I’m not an organized person. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be an effective person.

Benjamin Franklin, creator of the modern day-planner or work diary (still called a “Franklin planner” in the US), as well as bifocals, the lightning rod, and the odometer (and a lot of other things), was an accomplished physicist, British postmaster to the Americas, an influential politician and revolutionary, a popular writer and successful publisher, a US Ambassador to France, the founder of America’s first Fire Department, and quite a lot else. He is often mistaken for having been a US President, owing to his enormous popularity. He was the 18th century’s own Elon Musk, in many ways, only more well-liked.

But Franklin was also famously disorganized, claiming that most organizational systems took more cognitive effort to master than simply remembering things. This was precisely what led him to the realization that the most efficient model was just to write things down. If it was important enough to write down, he reasoned, the effort of doing so would pay off. If it didn’t seem worth writing, you could safely forget whatever it was.

Since Franklin popularized the idea of a work diary, thousands of gimmicks and tricks have been packaged into products and marketed to make us more efficient and productive. But the truth is that the same basic principles, as true in 1750 as they are today, still apply. Franklin’s system, though it has a new name, is still the best.

Objectives and Key Results

OKRs is an adaptable goal-setting and efficiency promoting system based on Objectives and Key Results. In a given period (a year, a quarter, a week, a day, etc), a given objective is defined, and “key results” of that objective are listed. So for example, your OKRs for this week might include: “Computer Maintenance” as an objective. And under the objective, you would list concrete and measurable key results of computer maintenance. For example, “Hard drive backed up,” “desktop organized,” “malware scan completed,” and “keyboard cleaned.”

The value of OKRs is not just in self-motivation and goal-setting, but also in finding efficiencies. What key results are harder to achieve than others? Why? At the end of the period for your OKR, you can check how you did by ticking off, or scoring, your key results to see what percentage you have completed. Some companies use a 0-1 scale in which the goal is to have an average score of 0.6-0.7.

So for example, if you completed 3 out of 4 key results for an OKR, but missed one result, you would have a .75, or 75%. That tells you that your goal was pretty reasonable, and you got a lot of work done toward the goal. If you got only .25, meaning only 1 key result, then perhaps your goals are too lofty, or perhaps you are too inefficient. This can be a reflective exercise. 

Tried and True

While the modern popularity of the OKR system stems from its use at Intel and later at Google, where employees can all view the quarterly and yearly OKRs of other employees, and teams, the Objective and Key Results system dates all the way back to Ben Franklin. He popularized the practice in a series of publications that were widely read in business.

OKRs require us to define a certain objective. In the sample from Ben Franklin’s own planner seen here, it was in the form of a guiding question: “what good shall I do this day?” At the end of the day, he would ask himself what good he had done. Doing something good was his objective, and he would write the key results underneath, then tally them later in the day to see how he had progressed. The system has not been changed much in 250+ years.

 

Why OKRs Will Keep You Sane

 

Let’s be honest. There’s not much that is less motivating than having to always define your level of success according to someone else’s rules. A boss or an organization have always had and will always need expectations. But a strict or exclusive focus on filling those expectations, to the exclusion of other concerns, makes for a lot of workplace stress. And it also leads to the fundamentals of good business practices being ignored. Things like worker safety, innovation and creativity, and relaxation- things that matter to people when it comes to their jobs- even if it doesn’t matter to their superiors.

How often have you ignored certain parts of your work that you find important, in order to devote more time to something else? How often have you “stolen a moment,” to get something done at work, because you know, even if your boss doesn’t, that it will be better in the long run if you get it done now? Or how often have your boss’s responsibilities become yours, simply because your boss has put pressure on you to improve his or her results? This kind of thing is avoidable using OKRs.

Improve Communication and Cooperation

Often times, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to fix things that are outside of our areas of responsibility, and end up failing even in our basic duties as a result. Sometimes that pressure also comes from outside.

OKRs can help you to understand and to share responsibilities, and to work more responsibly, and more accountably, as part of the group. For example, my OKRs for this week include key results of two blog posts on two different topics, and a draft of two more for next week. Because we share OKRs as a team, I can see that Cedric, my boss, needs a certain number of views on the blog this week, and that supports his goal of getting applications to our accelerator (the due date for applications is nye).

