OKRs Q&A Podcast Ep. 57: North Stars With Your OKRs | Anthony Coppedge, IBM
In this exciting episode of the OKRs Q&A Podcast, Tim Meinhardt interviews Anthony Coppedge, Leader of the Global Agile Digital Sales Transformation Team at IBM. Anthony and Tim discuss the sometimes overlooked, but absolutely critical area of an OKR program—the organization’s North Stars.
Anthony shares his insight and stories about North Stars, and both Tim and Anthony delve into how important North Stars are for any organization and the success of an OKR program, because without North Stars, you literally cannot have an OKR program.
To learn more about Anthony, visit his LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonycoppedge/
If you are interested in working with the Atruity team or have a question you would like addressed on the show, please email contact@atruity1.com or visit our website at www.atruity1.com
Tim Meinhardt:
Welcome everyone to another exciting episode of the OKRs Q&A Podcast, also known as the OKR Corral, where OKR insight is the king. I’m your host, Tim Meinhardt, President and CEO of Atruity, an OKR consultancy headquartered in our nation’s capital.
Before we begin, if you’re an OKR fan and enjoy our podcast, please subscribe, leave a review, and explore our website at www.atruity1.com. And finally, should you have a burning question you’d like addressed in future episodes, please drop us a note at contact@atruity1.com.
In this exciting episode, I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with Anthony Coppedge, leader of the Global Agile Digital Sales Transformation Team at IBM. I always enjoy my conversations with Anthony, and this is actually Anthony’s second appearance on our program. On today’s agenda, we’re focused on the sometimes overlooked, but absolutely critical area of an OKR program—the organization’s North Stars, they are the most important element of a successful OKR program, because without North Stars, you don’t have a program. Anthony shares his insight and stories, and we both delve into how important North Stars are for any organization. This is an excellent podcast, as it’s never too late to understand the importance of North Stars for an OKR program. So, grab that cup of coffee, plug in those earbuds, and get ready for a very enjoyable discussion with Anthony and I on OKRs and North Stars.
So, Anthony, welcome back to the program. For those listeners that don’t know, this is Anthony Coppedge. And Anthony has been on the program before and I really wanted to have him back because I thought he provided some tremendous insight, which I know he’s going to do today again. So, Anthony, welcome to the program.
Anthony Coppedge:
Thank you, Tim. It’s always great to be here. And fun to do a second recording about, OKRs. So, let’s go for it.
Tim Meinhardt:
Beautiful. So, let our audience know a little bit about yourself again and what you’re doing these days, and then we’ll get into some good questions.
Anthony Coppedge:
Tim, I’m just this guy, you know? So, I have an interesting multiple set of careers, but it’s really fun. When I learned about Agility in 2009, it was like someone turned a light bulb on and it’s like, “Wait a minute. The way, I think isn’t so weird, after all. Someone codified my brain, and this is pretty cool.” And somewhere along that journey, the idea of alignment with clarity was introduced to me and we would call those OKRs. But I don’t talk about the term OKR because, there’s quite enough acronyms, thank you very much. So, one more doesn’t seem very helpful, but you know it is. Its Objectives and Key Results, and there’s a whole way of thinking that goes with that. So today I work for IBM. And I have been here for a couple of years now and have led the Agile transformation for digital sales and done work with the marketing teams as well. And so, it’s been an interesting journey on that side of the fence, which is not where you see a lot of Agility, not where you see a lot of people leveraging OKR frameworks and mindsets. And I prefer a mindset over framework, but that’s just a little bit about me, and we just kind of just go from there.
Tim Meinhardt:
Very well. Very well. Thank you. So, let’s kick off our podcast, and you and I were talking yesterday, and we were going over a few different concepts, and we started talking about something. I went, “Boom, I think that’s it.” And today I really want to talk about North Stars, and North Stars being, you know, kind of that high level purpose for what it is that we’re hoping to be able to accomplish. So how do you define North Stars and why, in your opinion, are they so important to an OKR implementation?
Anthony Coppedge:
Tim, why do we do what we do? Why do we choose the projects we choose? Why do we dedicate people time and resources to go accomplish something? It’s because someone believes somewhere along the line that that’s a worthwhile endeavor for whatever reasons. It’s those reasons, and it’s that motivation that we have to uncover, because without it, you can go do lots of activities and build lots of things. And you know, I think you’re the one who said, if you don’t know where you’re going, I’ll get you there, right? So, this is how you know where you’re going. And it’s your North Star guiding principle. Call it North Star, thinking of the North Star from a cartography standpoint of being able for ships sailing to be able to know where they were. So, it’s that idea of, do you know the direction, the heading? Do you know why you’re going there? These are the questions that I think need to be answered and are codified or represented in what we would call a North Star.
