and how we intended to achieve them over a short period of time, like a quarter.
Erica Seldin:
At August, we do trimesters. I'm not sure why. It's just a little bit more time to sink into. It works for us, and so we take that amount of time just what do we think we can achieve in that amount of time. And we wrote them down and that was a real pivotal moment for us to start to build some accountability. To start to say, “Okay, these are the things that we believe are going to be the best things for us.”
Erica Seldin:
And that step of itself was really hard, because it's all of the things that you're not doing more than it is the things that you are going to do, and we were looking at it that way in that moment. And choosing to focus on those things meant some people thought they were the wrong things. We did do it very collectively, very holistically. It wasn't individuals writing down cares for themselves but instead a couple of us who were accountable for the business's purpose at that moment in time, sitting down and writing the KRs for the business.
Erica Seldin:
Writing the couple of objectives, but really just focusing on the KRs, because the objective itself where we were was pretty clear, which was these growth goals that we had and also our purpose. That was really the thing that was guiding us. We gave it a shot and we had these KRs and they helped us to make what wasn't working more discussable. And that was the thing that really became clear. That was the big win for us in that transition where we were able to say, “Look, you wrote this down then we were going to do this particular action and we expected to see a particular outcome from that action, and we're not even doing the input.
Erica Seldin:
We're not even doing the things that are necessary to get into that action, and discussing that was a real turning point for our team and helping each other to raise our own expectations, to raise the bar and help everyone hit that bar of what we wanted to do together. And so that was sour experience. It's been interesting since then. I think that we're a rapidly evolving organism of some kind. We're like a very small cell, early days in evolution is how I think about us. The kind that's just mutating faster than we know what to do with and there's all issues from the mutation, but it's a lot of fun being a pioneer in that way.
Erica Seldin:
But we've now evolved our work, our KR work to be much more focused on habits. We've taken our KRs and turned them. Those KRs that worked really well that particular trimester because for us two things don't change that much. Trimester to trimester, things are relatively consistent. The goals look pretty much the same, the work is evolving, but those stuff we need to do to be successful is relatively similar, and so we've found it much more useful to develop a set of habits that we've all committed to, that we're doing on a regular basis.
Erica Seldin:
And that's actually what we measure, is the habits. We have this list of, I think it's 10 or so things that we expect everyone to do, and we're tracking those things on a weekly basis, and then we have a trimesterly average of our performance on those habits, specific activities that everyone should do every week. And it's binary, so either you've done it or you haven't. And that binary metric, everyone wants to debate.
Erica Seldin:
It's like, “Well, I did this version of the thing or I did half of it. Does…” No, it doesn't count, but also sure. Count it, if you want to count it, I don't care. And the idea again is making it discussable. And that's really where we get to the next level of our teaming which is the ability to pull each other forward, help each other to achieve our collective purpose. And that's where we've seen a lot of value from this system.
Tim Cynova:
We started OKRs about the same time that we were going through crucial conversations training, which was about the same time that we started in earnest, our journey in anti-racism and anti-oppression. I think to your point. When you write it down on a piece of paper and you have a conversation with your supervisor about it, then it's easier to come back to it and say, “Remember we had that conversation. You said you were going to do this thing. Why didn't it get done? Now it's three quarters in a row or what do you need?”
Tim Cynova:
And then it's less, you're not doing your work in general and more specific, that is a fact that we all agreed on in the moment. Makes it easier. I think for newer managers too, there's some framework to follow, but it's not… I think because we've iterated every quarter, clearly there's challenges with it and we've debated binary, we've debated various departments that are like, “This framework doesn't work for us.”
Tim Cynova:
And then others who are like, “Well, doesn't work for us in a different way.” And then you just keep iterating while also asking the question, if it's not this, do you remember… Before this happened, no one knew what was going on, and so what's the alternative? I love the idea of the habits as something to-
Nicola Carpenter:
What's funny is that one of my ongoing personal objectives is focused on habits.
Erica Seldin:
Well, there you go.
Nicola Carpenter:
Which is just an objective, which I think is funny that that is one of the objectives, because I try to be more simple because tracking personal life seems silly anyway sometimes, so I try to not think too hard. But I also really liked what you talked about of the needing to focus and coming across OKRs in a time of needing to focus. Because I feel like that's something that it's helped us with too. Because as an organization, we want to do all the things and it's hard to do all the things. It's impossible to do all the things.
