The OKRs Field Book

Preface

IN 2015, I WAS lucky enough to meet Paul Niven, a leading author on strategy and performance management. We wrote Objectives and Key Results: Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement with OKRs in 2016. That book was based on my early success as an OKRs coach and featured interviews with several of my clients. In 2016, I was still a student discovering how best to deploy OKRs. In this book, I am the teacher. I teach you to master the art of OKRs coaching based on my experience coaching 200 organizations and mentoring dozens of coaches. Here is the story of how I ended up writing this book.

In late 2018, shortly after Measure What Matters hit the market, coaches from around the world started reaching out to me for guidance. These coaches were new to using objectives and key results, but they did not ask me about the basics of OKRs. That information was already covered in the existing literature. They wanted to know how to be an effective OKRs coach – everything from how best to design an OKRs coaching engagement to how to facilitate coaching sessions at each step of the OKRs cycle.

In 2019, I got consistent feedback from other coaches that my guidance was working. With countless organizations launching OKRs coach certificate programs, I was compelled to develop a certificate program of my own. However, I quickly realized that the foundation for an OKRs coach certificate program was not in place. There was no definitive book written for coaches by OKRs coaches. As my colleagues ...