And I think the biggest thing about it is it helps create clarity and alignment so that people know why they should put effort, focus, time, attention, money, resources, whatever towards that thing. It also is helpful because it should point you towards things you shouldn’t do, right? So, if you’re trying to go north and you see that your activities are heading east, it would be a good indicator that you’re off target, you’re off course. And we don’t have enough of that, I don’t think, in most organizations because we’re so busy following the directives of people in charge, and we assume that the higher the rank, the more important, and that’s just not true. The more responsibility, absolutely, but no more important than the next person. And the ideas can come from anywhere and should come from anywhere. So let the best idea win. And that, by the way, is a little bit longer of an explanation, but ultimately, it’s that “How do you know you’re going the right direction, the right way?” and how do you validate that as you go?
Tim Meinhardt:
Absolutely. And you know, you and I were talking, sometimes in a smaller organization, sometimes they don’t have the why, either. But as you get to a larger organization, the why becomes sometimes a little bit distorted. And I think that, you know, they have at some level the vision and mission of the organization, which to me generally in a small to midsize business, you know, that that will help find your North Stars and give you that direction. But you get into a very large enterprise, and sometimes it gets lost a little bit. And you know?
Anthony Coppedge:
Yes and no. I mean, I hear what you’re saying, and I’ve observed what you’re describing, but I think that there’s a human element that cuts through all of that, and it’s this: you really have to know not just the differentiator of your organization, but the value that your organization is best able to deliver. What is the value for others that helps them be successful? And if you understand what that is, that’s not a product, by the way. It’s not a service. It will include products and services, but it’s not a thing—it’s a belief. It’s a mindset that someone says, “Our reason is X, or Y, or X and Y, whatever those things are. They have to define that. But what it’s not, it’s not profit, it’s not revenue. And this is very confusing for a lot of organizations from a 20th century mindset. I think it was economist Milton Friedman in I think 1970. And he said the only reason for an organization to exist is to generate a profit. And for a long time, that’s how things happened. I mean, you had the whole Taylorism model that was built with, you know, Henry Ford, where it was there’s dumb people that are uneducated and can’t make decisions. You need smart people to tell them what to do, and you need to have it done in a certain way, and that model needs to go away.
I mean, I was listening to Esther Derby. She and Diana Larsen co-wrote about retrospectives, and she was talking about how it goes even before that, and it goes back to slavery. And it’s remarkable when you think about the genesis of telling people what, how, and when, and what, and where to do it. Instead, paint a compelling picture of what that thing could look like of this direction you want to go, and then free your people to have the ability to use their own critical thinking skills and their own relationships to navigate that way. Because you’re probably going to find that they’ll navigate it better than you could ever pre-plan it for them.
And that goes along, you know, hand-in-hand with Agility, the idea of business agility. So, I look at this as how do we free people to bring the very best of themselves? And to your point, you start with—and I like how Simon Sinek does it with the Golden Circle, you know, the clarity of purpose of why, how, and what, and start with why. And he’s right. So why do you exist? Why do you do what you do? What is your purpose as a team? What is your mission? These are all things we hear that we think we know, but when you actually go look and talk to a CEO or a C-suite, what they’ll talk about is their revenue, and their profit margins. Which I get it right. You need air to breathe, you need profit to exist. But Tim, I’m pretty sure you and none of our listeners—I know I don’t—I don’t get up every morning going, “I sure hope I have enough air today. You know, I better make sure I’m breathing today.” It’s a byproduct of living. And so yes, we have to do some things. Air is just free all around us. But so is the opportunity, right? The opportunity to deliver values all around us and from that byproduct, this profit and revenue. So, when you say, “I’m doing this to hit a target,” be careful that you’re not painting yourself into a corner of defining success as a fiscal metric exclusively. It’s an indicator, but it’s not the point.
Tim Meinhardt:
Agree completely, you know, and I think, you know, to your point, painting that picture of the why? And you know, we talk a lot about empowering your employees. You know, you go to great pains to hire great people. Well, allow them to do the things that you interviewed them and you hired them to do. So that’s just an excellent point. And I go back to what you and I were talking about yesterday. You know, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road is going to take you there. So yeah, having that clarity of the North Star really, truly helps. So how can an organization, in your opinion, figure out those North Stars and really dig deep into their why?