Erica Seldin:
We want to do all the things.
Nicola Carpenter:
Exactly.
Erica Seldin:
Even all the things, emoji and slack.
Nicola Carpenter:
Amazing.
Erica Seldin:
And so we-
Tim Cynova:
It's just a pile of books that just keeps adding, because-
Erica Seldin:
-no. Well, yes, it should be that, but if there were animated emojis, maybe that would be it.
Nicola Carpenter:
There are.
Erica Seldin:
Oh, like the party parrot.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yes, we have an absurd number of animated emojis in our Slack. I love it.
Tim Cynova:
We have a very talented people in our team.
Nicola Carpenter:
I need to get in the animated emoji game.
Erica Seldin:
Actually animate. We have people on our team that animate the emojis. Yeah, it's great.
Tim Cynova:
Everyone should have one of those people on their team.
Erica Seldin:
Apparently I'm missing a core skill for the future of work, which is the emoji animator and noted.
Nicola Carpenter:
My favorite is sparkles that animate like rainbow sparkles that animate. It's great.
Erica Seldin:
Oh that does sound very nice.
Nicola Carpenter:
It's magic.
Erica Seldin:
It's magic.
Nicola carpenter:
Back to magic.
Erica Seldin:
You can use that when you have an alignment meeting.
Nicola carpenter:
Yes, exactly. It's the new alignment emoji. But one of our taglines for the past year that we've been trying to focus on is do less better. And I feel also that has helped us change OKRs in our documents, so we have a sheet in our shared Google Drive, and there was a while when I was just auto-populating blank three objectives and each objective had, I think three key results and we're like, “Wait a second. What if we just got rid of one of those objectives and the default was two objectives with three key results each. Is that going to have people create less OKRs, less things so that they could then focus on it?”
Nicola carpenter:
Because we were getting as an organization probably 30% when we were hitting super low. [inaudible 00:21:12] 40%, we were not doing less better very well. One of the things that we used to say all time is focus even over more. That was a really a strategic filter for us, is how can we focus even over more, because we want to do all the things. And then someone on the team says, “Focus is more,” which really worked for me because I was like, “That is so true.” When we are focusing, you get to do so much more depth, and so thinking about fewer objectives and higher output on your KRs, all of a sudden, that's what more feels like.
Nicola carpenter:
It's like you're making more progress against the things that you really care about and so that started to feel really good. It started to feel like, “Oh, I'm getting smarter and better at the things that I care about as opposed to doing more stuff that helps me feel like maybe there's more out there for me to be successful at," so I really liked that. But it also connects into another way that I think about OKRs which is that the objective itself is a version of naming the uncertainty that we have.
Nicola carpenter:
What we would like to have happen in the uncertain context that we operate in. And then the KR makes it certain, it's writing down what the certainness is, what we can be sure about, or at least, what we think we can attain in the context of that uncertainty. My work is all about balancing certainty and uncertainty and helping people to operate more in an uncertain world, and if you think that writing down what you think you can achieve in the form of a KR as a way of making the uncertain more certain, that feels really good.
Tim Cynova:
Some of the good things about OKRs are that they're transparent. They're transparent and they cascade throughout the entire organization, so the idea is that everyone wherever they are in the organization sees how the work that they do day in and day out impacts where the organization is going and what the organizational objectives are… what the organizational objectives are for that period. That's one of the good things, but I know both of you maintain some skepticism on varying levels probably depending on the day in OKRs as a framework. I'm curious who wants to jump in first with their skepticism about OKRs as a framework.
Erica Seldin:
I'm happy to say some of the things that I told you. I was like, “I'll come and talk about OKRs but you have to know that I'm skeptical, which I love the answer because same. Obviously I love them but also you got to have some healthy skepticism in there.
Nicola carpenter:
Totally, and for me, I think it comes down to a couple of things. The first is just the… I have a real problem. I think with this idea of 70% is good. That's what success looks like. I think that it plays into this hyper-competitive over achieving cultural… work culture narrative and I think a lot of that comes from Google, I think mostly popularized. OKRs.
Erica Seldin:
And I think that the culture and this idea of the startup culture and that nothing is really ever fully achievable is something that bakes in this mindset of where the workplace becomes a place of never being able to succeed fully. And that you're always striving for something more, and I think that I want it to be the case that we feel that we're doing things that we can achieve, that are really achievable and I don't know. There's something about the competitive, overachieving, ‘you're never good enough' element of it that just irks me.
