Human Centric OKR's - The Fabric of an Effective & Growing Organizationwith Jeff Gothelf, Author, Trainer & Speaker at Sense & Respond Learning
In this episode of Exploring Growth, host Lee Murray sits down with Jeff Gothelf, Author, Trainer & Speaker at Sense & Respond Learning. They talk about implementing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and adopting a customer-centric approach. They discuss the importance of experimentation, continuous improvement, and understanding customer behavior to drive innovation and measure success.
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Jeff - https://www.linkedin.com/in/gothelf/
Jeff Gothelf
00:00:00
I was just talking to a client today and they said, look, this is really interesting stuff, Jeff. But, you know, we have to come up with a business case for doing the work. And that business case has to include, like cost estimates. What will it cost to produce this and ROI, projections and all of that. And we can't get a project funded without that. And the reality is that everything that goes into that business case is a guess. and so changing that mindset is difficult. And getting organizations to manage to a different set of goals seemingly is a trivial, change. Right? The pithy phrase here would be outcomes over output. Right? But as you start to peel that onion, the layers, the impact that that this has on an organization, it's actually pretty significant.
Lee Murray
00:00:56
Welcome back to exploring growth. Today I have the privilege of sitting down with an expert in measuring success. My guest today is Jeff Gothard, author, speaker, and trainer at Sense and Respond Learning.
Lee Murray
00:01:10
And we're going to dive into why and how you can build OKRs to track success throughout your organization. And as I've seen personally, for most leaders, it's kind of an afterthought or a bolt on. But today we want to discuss how it how it can be something that is part of your actual culture. So welcome to the show, Jeff.
Jeff Gothelf
00:01:31
Thank you so much, Lee. It's a pleasure to be here.
Lee Murray
00:01:34
So let's start with, who are you? You know, tell us a little about your background.
Jeff Gothelf
00:01:39
Sure. So my background is in design. I was started off as a web designer in the early days of the web. The web 1.0 days, the dotcom days. Those were heady times. Yeah. Good times, you know, learned a lot, on on the clients dime, mostly.
Lee Murray
00:01:56
Oh, yeah. Sure. Who hasn't? Yeah.
Jeff Gothelf
00:01:59
that was an interesting times. But, as the web became more interactive, my roles became, more sophisticated. So start off as a web designer and then into information architecture, UI and UX design, eventually leading teams and getting into product management.
Jeff Gothelf
00:02:14
and then in the, the late 2000, I started working at a company called the Ladders in New York City, leading their UX design team and working with folks inside and outside that organization. We began to solve the problem of designing in an agile software development environment, which is a real issue and actually kind of continues to this day. that work turned into my first book called lean UX. And as that book came out, the things that people were asking me to do change. So I was designing and leading design teams and doing product management and product work. And then all of a sudden the book came out and people said, hey, come teach us this stuff. That's in the book, which is really interesting. I didn't expect that. And so since then I've been working as a trainer and a keynote speaker. I've written a few more books since then, mostly with Josh Seiden, my business partner and co-author, and these days I work as a trainer and a speaker and, and, and an author.
Jeff Gothelf
00:03:14
But the scope of the conversation that we've had over the years has grown. So we started very tactically. How do you do design in an agile, or organization? And then it was more about cross-functional collaboration, leading software development teams in software driven businesses and then most recently, objectives and key results, which is a human centric approach to goal setting.
Lee Murray
00:03:34
Yeah. That's great. Well, that, that, that, sort of trickle effect and that makes a lot of sense. And naturally you're going to end up with OKRs, kind of being the center point of the conversation. So, so that's great. so, let's kind of start high level, right? And we can get into the weeds. Why do a lot of companies not operate with an OKR mindset?
Jeff Gothelf
00:03:58
Well, so look, let's just set some some sort of foundations, right? OKR is not a new thing. It's been around for over 40 years. Started off with Andy Grove at Intel, and it was popularized in the in 2016 with the success of John Dore's book Measure What Matters.