I can see what his goal is, this week and every previous week, and I can see if he’s gotten close to matching the goal. In turn, I also know that when Cedric gives me feedback, he is concerned with his OKRs, and he also understands mine. He does not make me directly responsible for the number of page views we have- he doesn’t “blame” me, if we don’t get them. But he changes his approach to me in order to improve his own results, and in turn, we both benefit. If we get more views than his goal calls for, then he has the opportunity to congratulate me for my good work, and to use that experience to encourage me to continue. But if we don’t get as many views as he wants, he can take a look at what I’m doing, and ask me to make improvements in specific ways. This system helps him to avoid making unreasonable or irrelevant requests like “improve our traffic” (how?), and helps him to make reasonable ones: “do more of this kind of post,” or “talk less about this subject.” OKRs make him think about how to support me in my work, and help me to understand how my work is affecting his results, and the team’s success, in a real way.

The boss who does OKRs and sticks to the system will avoid putting too much unreasonable pressure on subordinates, and an employee using OKRs will have an accessible reference that tells them when and how they are underperforming, and when they are doing well.

Measure Results, not “Performance”

OKRs are not an evaluative tool, even if they look like one. First off, while team members look at their own OKRs and the OKRs of others, the focus is on the OKRs themselves, and not the work that goes into them. What this means is that members of a team, as well as superiors, can look at a person’s OKRs and get a feeling of how someone is performing, without involving their own personal judgements about how a person works. If the results are themselves measurable and concrete, and they are sufficiently relevant to the goal, then a person’s performance need never be in question directly. How a person does their job is left to them, where it should be. If a person has objectives that the team agrees with, and key results that match those objectives very well, then you shouldn’t care how they achieve those results, should you?

Does it matter that someone spends 15 minutes an hour outside smoking, or talks on the phone, or listens to music, or comes in at noon instead of at 9, if their objectives are good, and their results are consistent? If a person is getting all of their work done in 2 hours, perhaps their work isn’t satisfyingly challenging for them. Perhaps their goals are too modest, and they could set higher ones. Or perhaps not. Perhaps that person needs a lot of time to think, or likes to work quickly and steadily, and couldn’t handle more time in the office. Often we simply don’t understand what makes other people effective at what they do. But we don’t really have to understand, as long as we can see the results of their work.

Improve your Goals

Mostly when we talk about “measuring performance,” the idea of measuring someone’s output or their job performance goes hand-in-hand with increasing that output or pushing that job performance to higher levels. You made 50 units today, tomorrow you want to make more than 50. There is no end to that cycle.

While OKRs also aim to improve your job performance, they rely on internal motivations to do so. Instead of your performance according to some specific goalpost having to increase every quarter, week, or day, instead your performance is a free-floating point, and your goals change in order to give you something to work towards. My goal over the past two months has been two posts a week, and for a lot of reasons, I’ve struggled to meet it. So my goal next week can’t be three posts. But if it weren’t a struggle, then my new goal could be more ambitious.

In the OKR system, you are not succeeding if your score increases, and you are not failing if your score decreases. It’s not about winners and losers, leaders and laggers. It’s not about meeting goals, but about setting the right goals. 

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If you’re anything like me, you probably have a journal or two sitting around somewhere, with your name scrawled on the inside cover, and one or two hopeful entries, followed by an embarrassing, plaintive emptiness. If you’re good at documenting and privately reflecting on your own thoughts as a life habit, then I applaud you. I’m not good at it. In fact, I often resort to looking up my old notes on Facebook, or private messages and emails I’ve sent, to try and capture thoughts I once had, that are now gone.

I’m not writing to tell you that you should be a better person and write your precious, heartbreaking insights in a journal, just like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. Of course you should, but I can’t make you do it. I can’t make myself do it.

But Mindmapping is different, and you should give it a try. This post is going to be about the why and the how of mindmapping. So let’s get started, shall we?

Step 1: Brain Dump

Cedric calls mindmapping “a braindump.” I rather like that analogy, so I’ll use it here. It’s a messy, minimally organized process into which you can just spit out all the flotsam of your thoughts and ideas. It can show you what you’re thinking about, help you to start prioritizing your objectives, and remind you, as you reach for higher levels of organization, what you were thinking about at the beginning. It can be a benchmark of the evolution of your idea from “idea,” to “actual workable plan/strategy/concept.”

And contrary to what many people think, even and often especially the smartest among us, an idea is just an idea, and usually not very valuable, until it’s been through a couple of processes like this one. Mindmapping helps you to challenge yourself and your ideas to define themselves in ways that aren’t conveniently hazy, but are also not overly strict or structured.

It can start by simply writing down, with no structure attached, any and all thoughts or elements attached to the goal. This is the brain dump. You could write down dates, people’s names, places, quotes- whatever you think is relevant. This is a map of your brain, so whatever comes into your head can be written down. This is not the stage where you need to be picky about what it all means, nor what’s really relevant.

