The Catalyst is a Group 18 publication. I'm Kevin Noble. I run a business transformation consultancy and write practical frameworks for leaders who want more from themselves and their teams. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at https://catalyst.group18.co/.
A friend recently inspired me to get on the balcony and look at my business as an object. Since we’re so small, I spend a lot of my time IN the business, as they say. I’m the developer. The strategist. I’m heads down on service delivery for our clients.
Then there are times - mostly nights and weekends - where I’m working ON the business, as they say. I’m the marketer. I’m doing biz dev. I’m doing ops cleanup or finance.
But what’s funny is that ON the business is still short-sighted. Meaning, I’m executing on things, but I’m not doing system design. I’m not clarifying WHY we’re doing what we’re doing. I’m not improving HOW we do it. I’m not making it more scalable and ensuring we survive into the future.
As a systems person, I just needed that one little push from a friend to unleash a whole flurry of activity.
I climbed (metaphorically) on the balcony and took a look at the business as I would if my business were a client of mine. The gaps were glaring! I’m not judging myself - there are an endless set of opportunities and problems as a small business, AND I still need to do service delivery - but it was really fun to see my business from that new angle.
So, I got to work! I mapped out the jobs to be done in the back office. I mapped these to an org hierarchy; organization, function, department, role. Even though I’m serving all those roles, it helps me see the structure underlying what I’m doing. From here I’ll continue into defining metrics of success, artifacts needed, processes - and eventually into options to automate some of that work before it even starts.
I did the same thing for Service Delivery. It clarified the structure underlying what we do, which helped me think through improved ways of coordinating work on our growing contractor team. We were missing rituals and metrics that I’ll be able to bring into play starting next week.
I worked really hard on our GTM strategy. ICP. Positioning. Offers. Campaigns. Hypotheses. I’ve said it before, I’m not good at all of this yet, but I’ve read a LOT about it. I have tons of notes. I fed these into Claude and we went bananas. And I didn’t just plan - we created.
We wrote cold outreach emails. We built PDFs. We re-did the language and content on the website (the one we just launched last week!). I streamlined the call-to-action scheduling flow. I added a signup for this newsletter to the website. I rewrote this newsletter welcome sequence.
All of my GTM notes, organizational system design, and playbooks are loaded into Obsidian as markdown files, ready for me to continue building upon.
I started reading Hormozi’s “$100M Leads” book to take my understanding even further.
It’s fun to have this little sandbox to play in. I get to experiment. I see a problem and can solve it.
Oh, and I also moved physical offices at home. If we work together, you’ll see a new background this week. I don’t think this is related to all of the above, other than I must’ve just been fired up 😆
What’s getting you fired up? What do you wake up wanting to go do? It doesn’t have to be “work” related; I’d just love to know what you’re currently passionate about.
Kevin
PS - I’m still planning to separate this intro from the deep dive in future newsletters, but I did not prioritize planning that in the last two weeks. Stay tuned 🙂 I’ll give you a plan before too long.
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The best leaders cultivate a climate that is both comfortable and intense. They remove fear and provide the security that invites people to do their best thinking. At the same time, they establish an energizing, intense environment that demands people’s best efforts.
— Liz Wiseman in "Impact Players"
Deep Dive on an OKR Operating System
You did the hard thing. You wrangled leadership. You fought through the abstract conversations, and you landed on objectives and key results (OKRs) that mean something. Energy is high. People are smiling with a mix of relief and excitement. Someone takes a photo of the whiteboard. You did it!
Which one of you will build the system?
Then…nothing.
Three months later, the OKRs are sitting in a Google Sheet somewhere.
Everyone went back to their day job. Nobody’s tracking. Nobody’s reviewing. There was no enablement or system design to ensure OKRs actually happen.
If you’ve been through this, you’re not alone. I’ve helped a lot of teams build OKR programs, and the pattern is pretty consistent: The offsite goes well, but there's no follow through.
The team spent all their energy on what they wanted to achieve and almost none on how they’d actually run the program.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
It’s not the goals on the whiteboard that drive success, it’s the system you create to enable the goals.
The Operating System
I think of this system as five pieces. They’re components that have to exist together for the program to run, like links in a chain. A weak link makes the whole system weaker.
Roles, Metrics, Rituals, Artifacts, and Process.
I'm feeling very literal today.
Roles: Who Does What
There are many ways to do OKRs. Even John Doerr who wrote “Measure What Matters,” the book about OKRs, says that you can break the standard rules of OKRs to make it work for your situation.
I’ve done OKRs for my small business for many years - so I'm pretty much all the roles. I’ve also been part of OKR programs for a department closer to 1500 employees with hundreds of people on the OKR program - there were a LOT of different roles involved in that.
All that’s to say that your situation may vary. But if I were to boil down the roles to their essence, here are the four I see needed.
The Champion is whoever gives the program authority. In most companies this is the CEO. Their job isn’t to run the process - it’s to make clear that the process matters. They present the OKRs. They reference them in regular communications. They open the quarterly review. If the most senior person in the room treats OKRs as a side project, everyone else will too.
The Conductor is the person who owns the rhythm. Calendar invites, reminders, scorecard reviews, running the monthly check-in. The Conductor conducts the orchestra. They don’t play everyone else’s instrument.
KR Owners are the spokesperson and conduit for each Key Result. They don’t single-handedly deliver the result - you win or lose as a team. The KR Owner’s job is to ensure the team has clarity, the work is resourced, leadership has visibility, and problems get escalated. The KR owner is a steward of the system, not a lone wolf.