Jeff Gothelf
00:04:17
And you know, in in Andy Grove's World and then in John Dawes book, he wasn't particularly particularly opinionated about what a good OKR looks like. Right. What should we be measuring for success? and what's interesting is that in our book, who Does What by how much? we take a very opinionated point of view that your outcome, your objectives and key results need to be customer centric. So qualitative objective that talks about a qualitative future state you'd like to create for your customers, and then key results that are outcomes, their measures of human behavior. And that, to me is the fundamental shift here, is that we're measuring success not in terms of creating an output, but actually delivering an outcome, a hopefully a meaningful and positive change to the customer. And that ultimately impacts the business in a positive way. And so to get back to your original question, why don't most companies work this way? Most companies don't work this way because there is tremendous historical inertia to manage to production, to the making of a thing that comes from the industrial manufacturing world.
Jeff Gothelf
00:05:30
And, and there's a real clear, understanding in manufacturing, whereas I'm going to pay folks to produce something and they will produce that thing. And then hopefully we will sell that thing and make money. And that makes sense when you're producing physical goods. But all businesses of scale and all businesses that seek to scale today are software businesses, regardless of the product or service that they ultimately offer, and the production of software is a measure of value. It just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because the rate with which we can produce and deliver software into the hands of our customers is literally as fast as we want. Amazon does it once every second. Right. So if you can deliver software into the hands of your customers once every second, the delivery of software as a measure of success doesn't make sense anymore. It's a non-event, right? Right. If we deliver software today, yes, 60 times a minute, we did. Right? Or once an hour or five times a day or whatever it ends up becoming.
Jeff Gothelf
00:06:34
And so, changing that mindset is, is a massive shift, right? If delivering a thing is no longer the measure of success. What is the measure of success and value? And the reality is it's human behavior, and we're just not used to measuring that across. Organizations or organizations are good at measuring two things. They're used to measuring sort of the KPIs, the high level impact metrics of a business. So sales, revenue, profit, customer satisfaction, and they're used to measuring production. Did we make stuff and how much stuff did we make. But the connective tissue between those two things is human behavior right. Did people look for the stuff that we made? Did they try it? Did they use it? Did they use it more than once? Did they tell their friends, did they pay us money for it, etc., etc., etc.. Right. and so it's just it's a it's a complete mindset. I was just talking to a client today and they said, look, this is really interesting stuff, Jeff.
Jeff Gothelf
00:07:28
But you know, we have to come up with a business case for doing the work. And that business case has to include, like cost estimates. What will it cost to produce this and ROI, projections and all of that. And we can't get a project funded without that. And the reality is that everything that goes into that business case is a guess. and so changing that mindset is difficult. And getting organizations to manage to a different set of goals seemingly is a trivial, change. Right? The pithy phrase here would be outcomes over output. Right. But as you start to peel that onion, the layers, the impact that that this has on an organization is actually pretty significant.
Lee Murray
00:08:17
Sure. Okay. So customer centric we're we're getting somewhere with that. what about the things that are hard to, to measure. So in my world marketing there's this term that's been thrown around is called dark social. And essentially what it is is have you heard of this term.
Jeff Gothelf
00:08:37
No, no I'm intrigued.
Lee Murray
00:08:39
Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:08:39
So it's you know, marketers are good at coming up with acronyms. They're good at coming up with terms. So what we do. So we we confuse ourselves by creating new new terms all the time. Yeah. But there's this terms be thrown around and essentially what it is. The best description I've heard of it is it is the conversation that's happening behind the scenes, especially in a B2B, scenario where you, you see the markers of them visiting your website or, even downloading a podcast, like, you know, you see the kind of surface level interactions, but then there's all the interactions that happen behind the scenes that you can't see is what the dark part of it is. And an interaction behind the scenes might be, sharing, you know, sharing a post inside of a LinkedIn DM and then having a conversation about it with your colleague in inside LinkedIn or, sharing inside of slack, slack group forum and having a conversation about it there. of course, internally in your company as well. group texts, right where you're texting a bunch of, you know, whether it's for work or for for personal on the consumer side.