Nicola Carpenter:
It's so interesting because I have viewed that in such an opposite way. I feel like that 70% has let me let go of some perfectionism, and I was always the person who was like, “I need to get an A in school. I need to do all these things.” And I also live with multiple chronic illnesses, so I just can't do everything. And if I try to do everything, my body is like, “No, you're not going to do all these things.” And I feel that built-in scarcity is actually really helpful to have in when I'm thinking about work. Because I tend to overthink what I can do and then hit not to a hundred and then I'm sad that I can't hit a hundred. If it's built-in and that 70 is what you can do, I feel like that built-in little bit of buffer is helpful.
Erica Seldin:
Then why not just write down what you actually can do?
Nicola Carpenter:
Great question. I don't know.
Erica Seldin:
I feel fitness, physical fitness and it comes up a lot as a good metaphor for these goal-setting conversations and I've recently… I've joined the Peloton revolution or whatever is happening with Peloton. There's one of my building, it makes it very easy for me to do it, but in particular, I've gotten to be a big fan of this one type of training on the Peloton. I think it's called FTP test. Functional threshold power I think is what it stands for. Are you a cyclist? Do you know this or Peloton or anything?
Tim Cynova:
I'm a cyclist. Aspirational at this point, but we also work with… One of our colleagues is a professional cyclist and also our senior director of finance. You're in good company. Usually Nicola just rides along with the cycling conversations until we get back to the actual topics, so we're good.
Erica Seldin:
We're good.
Tim Cynova:
We can keep going.
Erica Seldin:
We're okay. Well, I'm not a cyclist and I won't spend too much time here but I feel it's so relevant to this conversation because basically the way that this works is I don't feel good about my own physical fitness. I've never felt like I am an athlete or I'm great at stuff. I have arthritis and issues that I cannot actually do these things, but this particular way of working on the Peloton is that you set your own threshold power. You do a test, it's just for you. And then every class that you do is in these zones.
Erica Seldin:
It's still on one to seven and they call out the zone and you're just doing your own zone. You can be successful in the class because you're riding your zones. It reminds me of this conversation because it feels like if you set the goals that you can achieve, it still feels good to achieve a goal, even if you've written it down for yourself, but you know what's achievable and you're able to work in your zones.
Erica Seldin:
You're still getting better, and you can always push yourself to the next zone, but you can also lift yourself up by doing the zone below where you are consistently. And so I think that there's something about that. It was the inverse. It's like write a lower goal and achieve it more regularly, I wonder what that would do to a culture around OKRs and goal setting, so just a thought. And sorry for the cycling tangent.
Nicola Carpenter:
Oh no, it's fine. I enjoy it. I feel I've gotten a whole another side of knowledge of acronyms and things that I don't necessarily need to know, but it's enjoyable.
Erica Seldin:
You don't need to know it.
Tim Cynova:
It comes in handy every July with the Tour de France. You can cocktail party or something like that.
Nicola Carpenter:
Something to talk about, yes.
Tim Cynova:
I love the idea about the equivalent of an FTP as an organizational tool, and what would that look like?
Erica Seldin:
Yes, I think it's a similar concept in a lot of ways. The thing I like about it is that you can choose the zone that you're in. You can be operating at a variety of different zones and to be intentional about that, where each zone has its purpose. Each zone you're maintaining. You know that you're in maintenance or endurance mode, you know that you're maximizing effort, but you can't do it for that long.
Erica Seldin:
And there's something about, we all do that. We all know when we're in a high intensity moment. We're in that moment right now at August where everybody is just cranking on what we're doing and we've all looked each other in the eye and said, “This is one of those moments. We're just going to do it, power through and we know that it won't last that long. It's temporary, so we can help each other succeed in that mode and then we can all commit to an endurance mode for the next couple of weeks once we get through it.” It's really nice to think about different modes of working in that way.
Nicola Carpenter:
It has to be sustainable. I think that engagement is something that we think a lot about and engagement has a lot to do. There's so many different factors in engagement, but one of the things is just feeling you can sustain. You can sustain in the organization and that requires sometimes being challenged and pushing and that requires sometimes having it be okay to coast, and thinking about acknowledging those modes when you're in it or those zones when you're in them is something that's really helpful and to be able to do that transparently with your colleagues. It's also really helpful.
