Sometimes even I fall for advertising, especially when it’s promoted in a reputable community. A few weeks ago, I came across an invitation to a free webinar on strategic sessions in a remote setting. It’s clear that the topic of remote work is being exploited by just about everyone these days, but I’m genuinely interested in the subject of strategic planning in general (and this is a good moment to remind everyone of the excellent book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt). At the same time, I’ve spent many years building workflows with remote teams. So, this webinar touched on two areas of interest for me.
The webinar was hosted by Constantine Koptelov, someone I hadn’t heard of before. However, the hour-long presentation flew by almost unnoticed. I took several notes during the session and became so intrigued by the topic that I immediately purchased Constantine’s book, Order in Chaos: Objective and Key Results (OKR), which I’ll tell you about today.
OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a rather popular methodology today for setting goals, whether personal or for a company. Constantine Koptelov is a trainer and practitioner who actively promotes this methodology and helps companies implement it as a coach. His webinar largely revolved around explaining how he does this, while also marketing himself as a trainer (which has become almost standard practice these days; it’s how trainers make a living). Constantine also emphasized several times that while OKR is an international methodology, he has personally adapted it for the post-Soviet space, as some approaches need to be adjusted for our mentality compared to the “classic” methods.
If I were to summarize the most interesting points briefly, here’s what stood out:
- Goals should be transparent and measurable (a widely accepted principle, not exclusive to OKR).
- However, more importantly, goals should be inspiring.
- There should be few goals to maintain focus.
- When setting goals, employees should be as involved as possible. According to the author, roughly 30–40% of the goals are set by leadership, while 60–70% come from the employees themselves.
- Goals should consider what is required from adjacent teams to achieve them and how you can help your colleagues in return.
- Goals should not be tied to employees’ salaries or bonuses. Otherwise, no one will set—or take on—even minimally risky or ambitious goals. On this point, I completely agree. People in such cases tend to set the smallest goals possible to exceed them easily and secure their bonus or raise.
- As a result, goals should be ambitious but not unrealistic (ambition is not about fantasy).
- Additionally, as Koptelov states, “To inspire with a goal, it must be phrased in terms of the benefits for the employees.”
I wouldn’t say these ideas are groundbreaking revelations. But OKR is not just about the methods. It’s essentially a framework to train yourself and your teams to approach goal-setting differently, making goals more transparent and more frequently achievable.
Overall, I enjoyed both the webinar and the book. I’m even considering taking a separate course on OKR to gain more hands-on practice with the methodology.
On the downside, despite the author’s claims about “adapting the methodology for Russians,” there isn’t much content in the book about this adaptation. It’s limited to just a few paragraphs that, while they touch on cultural differences, don’t feel like significant modifications to the methodology. Additionally, the book felt unfinished to me, more like a high-level overview and an invitation to further collaboration through self-promotion. I’m not a fan of that approach.
Another issue I had was the presence of errors in the text. Unfortunately, the book is riddled with what I’d call “typos,” whether due to carelessness or poor editing. These mistakes are very distracting (at least to me).
Because of these shortcomings, I lowered my final rating of the book. However, I still recommend both the methodology and the book. That said, it’s clear that the book could have been much better.
My rating: 3.5/5
Selected quotes (translated by me from Russian):
When they started the race, the dog always finished before the human. Why? After all, they started at the same time and ran at the same speed. Eventually, they figured out that the dog finished first because it didn’t know where the finish line was. A human, knowing where the end of the race is, begins to relax and slow down at some point. The dog, on the other hand, just keeps running until it’s stopped or stops on its own. This highlights a very important concept—the “effect of just getting there.” One of the reasons for setting moonshot goals is their distant, almost unreachable nature. If an employee knows that the goal is close to being achieved, they are likely to slow down (after all, they might be given even more work if they finish too soon). They might take a careful approach, thinking, “Well, I need to accomplish this much in a day, so I’ll do just that much.”
An important point: disconnecting performance evaluation and compensation from each other gives our employees the confidence to take on ambitious tasks. This approach provides them with motivation, a sense of responsibility, and a feeling of importance, all without putting their salary at risk.
We strive to hire specialists in their fields—people who understand their area of expertise better than we do and who can formulate tasks for their subordinates more effectively. Leadership cannot always assign tasks with 100% accuracy for all departments. Instead, it must rely on the knowledge and experience of its employees.
We can define a task at the “we would like this” level, and the subordinates will figure out how to achieve it themselves. This is why we need their participation in goal-setting. It’s quite clear that when employees are directly involved in setting a goal, they gain additional motivation, which, in turn, leads to a more precise realization of the plan we envisioned.
Here is the recording of the webinar (in Russian):
And an article based on it (also in Russian): https://hurma.work/ru/blog/algoritm-provedeniya-strategicheskoj-sessii-na-remote-work/