Lee Murray
00:09:49
It's it's all the conversation and sort of community that comes around it that's happening behind the scenes. So, you know, we started off real high level and I just jumped right down to the, to the, to the to the weeds here. But it just came to mind like, because that's the where I live in is the things that you can't measure. You know, where does this because what you're talking about being customer centric is totally, you know, in the behind the scenes type of behavior when it comes to marketing. That's the stuff we want to be able to measure. how do you adopt this mentality of being consumer or customer centric? Okay, OKR but it's hard to measure.
Jeff Gothelf
00:10:30
So I get this question a lot. Right? And the question comes up kind of like in like this, this stuff that we can't measure. Or should we set a goal that we can't measure or that I tend to be an optimist, and I tend to believe that we can we can pretty much measure anything, or at least get a sense of, of of anything.
Jeff Gothelf
00:10:49
So when I talk about measuring customer behavior, certainly the visible behavior that people, do as they interact with our systems, with our campaigns, with our products, with our services is the obvious stuff that we can measure. Right? So the stuff that analytics tools give us back. But you're right, stuff happens behind the scenes. and, and there are conversations that take place that we don't know about. So how do we find that stuff out? First of all, it shouldn't stop us from setting a goal that, to for a metric that resides in this sort of obscure the dark side of the moon, if you will. Right. the second thing is. Okay, well, how would you how are we going to find out that these conversations are happening and to what extent? And if we can't measure them quantitatively, then at the very least we can try to find out if they're happening qualitatively. Okay. So for example, you've got your target audience, right? And so on a regular basis, you're speaking to let's just say, let's say every two weeks you talk to five people, which I think is a fairly reasonable task.
Jeff Gothelf
00:11:50
You know, when I, you know, when I advise teams, usually I want, I want them talking to 3 to 5 people every week. But let's just say it's five people every two weeks. So on an average month, you're talking to ten, 10 to 15 people and you're asking them the same kinds of questions. Hey, how did you hear about the product? Hey, where where are you getting information about these kinds of products? Oh, I'm in this slack group and they always exchange links. Oh, I'm you know what? My friends on LinkedIn, my connections on LinkedIn are always sharing stuff with me. Backchannel. Right. or whatever. Whatever it is. Right. And so you're looking for those patterns over time. So qualitatively you're saying, look, this month, three out of ten people told us that there they learned about the product through a DM exchange on LinkedIn. Right, right. Next month it's eight out of ten. Next month it's nine out of. And so you're looking for those trends that tell you that this stuff is happening and to over time, I'll tell you a story, right? This is this is really interesting because actually, when I used to work at a company called the Ladders in New York City, which was a job board, and at the time it was a job board for people who made $100,000 or more.
Jeff Gothelf
00:12:52
And this was between the years of 2008 and 2012. And during that time period, texting became a thing in the US. Right? Like, you know, and when I started my, my job, texting was new. It was a thing that kids did. but it was not a thing. It was not a legitimate form of of communication. Certainly not for executives who made 100,000.
Lee Murray
00:13:18
Yeah. Because it came out of the development world. Right, right. if I, if I remember correctly.
Jeff Gothelf
00:13:24
Exactly. And so, like, in the eyes of senior executives looking for their next job, this was not a, a viable Professional communication channel. Certainly not for job hunting. Sure. and so and I would meet 3 to 5 job seekers every week because we would invite them in and have these conversations with them. And over the first two years, just talking to 3 or 5 people every week, asking the same set of questions. We always had something specific, but the same set of questions every time, it became clear that this behavior pattern was changing more and more and more and more, these executives were fearing that their, their bosses could, would read their emails, or, or any other sort of company owned communication channels, but they saw texting as a safe way to communicate with headhunters.