Nicola Carpenter:
I think we use vacation as a proxy sometimes for that and I think things like unlimited vacation policies or work from home or whatever it is as a proxy for saying like, “It's cool to meet a minute and that's okay.” But actually being able to talk about it in the way… And sometimes I need a week. I've had this week which has just been wild, back to back and so much challenging stuff, but it's one of those weeks where it's like, “I can do that too. And it feels good also.” Yes, there's something to it maybe.
Nicola Carpenter:
And I think for organizations who are good at setting realistic goals, then yes, why not have it be 100% as your goal? At [inaudible 00:30:46], we've consistently hit it 30%, 40% maybe 50 or maybe 63% I think is the highest it's ever been. I feel like even just pushing us to get closer to 70 is still a decent goal.
Erica Seldin:
Definitely, definitely.
Nicola Carpenter:
Okay, so where does your skepticism about OKRs come from?
Erica Seldin:
Yes, so I feel I had a falling out with OKRs. I read the book, measure what matters and it may be really sad realizing that they were created in an age of work that was not for me. And if I feel that as a white woman, what do colleagues of color feel? How do people who are oppressed in ways that I'm not feel, and just reading a whole book, I was like, “Ah, this is just so bro-ey and I don't feel comfortable reading this book.” And then there was this whole section about using a sports metaphor.
Erica Seldin:
And I was like, “Okay, well, what is the end goal of football? To make money for the owners.” And then I just went on this rage spiral of sports hatred, especially football and oppressing players to give money into the hands of owners. I was like, “Oh, who cares they're being used for such horrible things? How can I get behind with this thing that is used in such nefarious ways? And is there ways to use that framework in a better way?” And I was just so frustrated with it, but I feel like there's still benefits to it.
Erica Seldin:
In the last podcast episode that I was a guest on with my colleague Courtney about anti-racism, anti-oppression, and Courtney gave the example of that, racism falls through the cracks. If you don't see it, it'll fall through the cracks. We were talking about what can you focus on and how do you focus on things to make sure that you're looking at everything. And I feel like writing down what your priorities are can help you find what those cracks are.
Erica Seldin:
And so I feel like even though it is important to say how was this created? What was the environment that this was created in and how is that not necessarily the best way of doing things, but also saying, “Well, how is it beneficial?” But I do think that there are still pros even though don't love the origins.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yes, totally. I think that that's a much better way of articulating what I was trying to get at with this idea of competitive culture at Google or whatever. It's like that is exactly it, which is this very bro-ey and profit-driven environment where goal-setting is a means to an end and not necessarily a way of creating a more transparent, more equitable environment where everyone can succeed. And so it is both sides of that. And I do apologize for the sports metaphor in the middle of sports. I need a little goal-setting-
Erica Seldin:
It's especially football that I have issues with for some reason. There's so many brain injuries and now I'm going to get all hate tweets of football fans, but oh well, brain injuries.
Nicola Carpenter:
I'm a huge football fan. I grew up with football and over the last couple of years, I've been making an active effort to stop giving my money to the football industry. Not paying for cable anymore just to watch football and not going to bars to watch football at that time. I'm just trying to not reinforce that, but it's challenging. I really do like it. Then I feel bad about it.
Erica Seldin:
And then there's something fun about sports. I wish there was a way to make it so that the end of sports wasn't to give money into the hands of owners, but it's the same as so many things.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yes, exactly. It's capitalism.
Erica Seldin:
Capitalism. Is it over? Are we done with capitalism? I think we're getting close.
Nicola Carpenter:
That's a different podcast, but I would come back for that.
Tim Cynova:
As we start to land the plane on this portion of the episode, what are your final thoughts, on this topic?
Nicola Carpenter:
Not on capitalism?
Tim Cynova:
No, we can go with capitalism. I've got an episode that I'm going to have to put together about the conscious capitalism movement and how it might not be all that conscious.
Nicola Carpenter:
Yes, I look forward to that episode. I think my final thought is that accountability and creating tools that help to build accountability is more important than success, than actually the success itself. And so many organizations are striving for just winning in some way. Winning in the market, winning against their competitors, coming up with the next best idea of being best in class, and that success can be very distracting.
Nicola Carpenter:
And in my experience when you have the best people coming together, helping each other and holding each other accountable for a shared goal, that you achieve success that you didn't even know it was possible. It's different from what you would write down. If you could write down a particular goal of yours, you might actually exceed it if you are focused more on the ways that you are getting there and how people help each other to get there than if you just wrote down the goal itself.
