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.

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."

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.

Peter Compo has a delightfully provocative perspective on strategy, having worked in that area at Dupont for 25 years. What do we even mean by strategy? For many, it's a stack of vision, values, goals, and big projects. Peter would call that a "strategy framework." And by his definition, many strategy frameworks actually lack.... a strategy. Peter defines strategy as a central rule or policy designed to address tradeoffs and guide decision making and other behavior. As a well-thought-out set of guardrails, this kind of strategy actually creates a clear space within it for creativity and innovation. Sound ironic? Check it out.

In this conversation with OKR pioneer and best-selling author Christina Wodtke, we suspect that OKRs are in fact being overused. It's best to have very few OKRs that focus the whole organization on giant efforts. Instead, what's happening in many cases is that there's a feeling that every function, and sometimes every person, needs OKRs in order to align with strategy and feel like "one of the cool kids." To do that is to miss the arguably greater importance of "business as usual," what Christina calls "heartbeat work." Also, we talk about the inseparability of team climate for OKR success, and the importance of effective feedback and performance coaching. As Christina says, "Most problems are people problems."

In this conversation with Agile industry veteran Evan Campbell, we talk about Strategic Agility, and particularly, the need for resource fluidity. This plays out in any organization's portfolio management process. Evan sees too much emphasis on quantitative models for prioritization of innovative experiments that often deny resources to innovative projects because the risks and benefits are so hard to quantify in advance. Rather than starve innovative projects, we need to reserve capacity for innovation knowing that not all efforts will succeed. We talk about how hard it can be to apply OKRs to long term capital intensive projects, and explore why these projects get bloated with too many features before they even get off the ground. OKRs can speed up the process and eliminate blind alleys by mitigating risks and exploring constraints early in the process.