Jeff Gothelf
00:14:17
And so all of a sudden, we're seeing a shift in behavior. We weren't looking for that shift in behavior. Right. We were just qualitatively measuring a consistent set of questions. Yeah, over an extended period of time. And we saw that behavior change. Right. So so this is one way to do that.
Lee Murray
00:14:33
Yeah. And so it really just comes back to simply asking your customers, your prospects even lost sales for feedback and measuring that quality, quantity qualitatively so that you can eventually it turn, maybe turn into a new mode of communication or new platform or something that is qualitatively measured.
Jeff Gothelf
00:14:54
And I would argue again, or double down on the fact that this should be a consistent activity, especially if there are there are, you know, that there's stuff happening that is not easily measurable or accessible to you, and you don't want to overestimate it or underestimate it. And so, like, like, like we did at the ladders every week, 3 to 5 people, every week, 3 to 5 people.
Jeff Gothelf
00:15:17
Right. So you're investing, you know, you can invest 90 minutes every week, two hours every week in doing this. But you're building that qualitative set of insights and you're kind of seeing the behavior shift over time.
Lee Murray
00:15:30
Yeah.
Lee Murray
00:15:30
And also it makes me think, you know, there's a finite number of ways that people are communicating with one another. You know, it's not an infinite unknown of, you know, modes of communication. So in this case, it might be LinkedIn, DMs, group text, slack, Reddit, you know, the social platform messaging, Facebook groups like you may end up having ten or maybe 15 different avenues that you need to pursue or ask about. but as you start to get feedback, you're going to start to see the patterns. And that's where the consistency is, is going to make a lot of a lot of difference.
Jeff Gothelf
00:16:08
Sure. And look, and we, you know, without going down too far, a rabbit hole of how to do a proper customer interview.
Jeff Gothelf
00:16:14
Right. You don't have to you don't have to bias the question at all with, do you use LinkedIn DMs for X or do you use slack? Hey, tell me about the last time you heard about a new product. Oh well, I'm in the slack group and they're always sharing. right? So you're letting folks tell you where they get that information, and then you can double down and dig into it once they share that with you.
Lee Murray
00:16:35
Yeah. Okay, I like it. All right. So going back to our kind of more high level conversation about OKRs, we're talking about methodology. and, you know, where so if you're talking to companies, where should they look to? I guess we can talk about adopting a certain methodology. But then where should they look at deploying that methodology first in their company? it doesn't matter. I mean, is it need to be in a certain domain or.
Jeff Gothelf
00:17:05
That's a great question. The reality is the framework, the objectives and key results framework. Certainly the way that we have defined it in our book is applicable anywhere in the organization.
Jeff Gothelf
00:17:18
That was by design. We wanted to make sure that this was clear that this was a goal setting framework for teams, but any team in the organization now, if you read the case studies in the book, you'll notice a pattern about where these organizations that have successfully deployed OKRs in this way have started. They've started with the teams that are most likely to succeed. So what does that typically mean? It typically means that they're customer facing teams. So they're facing the actual buyers, the consumers of the product or service. Usually they're going to be the digital teams, the tech teams in those situations. And they're going to be sort of the most forward thinking teams within that particular organization. Why? Because a it's really easy to get data from actual customers because you're selling directly to them. b digital channels are easy to learn from and easy to update and see if you've got sort of a modern cross-functional product development team. They can learn and adapt and and iterate on the product very quickly to see how well they're learning.
Jeff Gothelf
00:18:26
So while it's not a universal best, you know, a universal law that you have to go down this particular path. If you look at case studies across organizations, the companies that have done this well typically started with these consumer facing teams and usually the digital consumer facing teams.
Lee Murray
00:18:42
Okay. All right. So tell me more about your philosophy. I know we've kind of talked around it a little bit, but let's get to the root of like what's your philosophy on human centric OKRs.