Nicola Carpenter:
That's what I hope for from the iterations that we're all doing around OKRs and goal-setting and all of the above. And I think that leads into what I like to tell people too is if they want to try it out themselves, don't worry about it being perfect because the wording is never going to be perfect. You're never going to have a perfect OKR, but that's not what's important. What's important is that you're having these conversations regularly, writing them down and then seeing if you did what you said you were going to do.
Erica Seldin:
Yes.
Tim Cynova:
Great. Eric and Nicola, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Erica Seldin:
Thanks Tim. It was fun.
Nicola carpenter:
Yes, it was fun.
Erica Seldin:
This is a side note and probably something to be edited out, but I've been having a lot of conversations in my overlapping self-organization nerd friend group about whether or not the problems of Holacracy are foreshadowing for the problems in democracy. And if it's the case that… Well, you have self-organization Holacracy and sociocracy are these accelerated microcosm of what's happening in democracy. And I'm compelled by that argument because it feels real.
Tim Cynova:
I was at Zappos probably 18 months after they started their experiment with Holocracy and it was also about the same time after they had been acquired by Amazon. It was a really interesting time to be there, and I was there for a couple of days. I went to their all hands where Tony Hsieh did a presentation on teal, whatever they were doing that quarter. And it was interesting to talk to people and ask them questions and have the very strong feeling that there was a lot going on underneath the surface that they were not telling you about. All of the things being thrown up into the air and being acquired by Amazon and everything else. And I'd love to go back and see where they are now.
Erica Seldin:
Yes. Well, you can do an episode about that with my colleague Alexis Gonzales-Black who is the part of that whole change there at Zappos and led the transition to Holacracy. I'm sure she has much smarter things to say about that. But it does come back to a point you made earlier, Tim, which is about how it's better than the alternative. And that's the thing we never… As humans, we're always looking for the downside or the reasons why it's not working and this negativity bias comes into how we think about stuff.
Erica Seldin:
But actually, it's important to remind ourselves as change agents and people trying new things and having these conversations about how things can be different, that it's not perfect, but it is better. And as long as we keep trying to notice what's not working about it and coming up with solutions for it, then maybe that's okay. It's a lot like OKRs and goal-setting, choosing your framework for how you do that, building transparency and accountability into your organization, building more equity, being on a path towards anti-racism and anti-oppression. I've made more mistakes in that journey than I could possibly admit and probably even more that I don't know, but it's just better than the alternative.
Nicola Carpenter:
I think that brings it back to what we were talking about earlier, is that these are tools to start conversations. And I think that at the end of the day, that's important because we're not necessarily having a lot of these conversations about what are we prioritizing and regularly having those conversations. I don't think it's necessarily the perfect tool, but it is something that gets us to do that regularly in a way that I think is really helpful and important.
Erica Seldin:
Absolutely, and again, writing it down creates more equity. It creates the opportunity for everyone to engage in a way that makes sense and then also gives permission to have conversations when things aren't working, which is something that's really hard to do, but something that we can all look back at and reference and agree that we wrote down.
Tim Cynova:
To close out our episode, it's my pleasure again to welcome back. podcasting's favorite co-host, Lauren Ruffin. Hey Lauren, how's it going?
Lauren Ruffin:
It's okay. I knew it was coming and I still almost spilt my coffee into the microphone. [laughs]
Tim Cynova:
[laughs] That's [inaudible 00:40:12] good morning.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yes. Good morning.
Tin Cynova:
This episode we spoke with Nicola Carpenter and Erica Seldin about transparency, accountability and alignment, because the OKR framework is a tool that we can use on multiple of these fronts. We spent a good bit of time talking about it, the pros, the cons, the alternatives. You've been working on the Fractured Atlas team for about three and a half years during the entire time we've used this tool. You also are a member of the leadership team as we work each quarter to set and articulate our organizational objectives. What has been your experience with OKR?
Lauren Ruffin:
At the risk of undermining everything that we do, I hate OKRs. [laughs] I hate them so much and they're like the dentist, which I also hate. I know that I have to do them. I know they're going to make everything better so I do them, but I don't get joy. They don't spark joy in my life, but they have gotten better. When I first started, they were really an onerous process. Do you remember when we had to do really lengthy everything?