Anthony Coppedge:
I find it’s helpful to think of three things that make a compelling vision, and a vision and a mission are not the same thing. But the vision would be purpose with clarity that have compelling outcomes, and that invokes emotion and stokes imagination. So, I repeat that. I think a compelling vision has a purpose with clarity, it has compelling outcomes—not outputs—and it invokes emotion and stokes imagination. I’d like if I could, to demonstrate this. So, in the 1960s, at the time, John F. Kennedy is president. He’s at Rice University, and he talks about the space program and he says “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize, and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. Clarity, very purposefully described, very compelling outcomes of the why—because, because, because. And it certainly invokes emotion and stokes imagination. It certainly did then, and I would say it still does now. That vision is a North Star. You can’t not go there. This is it. We’ve chosen, and I like his success criteria, in a sense, right. He talks about how we’re willing to accept this challenge, we’re unwilling to postpone it, and we intend to win. So again, this was a race against, the Soviets, a space race, et cetera, et cetera. There’s more going on socio politically in the background, but ultimately, that’s a pretty great example of a terrific vision.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah. You know, emotion sparks that motivation in people, and I think that’s why, you know, you take your time when you when you develop these statements because they’re supposed to give you that true North Star that people can rally around, and your organization begins to become a team of teams and pushes that envelope to where it is that you want an organization to go.
Before we continue with the interview. We’d like to tell you a little bit about Atruity.
Voiceover:
At Atruity we understand the challenge of implementing a successful OKR program. While the methodology may be straightforward and easy to understand, the implementation and execution of the program can seem daunting. Your team is concerned because you’re unsure how to properly implement or manage your OKR program. You are not alone. This is where Atruity comes in. We know how to implement an OKR program and are experts in OKR implementation and management. By using our proven methods and implementation structure, we can help you to successfully implement OKRs within your organization in as little as 30 days. If your organization is considering implementing OKRs or struggling with the management of the program, do not hesitate to reach out to us at contact@atruity1.com. Remember, no plan succeeds on its own—execution is everything.
Tim Meinhardt:
So, let’s suppose that you have an organization that’s unsure whether they want to implement OKRs or not. What reasons would you give them that they should?
Anthony Coppedge:
What reasons would I give them to? Well, I think rather than say why they should do something, I would ask different questions. So, if you don’t mind, I would take a different approach, but I think we can arrive at the same place. I think I would say, “Do you want clarity and alignment of your team’s projects and programs?” Generally, the answer is, well, yeah. And then “Do you have a clear visualization of not only the progress being made across your work streams, but understanding the outcomes from the effort as you go?” Probably not, most organizations just don’t have that. I said, well, then the visualization of clearing and alignment is the power of OKR thinking, because it’s more than another set of metrics or KPIs, right? It’s the way you make sense of your metrics and KPIs. It’s a way you understand context because you’re not looking at, “did we do a thing?” You’re asking, “of that, which we did, is it delivering the benefit and the value that we desire?” Is the outcome there, not is the output there. And most organizations are very output focused. They say things that sound flowery on the outcome side. But what do they measure? It’s outputs. They measure activity, they measure quantity. And those are certainly helpful as indicators; a KPI is a key performance indicator, but an indicator isn’t the thing. It indicates something else. It’s not the thing.
Tim Meinhardt:
Interesting word—indicator.
Anthony Coppedge:
Yeah, indicator.
Tim Meinhardt:
It kind of indicates.
Anthony Coppedge:
So, I look at it that way. But think about this way too. If they don’t have a compelling vision, they won’t have a North Star. Without a North Star, should you take on OKRs? Absolutely not. Because it will then be another hammer to wield, and everything in front of you becomes nails to nail down—that is not the purpose. We do not need more command and control. So, this is a shift away from that command-and-control model.
So, if JFK had a great vision, then what was the mission? Well, actually, in that same speech, he declared it. He said the growth of our science and education would be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home, as well as the school. So, he didn’t just say we should do this great lofty thing because I said so. I mean, yeah, there is a compelling vision and he’s the dude in charge for that—great. But he still has to have people buying into that. How did he get them to buy in? He shows them the values that they want to deliver. And notice its value delivery is the point, not stuff. Not, “we’re going to make more X and produce less of Y.” This is the value delivery concept, so that’s a very compelling mission. You know, more than 50 years of human activity in space have produced societal benefits that improve the quality of life on Earth. He was right.
