Your top 5 Objectives

In this article I want to show how you could build your own platform using Objectives and Key Results.

The Question

“If you had to pick out 5 objectives you would like to see the next presidency accomplish, what would they be and how would you measure they were done?”

Seems like a simple question on the surface, but I think it is possibly one of the most productive civic questions you can ask yourself.

Additionally, I surveyed 5 different friends and got back 5 totally different answers.

The magic of OKRs.

Google “Objectives and Key Results” and start researching. They sound technical and they really aren’t. An Objective is really a sentence that you state what you want to accomplish. The Key Result is how you plan on measuring that you are going to accomplish it.

Companies like Google, The Gates Foundation, and Intel use this sort of process to govern their thousands of workers. They do this by calling out a vision, then using Objectives to move the company toward that vision one quarter at a time. By being transparent about what the Objectives are and how they will be measured, the workers can create Objectives and Key Results for themselves that align with the company Objectives and Key Results. Typically a workers Objective is trying to solve for one of the companies Key Results, but not always. This system isn’t only top down. Sometimes workers choose Objectives that seem unrelated to the company OKRs because they can see something from their perspective. This allows them to solve problems the folks at the top haven’t seen yet.

Once the OKRs are established everyone in the company needs to check that they are staying focused by looking at the Key Results and working to improve them. This usually takes the form of a dashboard and can be easily visualized.

Periodically you have everyone grade their OKRs to see if they are succeeding and to realign the company and Objectives around anything that has changed since the last time. Making this period too long means the Objectives might be stale. Making the period too short creates churn since everyone is constantly rethinking their priorities. That is why a quarter is a pretty good balance.

The one thing that stays consistent is the vision for the company which the Objectives are aligned with.

What I’m Proposing

What if a government used a process like this?

I think that there are many visions for the country but with all the rhetoric, attack ads, misinformation and distrust it has become an emotional mess to try and sort out what everyone wants to do. I feel like our population is constantly pitted against each other and having emotional conversations about esoteric subjects when the outcomes end up being a confused mess of laws and rules that only seem to help those who are lobbying.

I believe that if you start by calling out objectives this forms at least a basic understanding of where someone is coming from. You can then quickly get a sense as to what is important to them and it becomes less about tribal signaling and more about something they are concerned about. Simply put, if I can see the objectives from someone, I can empathize with them to at least see why they might choose a candidate over another. I can also start to have a conversation about “Why is that important to you?” or “How would you measure that this was done?”

The conversation suddenly becomes real and not so much a venting of emotions and frustrations. I highly recommend you try this as a way to have a real conversation.

The Survey

As an example, I surveyed some friends and asked them this question.

If you had to pick out 5 objectives you would like to see the next presidency accomplish, what would they be and how would you measure they were done?

It was assumed that we are talking about a timeline of 4 or 8 years in order to fit within this model. Read below to see what they responded with.

Friend 1

  • Obj: Police reform
  • Obj: Make the living wages livable
  • Obj: Universal healthcare
  • Obj: Covid pandemic
  • Obj: Opioid pandemic

Friend 2

  • Obj: Strengthen NATO alliance
    • KR: 30 member nations commit 2% of their budgets to funding NATO
  • Obj: Fix the mental health crisis
    • KR: Rate of death by suicide < 10 per 100k (averaged across age groups)
  • Obj: Eliminate the long term effects of climate change
    • KR: Global mean temperature is within 1C of recorded levels in 1900
  • Obj: Affirm the right to privacy
    • KR: Federal privacy legislation based on GDPR or CCPA principles
  • Obj: Power the U.S. with self-reliant, sustainable energy
    • KR: 100 quads of renewable energy produced

Friend 3

  • Obj: United vs two strong camps with unchanging opinions amongst the people
  • Obj: Modernizing some of the ideas around social and medical support systems ( insurance, living wages, UBI ? ) and tax brackets that make more sense and are fairer
  • Obj: Education made almost free or better
  • Obj: A focus on national parks and ecology, climate, and wide-scale well-being, including carbon sequestration and taxes and whatever works
  • Obj: Perhaps a strongly reduced emphasis on military, at the federal and state levels

Friend 4

  • Obj: Preserve the constitution. No erosion of the bill of rights.
  • Obj: Establish law and order.
    • KR: No more selective enforcement.
  • Obj: Dominate strategically in space, air, sea, cyber, diplomatically, economics, and intelligence, maintaining US global hegemony.
  • Obj: Reform this economy. It’s becoming an oligarchy. Break up the tech giants, regulate social media, tax monopolies out of existence.
  • Obj: Protect and ensure the privacy of the individual before the government and culture.

Friend 5

  • Obj: Universal healthcare
  • Obj: Student loan debt removal
  • Obj: Campaign finance reform
  • Obj: Native peoples/”Black, Indigenous, and People Of Color”, BIPOC truth and reconciliation
  • Obj: EPA redux

My Observations

If you ask someone for just their top 5 objectives they can generally come up with this quickly. I think this is the most real answer since it isn’t overthought. But what it really does is get them to think less about the latest horrible issue and more about what the outcomes should be.

I did notice that very few friends actually were thinking about Key Results but I think this is quite all right. I think that would be the next conversation because if you are looking to get alignment around a group of people, I think a shared understanding of what they want to accomplish has to precede the conversation of how you plan on saying the objective was accomplished.

I also realized that I learned a lot. I found myself researching BIPOC and the Bill of Rights more. I didn’t realize that some of these topics were so top of mind for another person. I found that I was judging a lot less by a simple, “Red” vs “Blue” equation and more as a person who had very specific concerns.

In Conclusions

What objectives matter to you? You might not know and it helps to ask those you care about what matters to them. If you are scared of alienating a friend or relative in an emotional fight regarding “why people are wearing masks” and “if you can trust the media”, take a step back. Ask the person about their top 5 objectives. If you start by listening you might learn what the people closest to you care about and you might even share a similar concern.

That simple set of objectives helps to prioritize what could be accomplished. Measuring how it is done gets rid of the drama and distractions and lets you tie the effectiveness to data. It becomes less of a reactionary need to dominate the conversation and more of a creative chance to figure out how to make something productive out of it.

I have a vision that our leaders start leading and stop pitting us against each other. If, as a population, we know what our own 5 objectives are and how we would measure them then we can judge how well aligned we are these leaders.

No more do I want to look at someone’s personality to see if they are someone I want to follow. I want to know what objectives they would like to accomplish. I would like to think about the changes I want as objectives. I also want the discussion to be about how they plan on measuring these objectives so I can easily judge their effectiveness.

You can easily join me on this vision. Just have conversations with your friend and family with this sentence, “If you had to pick out 5 objectives you would like to see the next presidency accomplish, what would they be and how would you measure they were done?”