Lauren Ruffin:
And I also feel like I didn't quite understand them and I knew that I'm not a dummy, so if I don't get them, that a lot of people in the organization really didn't understand how to do them. And it's probably really stressful for folks who are in positions of power in the organization to figure out how to do it. I'm glad that we've really streamlined our processes to make them more palatable. But some folks jumped right into them and really love them. It's not me, they're not my jam. They're helpful and I appreciate them, but the dentist.
Tim Cynova:
Has there been any tool that you've used in the past that you prefer in a similar vein that attempts to help with transparency, accountability and alignment?
Lauren Ruffin:
A lot of the organizations I've worked with do strategic planning, and they plan down to the quarter. Well, I should say I don't think that in those sectors, in the human services sector, in the organizations I was working, they were really as attuned with the Google trickle-down of OKRs, so no, we never really called them that. I also think that when you're in an organization that's making incremental improvements over the same four or five programs and two events a year in the non-profit sector, they're probably not as necessary.
Lauren Ruffin:
You do something two or three times and you get in the cycle of, “This is what we do every year and we try and make incremental improvements about it,” but naturally, staff knows what's happening because you're not really making huge organizational changes. But Fractured Atlas is an organization that really does need something like OKRs. Otherwise, people get lost and or they make assumptions, and assumptions are, that's the death toll for organizations that are changing as quickly as we are.
Tim Cynova:
Yes, I can think back to some of the organizations that I used to work for and it probably is 15, 20 years later, it's probably the same cycle. You create two new works, you do the gala, you do the season about this point. This is how we tour. After one cycle you've got it. But yeah, as you introduce more complexity and different types, like drastically different types of things. We have this software engineering team over here which is completely different or works in a different way and thinks in a different way than this team over here, you need some type of tool to help coordinate that.
Tim Cynova:
I remember when you came in, it was starting to get to be like, this is really… this is tough to do. We've got to like a lot of columns that we need to fill out. And it felt like it was moved away from what the initial interest that we had in it. And so quarter after quarter, I think we've paired back to, “Oh here's the thing that is the thing.”
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, and I also think it helps at the leadership team. We have clarity on where we're going in a way that three years ago things felt a little bit jumbled. There were a lot of priorities. Some of them were competing. The organization was in transition from a much larger leadership team to the four of us that we have now. It was hard. So yeah, I'm really glad that we've streamlined it. I also think for other organizations who want to do OKRs, you have to have like an OKR warrior. I know that we're trying to get done with the military terms, but I can't think of it, like you've got to have someone who's willing to go to battle like a happy warrior for OKRs in an organization.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. It really makes the difference that someone deeply understands the way it works, is positive about it, is helpful and in the face of skepticism and delays just continues to go forward with, “Yep, we do this every quarter and here's the thing that needs to be done.” Even when you're like, “Really? The quarter just passed,” we were like, “We're doing this thing again? I just set them.”
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Exactly.
Tim Cynova:
We set hours every quarter, every three months, and the entire organization from the leadership team setting organizational objectives, to everyone in the organization having it locked in, we do that over the span of two weeks. The first two weeks of every quarter we do that, so effectively you get two and a half months for your OKRs, but it never fails. It's like it just feels like we did this and I think that's part of the thing that I like about OKRs and the thing I hate about OKRs. Because you can see the end, but also it comes so quickly and you start to realize how fast time is passing.
Tim Cynova:
And especially if after quarter, after quarter after quarter you're like, “I still have this thing on my list and it's not done. So what's happening that I can't get this thing done that I say is important that I'm trying to dedicate resources to.” Just trying harder is probably not going to get it done the fourth time if it's been an OKRs for the past three quarters.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I mean we settled on the quarter thing because at that time we felt like we needed to make quarterly changes like we need to track by quarter. I don't know. I also think that we should give ourselves the flexibility to figure out as we settle into, because we've had some of the same organizational goals now for a while. It'd be interesting to think about what would happen if we were to lengthen the timeline.
Tim Cynova:
Erica said that August does trimesters.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, interesting.
Tim Cynova:
You get the three to four months and that might be just the month that you need.
Lauren Ruffin:
A lot of mine are, I put them on for the next quarter because I was so close to finishing them.
