Supporting High Stakes Decision Making

A few years ago, I was discussing the company’s OKR tracking with one of the technical leads.  For those of you unfamiliar with OKRs, OKR is an acronym for Objectives & Key Results.  It is a process for making periodic strategic commitments.  Once the commitment is approved, teams build projects and programs to meet those commitments.  Once the programs and projects are in motion, progress is tracked with updates on a regular cycle.  Often these OKRs are set annually and tracked at least quarterly.  

The technical lead asked me what happens with the updates.  He had been making updates for years, but never heard anything back.  I realized that underlying his question was an expectation that there was a one-to-one relationship with update and executive response/action.  That one-to-one interaction works well at the team lead level.  Both the update provider and that team decision maker are in parity about the details of the effort.  They have the same language, considerations, and ultimately the same stakes in the decision.  This is not the case for executive leadership.  Executive leadership concerns are ‘holistic’.  By that, I mean an executive leader is considering all of the organization’s commitments, projects and programs, major risks and issues, health of the folks, long term bets, and interactions with both development partners and customers.