And so, satellites are now designed to study the space environment, test initial capabilities of the Earth’s orbit, contributed critical knowledge and capabilities for our satellite telecommunications. GPS, right? Advances in weather forecasting. That all came from the space program. It has contributed to diverse aspects of everyday life, from solar panels to implantable heart monitors, to cancer therapy to lightweight materials. Velcro, right? That was all a part—we’ve seen Apollo 13, right? Water purification systems to improve computing systems, and a global search and rescue system. All of that came from the space program, through the precise nature of future benefits from space exploration is unpredictable, though current trends suggest that significant benefits may be generated in areas such as new materials we haven’t even thought of. Health and medicine, transportation, and even better computer technology. We’re seeing the rise of machine learning and AI, and these are the things that helped go from literally slide rules, right? They got a crew back on Apollo 13 using slide rules, right? And now, though, the modeling is very different, so much so that you have private companies racing to space. So, there is a mission that was like absolutely accomplished, but then the manyfold expressions from that continue to impact us today. And so, it is with our businesses. We’re not here to just go generate more income. Again, if we deliver value, who knows what our clients are capable of delivering then? Because if we help them succeed, we succeed. And if we help them succeed, they help their clients succeed. The manyfold benefit of that is so great, but only when you are really clear about that and you’re not trying to extract value from clients, you’re trying to create value for clients. And that’s a huge shift.
Tim Meinhardt:
That’s incredibly well said. And I just love the discussion here. When you start with something so small, and it wasn’t small, but a statement or sentence from, you know, the President of the United States, and look what it turns into in the next, you know, several decades. It’s very compelling. Thank you for sharing that. So, I’m going to flip it here for a second and just say, so, what are the dangers or pitfalls of OKRs in any size organization, in your opinion, Anthony?
Anthony Coppedge:
The danger is, if you go chase the wrong thing, right? If you’re not really clear about your why, then you can put a lot of effort in and really expend a lot of energy and end up in the wrong place. I was I was on a flight—remember this? I was on a flight from LaGuardia once and I was heading back to Dallas-Fort Worth. And I asked the pilot, because it was one of those flights where you get on and there’s like nine people. Thank goodness they had mail underneath to make their number, right, because it wasn’t making it on the passengers. And so, I was just chatting with them, and I said, “Hey, I have a question.” I was teaching on some subjects, and I had this thing. I said, “I’m curious about something. If you took off from LaGuardia and you were to go to San Diego and land at, you know, SDH, where would you end up if you were three degrees off on your heading right from the start?” And he didn’t even pull out a chart. He’s got it kind of in front of him, he kind of glances, but I watch him kind of look up in the air and he’s like “Three degrees…somewhere in either Northern California or somewhere deep into Mexico.” That’s nowhere near San Diego, and it’s only three degrees.
So, think about how when we don’t have that clarity alignment up front, and we’re measuring the activity in the cycles of things we do, our quarterly objectives, which are not bad things, by the way, these reasonable things to try to understand. But when you make that your single source of truth, you can miss the forest for the trees. And the next thing you know, you ended up somewhere you had no intention of being because you weren’t course correcting as you went. You were assuming you figured it out and you were going to stick to that plan. OKRs are bi-directional man. So, the whole beauty of them, the pitfall, is that you tell people you use them like a hammer, right? And you go, “Well you’re going to go here, and here’s this compelling vision, and you better get it done.” That’s not OKRs. That’s goals and targets, maybe, those quotas. I mean, there’s words for that, but it’s not OKRs. OKRs are bi-directional. So, what ends up happening is you say, “I believe.” so. Let’s go back to Kennedy. What was the first objective? Established the Apollo program. What were the key results? Employ the best and brightest in space and rocket science within one year, and then build propulsion systems capable of carrying humans to and from the Moon within five years because they still had to figure all that. I mean, there’s a ton in that right? There are very high level, I mean, you could break that down into sub streams of work, obviously, right? But if you don’t get some of that right, your ten-year thing you’re trying to achieve, you’re not likely going to get it.
Tim Meinhardt:
Not even close.
Anthony Coppedge:
So not even close. You might do something else really cool, but it wouldn’t be what the President asked for, right? So, what you’re trying to do is say, “How do we say no to as many good things as possible so that we say yes to the greatest right?” And this is hard. So bi-directional means that as you’re going, the people closest to the work that are doing it, that are discovering, inventing sometimes new ways of working, new deliveries, new technologies, et cetera, they’re informing how we should change our Objectives and Key Results in order to achieve the North Star. The OKRs are not static, they’re dynamic and they’re informed by that feedback loop. And I think it’s super helpful to think of it as if I were to do all this, I do a little diamond shape. And, you know, so imagine a diamond shape. If the top right’s your business goal, right, between second and first base, that’s your business goals. What are the things we’re trying to achieve? Great. Good. Know what those are. What are the strategic objectives? That’s kind of now going clockwise from first down to home, so it’s not baseball, it’s not counterclockwise, right? Clockwise. Those are your strategic objectives. Well, now you want to visualize the progress against that. And this is where you’ve got to think about, OKRs as a management model. How do you understand the alignment and focus of effort and the learnings of that effort? You visualize that progress, and you understand. And oh, by the way, we do it with, you know, kind of a red, amber, green, and red is not bad. It’s just true, right? And this is a big culture shift of “Wait a minute.”
