The Agile Strategies Podcast: Intelligence, Strategy, and OKRs

Jeff McColloch: Where Real Accountability Comes From

When it comes to succeeding with OKRs, I've noticed a big difference between leadership teams that are truly teams, and those that are a collection of smart individuals. One B-corp I worked with did an outstanding job of working through conflict and continuously evolving their OKRs to focus on the most important things. I was impressed with their teamwork, and asked them, how did you get so good at this? And they told me, we've got a great coach!. I said, I'd like to meet that guy! Now you can meet him too, Jeff McColloch.

Cansel Sörgens: Breaking Down Silos with OKRs

The tendency most people have is to cascade OKRs down an organization chart. Functional teams can certainly benefit from OKRs, but the greatest potential value lies in orienting people and OKRs towards customer-facing goals and products. Cansel (pronounced djan-sell) has developed a way to visualize this diverse and collaborative pattern of OKRs in your organization that she calls the "Solar System."

Mary Adams: What is intangible capital and why does it matter?

Organizations today build value through things that, not long ago, were not really measurable, and therefore not recognized as important. But the world has changed, with intangible capital comprising 90% of the S&P 500. Mary Adams is co-author of the book Intangible Capital and co-founder of Insights7. We talk about the different forms of intangible capital, like relationship capital, natural capital, structural and strategic capital. How can they be measured, and how can we translate them into KPIs and OKRs to help us improve them?

Jim Kalbach: Jobs to be Done, OKRs, and Thinking Out of the Box

Jim Kalbach is the Chief Evangelist for Mural, the collaborative whiteboarding tool. What exactly does a Chief Evangelist do? Listen and find out! He also wrote a book called The Jobs to be Done Playbook. We talk about how JTBD inspires innovative thinking by focusing us on customer problems and jobs independent of technology. Toward the end we get into some very fun speculations about how innovation projects can use JTBD language to write OKRs that support experimental learning.

Joe Ryan: What makes a network work?

Joe Ryan is the Executive Director of the Crux Alliance. Crux supports six organizations that focus, respectively, on the six major sources of carbon emissions. Their mission is to impact policy in countries across the planet. Joe wrote a great article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about how robust stakeholder networks accelerate climate progress. We talk about what the qualities of these networks are, and how Crux has adapted OKRs to their specific needs over the past five years. Finally, we touch on the role of strategic foresight and, potentially, artificial intelligence to provide a deeper perspective on where climate work is needed.