Data Owner is the person who pulls/calculates the metric. Small company or large, data often lives in silos or stuck in sources systems, and you need to name who pulls the data for the KR Owner.
Bro can't conduct AND play the cello.
Metrics: You Can’t Set a Target for Something You’ve Never Measured
Here’s a scenario I see frequently: a team sets a key result for something they don’t really have context for. For example, they want to improve profit, so they lock in “Improve net income by 15%.” Great.
What’s your net income today? No idea.
You can’t set a meaningful target for a metric you don’t understand, so don’t make it your KR.
Before you launch the program, every key result needs to pass three tests:
Can we measure it? Is there a defined metric with a clear data source?
Do we know where we are today? Do we have an actual baseline number? Do we understand how this metric fluctuates over time and seasons?
Can we measure it on the cadence we need? If you’re doing monthly reviews but the data only updates quarterly, you’ve got a hidden problem.
Any KR without good answers for all three is a risk. Rewrite the KR to something you can measure - or convert it to a Learning OKR where the first milestone is establishing the baseline itself.
A Learning OKR is often overlooked, but it turns “we don’t know the number” from a blocker into the task at hand. You’re not behind. You’re doing the work!
Rituals: The Rhythm Is the Product
A list of annual OKRs that are not supported with regular checkpoints will die. If you want the program to stay alive, you need a rhythm. And the rhythm doesn’t have to be heavy.
Here’s a three-tier structure based on time horizons:
Monthly - 20 minutes in an existing leadership meeting, first week of each month (not a new meeting - and if you can’t afford 20 minutes per month, the KRs must not be that important!). KR Owners update the Scorecard async before the meeting. The Conductor reviews the updates and runs a focused discussion. Greens get recognition, not airtime. Focus on yellows and reds. And when something is off track, the question is “what needs to be true for you to get back on track?”
Note: The above only works if people know their stuff. If the team's thinking and writing isn’t done async, you’ll need a lot of time to debate and discuss, and 20 minutes won’t cut it.
Quarterly - 90-minute formal review. Full scorecard walk-through and course corrections. Where are you off? Should you go harder on a goal? Should you make adjustments to execution in the subsequent quarter?
Year-end - Grading, celebration, and reflection. The reflection takes time, but that's where the learning happens. What did we learn about how we set goals? What would we do differently? The reflection matters more than the scores.
Speaking of scores, I think it’s important to track two scores for every KR. The Actual is where you are right now. The Projected is where the KR Owner thinks they’ll land at the end of the measurement period. You need both; the Projected score calls your shot and is the single number you report, and the Actual is a diagnostic.
The gap between them is a strong signal. Projected and Actual have to converge by the end of the scoring period. If they’re not converging that’s a conversation worth having.
Artifacts: Data Needs a Home
You need exactly two core artifacts. Team members will do a lot of thinking, drawing, and writing during the course of annual KRs, but these represent the main shared deliverables.
The Scorecard. This is probably a Google Sheet or whatever tool your team already lives in. The key columns: Objective, Key Result, KR Owner, Data Owner, Baseline, Target, monthly Actual Scores, monthly Projected Scores, and a Notes field. Nothing fancy. This scorecard is used during the monthly update and anytime someone wants to know how things are going.
The Quarterly Review Deck. This is more in depth, but is only done four times a year. It adds trendlines, narrative, and strategic questions that aren't part of the monthly updates.
Things can get complicated later when you have multi-tiered OKRs, but these two artifacts will serve you well for a long time.
Process: Accountability Is a Calendar Invite
Who does what, when, and with what dependencies? Map out the monthly cycle. Something like:
Last business day of the month: Conductor sends a reminder to KR Owners to update the Scorecard.
By the 3rd: KR Owners update the scorecard
By the 4th: Conductor reviews, flags anything missing or confusing
First weekly leadership meeting of the month: 15-minute OKR segment
After the meeting: Conductor sends a recap to the broader organization
Process design is accountability design. When you map out who does what and when, you eliminate the “I thought someone else was handling that” failure mode.
Accountability is a calendar event. It’s a reminder that goes out on a specific day. It’s a Conductor who follows up when the scorecard isn’t updated by the 3rd. The system creates the accountability.
The System Is the Strategy
The offsite wasn't the work. The whiteboard wasn't the work. The work is the system you build to make the goals real.
Five pieces:
Roles so people know who owns what.
Metrics you can actually measure.
Rituals that create rhythm without burden.
Artifacts that give the data a home.
Process that creates accountability.
Miss one, and the chain weakens. Miss two, and you're back to a spreadsheet nobody opens.
Call to Action
If you’ve got OKRs sitting in a spreadsheet right now - assigned but not really running - pick one of the five pieces this week and build it. Just one. My suggestion: start with Roles. Write down who the Champion is, who the Conductor is, who the Data Owners are. Send that to the team. Making the invisible structure visible is often enough to unstick a stalled program.
If Roles are clear, then work on the Process design.
If you’re not the CEO or the person in charge of the program - you can still do this. You don’t have to wait for someone to tell you. Build one of the missing artifacts. Draft the monthly cycle. Bring it to your boss and say “I think this would help us actually run our OKRs - can I facilitate it?” Be an offer maker, not an order taker. The person who shows up with a solution and offers to run it is the person who moves the organization forward.
I’d love to hear how your OKR program is running - or not running. Email me at kevin@catalyst.group18.co and tell me which piece is missing.
Kevin
If this kind of thinking is useful, it's what I do professionally. Group 18 works with business owners and leaders of growing companies on the operational and leadership challenges that limit performance. If that's relevant to what you're working on, I'd like to hear about it.