You know, in a lot of performance organizations, anything less than 100% is failing. Not in OKRs, right? It’s a model where we try to go, “Hey, are you stretching yourself?” Good. If you’re hitting every target, you probably didn’t stretch yourself enough, and if you stand back, or if you’re barely hitting them, you probably overcommitted, and we should evaluate. But how do you do that? Feedback loops. And this is where I think OKRs with Agility make so much sense. So, if you look at whether it’s Kanban or whether it’s Scrum or any of the other, you know, flavors of Agility, I think your having a feedback loop is always a part of that process. I like retrospectives, I think that’s a very helpful way to do it. And what I want the retrospective to do is not just inform the squad or the team. I actually want to take the feedback, which is why I invented the retrospective radar to take the feedback at scale, and then go influence the strategy and say, “Are the business goals even correct?” I mean, someone had to invent that number somewhere, right? Even if it’s historical data informing it, it’s still a goal. A goal is not something you know you’re going to do, it’s something you aspire and hope to achieve. So rather than seeing them as black and white, we see them as dynamic, and we learn how to have feedback tell us the pivots. So that pilot’s not going to be in southern Mexico or northern California. He’s going to change based on wind direction, wind speed, traffic patterns, ground control. There’s a lot of variables that keep him on track. But it doesn’t happen because you put something in, and you just let the plane go. There’s a lot of of things. So, the feedback loops in the plane, a lot of that’s automated, we try to automate it. You know, anytime you don’t need a human doing something, automate. If you don’t need critical thinking skills, automate it. But if you need critical thinking skills, do not automate. Insert the people right there because that’s the value they bring. They think. Those critical thinking skills are what help us not only to stay on course, but to deliver it, focus on the best possible value, even when that value is not exactly what we originally intended, but we discovered along the way.
Tim Meinhardt:
Yeah, I think, you know, the feedback loop and the discoveries, Anthony, I think, are what really, those are those “Ah ha!” moments that management, and it could come from anybody that suddenly you look at and through that continuous communication and feedback and looking at whether you’ve set them too high, or too low, were they right, were they wrong? Having those genuine conversations and not having it based on compensation, this is based on, you know, what we think and believe based on our North Stars. And I think that’s where you get that really, really, truly compelling and profound change in the organization.
Anthony Coppedge:
Of any size. Because this works. This works for Enterprise that has, you know, nine levels, all the way down to a team, to mom and pop, where it’s two. The number of layers is not about hierarchy, it’s about clarity. And so, we want to skip level. We want to make sure we have the ability to go right to root cause of dialysis and not have to have the bureaucracy in the way. And that’s challenging. So, this is where things like a Cynefin framework is super helpful, from Dave Snowden, where you think about things that are complex versus things that are complicated, and we need to understand the difference. So, at any rate we can go off on a tangent, but I won’t. I’ll just kind of come back and say, this thinking, this rationale, this way of approach applies regardless of size and scale. It’s harder at scale, right? Because humans, but it’s no less important not at scale.
Tim Meinhardt:
Could not agree with you more. Well, Anthony, first off, I want to say never a dull moment in your discussions. I love your passion about this. I thoroughly enjoy your insight. And I think today you really had a great opportunity to share with our audience some things that are truly insightful when it comes to looking at why our North Stars are so absolutely, critically important. So, I want to thank you again for being on the program. I hope you have a wonderful week and a wonderful holiday season, and I look forward to speaking again soon.
Anthony Coppedge:
Always a pleasure.
Tim Meinhardt:
Thank you, Anthony. Have a great day.
Thanks so much for taking a few minutes to listen to our OKRs Q&A Podcast. You know, OKRs provide such an excellent, agile framework which is critical for today’s business needs. It’s such a pleasure to have such wonderful people share their stories and journeys with us. Please, should you ever need assistance with your OKR journey, do not hesitate to reach out to us and contact us at www.atruity1.com, and make sure if you have a minute, to rate our show. Have a great week. Stay healthy. And of course, stay happy. Thanks, everyone.