Tim Cynova:
Well, and for the leadership team, for the past year at least, we've been doing binary. You achieve it or you don't, you don't get any partial credit while the rest of the organization is still doing partial credit. So there are some things where 85% there, but it depended on this other person and maybe I should have written it slightly better, but it was a big enough project that I want the dopamine hit from completing it and crossing it off my list. It was going on the list next quarter.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, the lawyer training in me always wants to gain the words and the OKRs like can I add a timeframe in here or can I add a number that I can… Like if I put that number in, do I want to say complete or started, or just leave it kind of like let it just tail off so I could-
Tim Cynova:
Ruminated over the thing.
Lauren Ruffin:
Exactly. Identified and solicited, not closed.
Tim Cynova:
What does solicit mean exactly? It's like I've drafted the letter or?
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I mean, OKRs, I think they've been really helpful for us. I mean going back to the other thing, like I think for some organizations they probably would feel pretty meaningless.
Tim Cynova:
I remember the time before they existed at Fractured Atlas and it really was, if you didn't ask someone, you had to proactively go and ask someone what they were working on, if they worked outside of your team. That transparency and I also liked the breadcrumbs it gives. Like if someone joined tomorrow, if they had time and interest could go back and read all of the OKRs that we've ever created, that anyone at the organization has ever created. See how we've graded ourselves to get the flow for what's happened.
Tim Cynova:
But before that you had to say, “Hey Lauren, can I go have lunch with you and ask you what you've been working on because I don't know what you're doing.” And there was a lot of uncertainty even when we all worked in the same office, that then leads to skepticism and you're filling in the blanks that really with the wrong answers, and then it creates tension in teams that isn't helpful.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I think you're right. I feel, especially for folks, it's been so long since I really reported to anyone other than a CEO or was running something, that that trickled down of confusion. I feel like I've always been in the loop on what's happening across the organization. But I think if I had been at an organization like Fractured Atlas 20 years ago, I would probably be really frustrated if I didn't have something like OKRs. For me, they're like, at this point, the annoying nut that's flying around my head. And I'm like, “God, I got to squash this nut real quick so I can get onto the real work of life.”
Lauren Ruffin:
But they are, like I do understand like how excited my colleagues are when we're talking about OKRs. Like, “Did you see what so and so's doing?” And I'm like, “Oh, actually I didn't, let me go look at that right now.” It helps you be a better manager, it most certainly helps you be a better colleague. And yeah, I do think staff appreciate it because a lot of the questions we used to get around transparency and what people are working on, especially since we've gone to the organizational goals cascading down, I think that really was the game changer for us.
Tim Cynova:
Right, before that it was just CEO singularly what their OKRs were, but they weren't necessarily… some of them were probably organization-wide, but it could have been like write a book and that didn't necessarily cascade in the same way. So yeah, now that everyone can plug directly into things, even if maybe their supervisor or their team isn't directly working on it, you can see how that rolls up to support the organizational objectives.
Lauren Ruffin:
So if let's say tomorrow OKRs are copyrighted patent and nobody but Google can use them, what do we do? Where do we go with that? How we modify them? Make not OKRs or would we totally… have you come across other systems that are interesting to you?
Tim Cynova:
Well, OKRs were popularized I think with Google, but they predate that to OKRs were originally called Management by Objective.
Lauren Ruffin:
I'm going to get an OKR history, what a great way to start my Thursday morning. Thank you, Tim.
Tim Cynova:
This might be the end of that history.
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh, is that it?
Tim Cynova:
I mean, if you look back, I don't know when they started, maybe in the ‘50s, ‘60s, but it was a framework called Management by Objective and that's what OKRs are or became. And then with Google, really popularized the concept of OKRs or Microsoft, the Silicon Valley group there. I'm interested in two things that came out of our conversation with Nicola and Erica. Erica talked about how August has been focusing on habits, the habits that we want and tracking those. Also, what came up in the conversation was this idea of adopting an FTP framework, this idea from exercise, specifically I know from cycling where everyone is able to map what their 100% is because it's different for all of us and that then you work toward that.