Jeff Gothelf
00:18:54
Yeah. So the fundamental difference here right is, is that we we take a strongly opinionated point of view that if you make the customer successful, you will make the business successful. Obviously, you've got to balance that with the business needs and sustainability and costs and all that stuff. But ultimately, our goal is to solve a meaningful problem for our customers or delight them in some way, or or help them achieve some kind of a benefit that they're looking for, right? So we want to define success in the same way that our customers define success, right.
Jeff Gothelf
00:19:30
Our customers don't define success by saying I got calendar integration. Right. Like really like no. I don't think anyone's ever said that. Right. Our our customers define success by saying, you know what? Ever since I signed up for that calendaring tool, I don't miss any more meetings.
Lee Murray
00:19:49
Yeah. So so is it sort of an outcome driven.
Jeff Gothelf
00:19:51
It's exactly right. Okay. That's exactly right. Yeah. So it's outcome driven right. So if you if you look at the way that we define objectives and key results, the objective is a qualitative future state that we'd like to create for our customers. So right, the most you know, the most reliable way to, to ensure attendance at meetings. Right. Something like that. Right. Doesn't say how we're going to do it. It just talks about you know it's it's qualitative. It's aspirational. It's it's is inspirational. provides value to the customer and into the business, and it's timebox. So we want to be the the most reliable way to never miss a meeting again by the end of next year.
Jeff Gothelf
00:20:32
Something along those lines, the key results answer the question how will we know that we are the most reliable way to never miss a meeting again? And that's a great.
Lee Murray
00:20:41
Question too, by the way. I mean, just to just to sit on that for a second, I don't think companies or leaders inside their departments, I don't think they think about those that question enough. How will we know that this we've we've found success? That's a huge question. I mean, not to be glazed over.
Jeff Gothelf
00:20:58
No, no, no, not at all. And typically the answer is we built a thing. Right. But in this case, what we're looking for are metrics that are outcomes that are measures of human behavior. So what will people be doing differently when we're the most reliable way to never miss a meeting again? And the way that you know that you've written a at least a well-written key result that is a measure of human behavior is that it has to answer the question, who does what by how much? So it's not a coincidence that that's the name of the book, right?
Lee Murray
00:21:32
Great.
Lee Murray
00:21:33
Great title, by the way, because it really puts you right to the heart. I love when books do that, where it puts you right to the heart of the solution in the title, but you don't really realize that fully until you read it. So just as an aside, yeah.
Jeff Gothelf
00:21:46
Thank you. And that's exactly right. Like so the way that, you know, that you're setting at least a well-written goal may not be the right goal. There's lots of options, but at the very least, you've written a human centric key result is it has to answer the question who does what by how much? So for our objective to create the most, the most reliable way to to never miss a meeting again, you know, key result could be, existing customers, you know, existing customers, Of enter 50% more meetings per month, on a month over month basis or a year over year basis. Write 5,050% more meetings per month. So we see people relying on the tool a bit more, right? We can see the number of alerts that are generated by specific that are set by specific people, whatever it is.
Jeff Gothelf
00:22:36
Right. but we're looking for behaviors that indicate that we're actually delivering value because, again, the production of a thing doesn't guarantee value, it just guarantees the production of a thing. That's it.
Lee Murray
00:22:50
Yeah, I like that. And you're you're really getting at the at the behavior. You're getting at what drives what motivates the the person because you're talking about, getting getting team members to show up to meetings more often or whatever. It was. The example you're getting at the heart of, what what drives them and what motivates them and, and trying to define that versus this, producing more show ups. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's really interesting.
Jeff Gothelf
00:23:21
You know the and this and what's interesting about that as well is that you'll notice that neither in the objective nor in the key results. Did I mention that the solution is going to be in there. Right. We deliberately exclude the solution from our OKR format, because there is an infinite number of combinations that you can put together to achieve the behavior change.
