Adapt to Win

Chapter 3Using OKRs to Improve Strategy Deployment and Execution

Chapter 2 presented the three critical subprocesses and capabilities of an effective strategy realization program:

• Strategy development (formulation)
• Strategy deployment
• Strategy execution (tracking and governance)

Every strategy must be expressed in a manner that is clear and understandable. The “House of Strategy” presented in the previous chapter is specifically designed to be easy to understand and communicate but also powerful enough to convey the critical elements everyone in the organization to understand strategic intent; what leadership has determined winning looks like. “Where we play” and “how we win,” once answered at the highest level, must be translated into specific measurable goals that can be decomposed and communicated throughout the organization at an appropriate granularity for every department and function, all the way down to every team. It is also critical to align goals vertically and horizontally to ensure interdependent functions are cooperating and collaborating to deliver top-level goals of the organization.

To consistently realize their strategic objectives, organizations’ strategy deployment and strategy execution processes both require a goal-setting framework that provides inspiring outcome-based objectives and empirical measures of progress and success. Objectives should be clear enough to support alignment over both long-term and short-term time horizons and enable alignment ...