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Recently, I made a short Linkedin post that was quite critical of OKRs, Objectives and Key Results. The post got a few likes, and comments who both agreed and disagreed with me. I found one of the comments that disagreed with me particularly interesting, because it referenced an article that was very positive to OKRs. That article contained pretty much everything that makes me doubt that OKRs are useful. I’ll walk through it, but first, here is my original Linkedin post: Here is why I do not trust OKRs, in three quotes: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." -Goodhart's Law, https://lnkd.in/dUgcBEMT "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." -Campbell's Law, https://lnkd.in/dFyeu4K3 "Key Results benchmark and monitor how we get to the obje...

Mapping a Value Stream is an adventure, a bit like exploring an uncharted landscape. If you are serious about improving the way your organization works … Let me rephrase that: If you are serious about improving any process, for an organization, for yourself, or for a friend, you will sooner or later need information about what the relevant value streams look like. You also need a simple, yet useful, way to map the information. Having that enables you to figure out where to focus your efforts. A value stream map is easy to learn, yet very useful, tool for mapping value streams. The purpose of a value stream map is to help you identify waste in a value stream. A value stream map tells you how much of the time that a goal unit [1] spends in the value stream that is value adding time and how much is non-value adding time. Waste, schock, and incredulity Schock and incredulity are common reactions the first time someone sees a value stream map. Does it really take that much time...

  …that the greatest prosperity can exist only as the result of the greatest possible productivity of the men and machines of the establishments— that is, when each man and each machine are turning out the largest possible output. — The Principles of Scientific Management , by Frederick Taylor, 1911. The 20th century was a century of economic growth and technological development never seen before in the history of humanity. A significant part of the credit for this has to go to Frederick Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911. Taylor laid down the basic principles of mass production. The ideas worked well for many years, but there were hidden problems. One thing that happened, because the idea was that each worker and each machine should produce as much as possible as much of the time as possible, was that parts tended to pile up, everywhere. Different people, and different machines, doing different things, produce things at different rat...

This is a draft version of a section in Tempo 2.0. Please do comment. Even simple systems can be difficult to understand. It is not because systems are inherently difficult to wrap your head around. The problem is our brains are trained the wrong way. Fortunately, it is not all that difficult to re-learn. When we do that, many problems that have looked utterly incomprehensible before, are suddenly fairly easy to understand. Doing something about them may still be difficult, but at least we have got a start. For starters, we will define what a system is: A system is a set of connected parts, real or abstract, that form an integrated whole. Systems have some interesting properties. For example: Systems consists of parts, that are also systems. Systems always belong to larger systems. Systems have properties that do not exist when you examine the parts separately. You cannot understand a system just by studying the parts. When you do something with a part of a system, other parts will nea...

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately. — Dr. Russel Ackoff Companies and other organizations are systems. All systems have some properties in common. As you will soon see, these properties can be counter-intuitive. If we rely only on intuition, we will make the wrong decision, even when we have all the information we need to make better ones. The Monty Hall problem We are used to solve problems through analysis. To analyze means to split a problem into parts, and trying to understand the whole by understanding each part separately. The idea is that understanding the parts enables us to understand the whole. This way of viewing the world is called reductionism , and it has been the dominating way of viewing the world in Western culture for hundreds of years. Analysis is indeed a powerful tool, but it has limits. When we try to understand a system by examining its parts, we loose the full pictu...