Lee Murray
00:23:50
Yeah. That's interesting. That's a that's a great revised look at OKRs because it sort of I think the way you said that there's a, there's a almost an infinite number of combinations to the solution. And I have always really thought about OKRs is more two dimensional, where the result is the solution. And you're saying it's not. You're saying that the result is is the result and it points to the solution. So I think that's that's super interesting.
Jeff Gothelf
00:24:20
The the solution is the variable. Right. That's the interesting part here. Like we usually get so married to the thing that we're building. But if the thing that we're building doesn't positively impact the behavior of the people who consume it, then we built the wrong thing. And so the measure of success again, is, is how are we impacting behavior. And this is where it gets like so so defining the OKR is actually the relatively easy part. I mean there's some work there. There's some editing and whatever and some reconciliation. But it's what happens after that becomes really interesting.
Lee Murray
00:24:57
Yeah, this is great. okay. So next what I want to look at is how do you build this into your culture. You know, how how a company thinks and acts around this sort of philosophy.
Jeff Gothelf
00:25:11
So this, this. This is tough right. So this is a mindset shift for an organization because it has to take into account a couple of things. Number one is we've got to start to move away from rewarding and incentivizing and promoting the just just hey, we made it. We made a mobile app okay. Did anyone download it? Right. So that's number one. It's just to get that in there. But more importantly more importantly is we have to build a culture that encourages learning and that encourages continuous improvement. Because inevitably, right, when we when we prescribe a solution, whether it's us or our bosses or our stakeholders, or maybe we take some direction from a customer, right? When we prescribe a solution, there are a whole bunch of assumptions baked into that solution. And so we take on a tremendous amount of risk by just blindly saying, okay, well, we're going to go build that now if we work with human centric OKRs, the team is still going to have.
Jeff Gothelf
00:26:14
At some point they're going to they're going to devise an opinion, a hypothesis about how to achieve this behavior change, and they're going to start working. Inevitably, along the way, they're going to learn that some of their assumptions were wrong. We have to create the kind of culture that makes it safe for those folks to raise their hand and say, hey, boss, I know I told you we were building this mobile app. The more we look at it, it just this this service that we're delivering doesn't make sense in the mobile channel. And so what we're thinking about doing is pivoting to a desktop only application or to, to fixed kiosks in the, in the, in the workplace or whatever it is. But the point is, is that we've got to create the culture that encourages learning and that encourages the course correction that is driven by that learning. And so there has to be psychological safety for folks to do that. And a lot of organizations, it's not there. It's not it's not particularly safe to raise your hand and say, hey, we're not going to build that thing that you told us to boss.
Lee Murray
00:27:13
Yeah, I like that. It's experimenting and it is and a culture of experimentation is, is a good culture, you know, that is progressing and learning and growing. ultimately going to get where you want to go. I, you know, for, for the CEOs in the room for the, you know, maybe shareholders that are have an invested stake. What would how would you parse this to, to them where they're, they're like, okay, this all sounds great, but how does this make me money? Yeah, right. How does this make me more profitable.
Jeff Gothelf
00:27:51
So a couple of messages there. So let's start. Let's start with what they can do to encourage this. And then let's talk about how this makes money. okay. So first first and foremost model the behavior. The most powerful thing that you can do as a leader in an organization is to model this behavior that says, look, I, you know, I believe we should do X, but in the face of evidence that contradicts X, I'm willing to change my mind.
Jeff Gothelf
00:28:22
And then if the evidence does show up, you change your mind, right? Simply by you doing it and your team seeing you do it, they now know it's safe. They can do it. Yes.
Lee Murray
00:28:35
They they don't fear, changing their mind and having recourse. Your negative recourse is they've seen you model it. I think that's that's a great place to start.
Jeff Gothelf
00:28:45
It's huge. All right. So that's that's what you can do. And it's really easy I mean it really is it. It really is easy to do and it's massively powerful. how does this make you money. So I talked before I said, look, I said, typically organizations measure two things, right? They measure high level success metrics. KPIs. Right. Sales. Profit. revenue, customer satisfaction, that type of thing, and they measure the production of a thing. What happens in between, right. What happens is people interact with that stuff. And so one of the most powerful exercises that we do with our with with the leaders in the stakeholders of the organizations that we work with, is we literally visualize the connection between those two end points, between the output and and the, the impact metrics.