Tim Cynova:
Not this 100% is equal across the organization we're trying to get 70%. What might that framework look like if you've meshed it together with OKRs? There's always the Bridgewater Ray Dalio alternative where you just videotape everything and all notes are public. That's probably way too much data, which I think is what they've also found out. Certainly the people I've spoken to who've worked at Bridgewater say it just gets overwhelming because everything is available, but that's probably on the radical transparency side of things and I'm not sure how well that actually tracks to performance and improvement, and connecting what you're doing on a daily basis to the organization's goals.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Can you think of a time when OKRs created problems for us? I also am skeptical of the former lobbyist in me is uncomfortable with transparency all the time. Have they ever created issues?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, certainly from just people issues. When you put what you're working on and the entire organization can see it, you have to expect that people are going to read it and start asking questions. And then maybe it's not fully formed and if people see it in print, they think it's fully formed. And then you're like, “Well, it's an idea that we're working on and it's not really a thing yet. It might not be a thing.” I'm always reminded of a piece of advice Amy Wrzesniewski gave me when I was talking about this way before OKRs, but when she was saying it's not that people who want to make bad decisions, they're making the best decisions with the data they have available to them in the context in which they work.
Tim Cynova:
Defaulting to open, defaulting to more information allows people to see the context in which they work, which will hopefully, and usually leads to better decisions. And so I think there's a messy part though that exists when you default to open because it means you're answering more questions, you're having to explain things in ways that you might not have to if no one knew that that was a thing. But hopefully in the longer run, it's a net positive. I can think of a number of examples where that happened, but-
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. OKRs.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, I know you're a big fan of Patrick Lencioni. Have you ever experimented with the thematic goal framework that he outlines?
Lauren Ruffin:
Oh gosh, I am a fan of Patrick Lencioni's. I'm fairly certain I only work at Fractured Atlas because that came up during the first conversation we ever had. I don't play around with it too much. For me, the beauty in Patrick's work is giving people a tool, and instead of being that manager who talks about trust in a spiritual, you actually have a tool to be able to really talk about how important trust is in the workplace. And how when there is no trust, people's behaviors are just so convoluted because they're working in all their childhood nonsense in the office.
Lauren Ruffin:
That's been my big take away that and like death by meetings. Oh, what a blessing. Someone who hates meetings. I feel like the more these episodes go on, the more people are going to be like, “She really doesn't like working with people.” Okay.
Tim Cynova:
Do you know that then you can adapt.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I know, exactly. Like the people, I want to work with three people. That's enough for me. Anything more collaborative than that is really too much, too much to manage. BUT death by meaning, I mean, organizations do get in the habit of having meetings and feeling like the meeting is the mission. And to me, those are the two biggest takeaways from his work in terms of helping organizations really have the language and the tools to be able to diagnose themselves.
Lauren Ruffin:
But no, the thematic goals get lost. For me, they're fine. I think we've implemented some of that, but yeah, no, I mean, those are my two big Pat things. I'd love to meet him, I think. I think, I'm not sure. His team's really, really wide and he has zero racial or cultural framework in his work, but-
Tim Cynova:
Well, that's something you can talk to him about.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I want him to rewrite five dysfunctions but actually have a little bit of identity there besides gender, and maybe not have the women perform as men in the workplace. I'd love to see a deeper analysis of that work.
Tim Cynova:
I would love for you to write a deeper analysis of that work and then let's share it with Patrick, and then I-
Lauren Ruffin:
Like fanfic?
Tim Cynova:
Yeah.
Lauren Ruffin:
Except with organizational development.
Tim Cynova:
There's an audience out there. Look-
Lauren Ruffin:
There probably is.
Tim Cynova:
Totally.
Lauren Ruffin:
Five dysfunctions of your diverse team.
Tim Cynova:
Every time we talk there's an idea like that that comes out of our conversations, whether it makes it on the air or not, so I'm totally game for that.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, I think I'm going to update Laurenruffin.com but here's a list of all the ideas I have that are actually viable ideas that I'm never going to do. I have a list that's on a pad, but I need to just publish it so somebody else does it. I don't have time.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah, claim the idea. Cross it off. Give me an update.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
That's a great idea. That should also be an idea on your ideas list.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah. Here's an idea, do it. I only want 3%.
Tim Cynova:
Yeah. I just know they're like 3% of solid percentage.
Lauren Ruffin:
Listen, I can 3% my entire life and be okay. Can I just get the 3%?
Tim Cynova:
That's the next t-shirt, I'm going to die for you.
Lauren Ruffin:
It's not book supporting your family on 3%.
Tim Cynova:
If you're presenting your life.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah.
Tim Cynova:
Lauren, it's always a pleasure spending a few minutes with you and have these chats. Thanks for making time and have a great week.
Lauren Ruffin:
Yeah, you too.
Tim Cynova:
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