Jeff Gothelf
00:29:32
And we say, okay, great. What do people do first? Okay, great. or we start at the top, we say, look, hey, we make money. What are all the ways that we make money and we list out all those activities? Okay. What happens before that? Cool. What happens before that? What happens before that? And before you know it? You've built this tree of outcomes, right? This this literal visualization of of all the behaviors that happen in your system. And then you look at your leaders and you say, look strategically, what do we care about in the next 12 to 18 months? Which of these levers should we pull? Because as you can now see, these levers are directly connected to profit, sales, revenue, customer satisfaction, whatever it is. Right. You can see that when we do this, then this happens, then we make money, right? So which of these levers should we pull? Right are the most important to us.
Jeff Gothelf
00:30:21
And remember we only have six teams, right. So we can't we can't do it all. And so it becomes it becomes a realistic conversation that speaks to the behavior changes that we want to influence, that directly impact the success metrics of the business. And so I think that that is a super powerful exercise. And it starts to to really draw attention away from, well, just make me that thing to, okay, I see if we get these types of this type of customer to connect with seven other people in the system within their first two weeks of using the system, they tend to stick around longer and renew their subscription. Right? So let's focus on getting that person connected to seven people in the first two weeks, right? And that that is a that's a fundamentally different conversation that is, is a leading indicator of making money.
Lee Murray
00:31:12
Yeah. Sounds like it sounds like behavioral six Sigma. That's what it sounds like to me. You know it's like you're looking at the behavior first around the production and around the consumption.
Lee Murray
00:31:30
And you are prioritizing the behavior as metrics for improving the production and the consumption. And therefore in theory, it should produce a more profitable process or product.
Jeff Gothelf
00:31:49
And I think the in theory part is important. Right. Because again, one of the things that we stress is that you're taking a guess. No one likes to admit that. Right? We have lots of words to avoid using the word guess. We talk a lot about requirements. Yes, that's that's a big one. Right. you know, we we use the word hypothesis and assumptions a lot, but if you want to boil it down to the simplest word, it's a guess. Now, it's not a blind guess in most cases. In a lot of cases it's an educated guess. And that's great. But since we are not in a position to predict the future, right, we've got to admit that that's what that's what we're doing. And that immediately starts to open up the conversation. How are we going to de-risk the guess? Right.
Jeff Gothelf
00:32:36
Super interesting.
Lee Murray
00:32:38
Yeah, it really is. it's a great a great perspective on that. okay. So last, last piece here is how does this all play out practically in an organization. And on our pre call, you were saying you have a lot of examples and studies from the book too. You can point to, on how that, how this looks, what this looks like practically. Maybe share a few of those with us?
Jeff Gothelf
00:33:00
Sure. So we worked hard in the book to find case studies from a variety of different types of businesses. So not just not just digital businesses or tech driven businesses. and so one of my favorite case studies came from a German company called Metro. Now Metro is a huge company, right? The 200,000 employees, they're a restaurant and supermarket supplier. That's what they do. Okay. Now, they and restaurant supplies have there's a timeliness factor here, right? Supermarkets as well. But particularly for restaurants. Right. They need stuff for their menu today or for the next two days or that type of thing.
Jeff Gothelf
00:33:40
And they can't have a whole lot of, of, of over, overstock in there. Right. And so, Metro runs warehouses distributed throughout Europe and Germany and Europe, especially. and they have to continuously optimize how those warehouses operate.
Lee Murray
00:34:00
Sure.
Jeff Gothelf
00:34:00
Right. So they have an objective to create, you know, the most responsive, timely, restaurant distribution warehouses in, in Europe. And their key results are things like the time to fill an order, the time to to deliver an order, the amount of returns that they get from the customers, things like that. the amount of, food waste that they generate. and it's fascinating because it has it has to do there's so many elements that they can optimize for. Right. There's the picking and packing of, of just getting the food off the warehouse shelves. there's the how do we pack the truck aspect of it? There's the route for the truck. There is. Should we specialize by restaurant type, like all the Asian restaurants? or, you know, get this.
Jeff Gothelf
00:34:54
This side of the warehouse and all the Italian restaurants get this side of the warehouse. Right. And that type of thing. And it's a fascinating case study where they are like, they've got these success metrics and they're continuously experimenting with various formats and, and layouts and, and, and processes in the warehouse to optimize for these behavior changes. Right. And sometimes it's technology assisted and sometimes it isn't. And it's really an amazing story that illustrates that this works in any context. Right. And isn't necessarily reliant on on digital tools. Digital tools make it, you know, easy and scalable. And the data comes back a bit faster. But but you can apply this in any situation.
Lee Murray
00:35:39
Yeah, I like it. on our pre call, you mentioned a quote from Janice Frazier that you, that you hold dearly. And, I want to have you give it to us and kind of put it in the context to what we're talking about, because I think that, you know, kind of wrapping all this up that companies who want to measure and want to track things to get better and closer to their customer and improve or improve everything, they have to adopt some kind of philosophy.
Lee Murray
00:36:10
And yours is very predicated on strong opinions. however, you know, give it to you. Yeah.
Jeff Gothelf
00:36:17
So the quote is and it's it's by Janice Frazier, strong opinions loosely held. Right. And I think it's, it's this that's the core foundational philosophy for this way of working. Right. Look, I think I'm a smart guy, right? You probably think you're a smart guy. See? Founders. Right. I've worked for a lot of CEO founders. They all think they're smart guys, right? And rightfully so. Right. We all have experience. We all have expertise. Okay. And so we're all going to form strong opinions based on our experience and expertise about what to do, how to do it, what good looks like, what bad looks like, etc. and that's great. And we should do that, right? But when evidence comes back that our opinions and to be clear, there are opinions. There are guesses about about what to do right. When evidence comes back that contradicts our strong opinion, we're willing to change our minds.
Jeff Gothelf
00:37:10
That's it. It's to me, this is the definition of humility. And humility seems to always get a bad rap because people feel like it's like, it's like an abdication of leadership. Yes. Or a vision. Right? But it's not. Humility simply says, look, I've got a strong opinion about something, right? But I'm smart enough and humble enough to say when I'm wrong about it, to learn from that and make a better guess the next time. And I think if you embody that philosophy, the culture that like if you plant that seed in your organization, the culture that grows from that is tremendously powerful.
Lee Murray
00:37:44
Tremendously. I couldn't said it better myself. I agree so much. When I see it, it's very clear and when I don't the opposite. Seeing a lot of ego, it's very clear. it becomes toxic on the other side. but yeah. No, that's, that's that's a wonderful way to kind of paint the picture for, measuring success. So thank you so much.
Lee Murray
00:38:06
This is great.
Jeff Gothelf
00:38:07
My pleasure.
Lee Murray
00:38:08
So if we want to send people your way, which we do, where do we send them to connect with you?
Jeff Gothelf
00:38:14
The two best places are my website. So Jeffcoat Health. Com. And the second best. Equally as good is LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me there.
Lee Murray
00:38:23
Okay. And the book again is.
Jeff Gothelf
00:38:25
The book is who does what by how much? A Practical Guide to Human centric OKRs. It's available on Amazon really anywhere you buy books online. It's available.
Lee Murray
00:38:34
Yeah, I love it. I definitely want to pick that up. Thanks again for your time today and all your your practical wisdom. I know that there's a lot of people getting a lot of value from this, so thanks a lot.
Jeff Gothelf
00:38:44
My pleasure. Thanks for having me on the show.