Step 2:  Contextualize and Problematize

I have a friend who’s been about to write a screenplay for the last 8 years. He has the perfect idea, he says. But when he tries to put it on paper, it doesn’t seem to work.

And here’s why that is: because he has never contextualized and problematized his idea. What does it mean to contextualize and problematize? This is the step in the creative process that forces you to take all those gooey bits of information floating around in your head, and make them stick together in some sort of a cohesive fashion. It is creating a context for your ideas: to see how they all fit together, and to possibly see what’s missing. It’s the part of the process where you address how your ideas may be stronger or weaker, depending on other factors.

Once you have all this crap written down and out of your head, you’re ready to start working. The next step is to connect these bits of information to each other in some way. You could use clouds, lists, trees of information. It doesn’t matter: whatever fits your thinking will work. You can re-draw the mindmap with a little more organization to “make it pretty,” if that’s something that pleases you.

Challenge Yourself

Context means the bigger picture- and the bigger picture involves the negatives along with the positives. What’s wrong with your idea? What issues do you face in implementing it? Problematize as many elements of your mindmap as you can, and challenge all the elements that you think are necessary to make the project work. If you need something to happen, find reasons why it might not. If you need something not to happen, look for reasons that it could.

This is the stage of the process where you may discover a project is too big to do in the time you’ve given yourself to complete it. Or to find out you don’t know enough to do the work, or that your idea for a product is already essentially being done by somebody else. This is the part of the process where your “beautiful thoughts,” the picture perfect dream you have for your ideas, are mired in the messy realities that you don’t normally make yourself face.  It’s a reality check. 

This stage of the process is the least fun. It doesn’t feel productive because it is energy spent challenging the assumptions that you are using to tell yourself that your idea will work. But as we know, many or even most ideas never do actually work out. You can find this out here, and get a realistic idea of the challenges you face while doing so. 

Step 3: Analyze

This is a reflective step. Using the information you’ve gathered so far, make some educated guesses about how likely your goals are to be realizable, given the current circumstances. How likely are circumstances to change? Do you even want to keep working on this project? If so, what reasons can you give for others to invest time and money in it?

A typical analysis tool for a business or a product is called a SWOT analysis. It forces consideration of 4 interconnected factors: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It looks something like this:

In this step, you can gather all that you’ve learned, and diagram it according to the positive and negative, the internal, and the external. This could be called the honesty phase. A frank assessment of the situation and the options.

We are human beings: we naturally oscilate between an extreme focus on our strengths, when we are selling them (to ourselves or to others), and on our weaknesses, when something isn’t working. We do the same with opportunities and threats. But we rarely if ever consider our strengths directly against our weaknesses- even if doing so can provide invaluable insights. So adopt a process that makes you consider these things together.

Step 4: Synthesize

We wrote a while back about how the groundwork you do at the beginning, from day one on your odyssey towards profitability, should start with your pitch. Mindmapping is part of that same iterative process, and the fruits of a good mindmap are fodder for a great pitch. What you know now about your market, your product, your customers, and your own abilities, will translate into a persuasive argument for your viability (if you’ve decided you are viable).

If you’ve dumped out all your valuable ideas, contextualized and problematized them, and analyzed them honestly, assessing your options, you’ll be able to answer most questions a potential investor or a client asks of you, even before the question is asked. You’ll be aware, and more importantly unafraid, of the challenges you face.

Wishful thinking and hubris are the enemies of a persuasive pitch, and a viable product idea, and mindmapping can keep you honest, keep you thinking, and keep you solving problems, instead of ignoring them. 

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We’re happy to announce that Synot, a corporate holding that encompasses a huge range of businesses in Central Europe, will become an investor in our upcoming accelerator class.

Most denizens of Prague, or other central European cities and towns will be familiar with Synot. Synot Holding spans 11 companies with 700 employees in the Czech Republic alone, which include concerns in real-estate, high-end automobile sales, cloud computing, and gaming, Synot operates a range of fixed-odds betting services with which many consumers are familiar.

Synot began supporting startups 4 years ago, starting with MADFINGER Games (producer of award-winning games ShadowGun and Dead Trigger) and Flow Studio (a selected developer for Leap Motion), in a move designed to diversify the company’s activities and offerings. Today, these company offer a range of popular games, mostly on mobile platforms iOS and Android. Shadowgun, Madfinger’s most popular title to date, was called by IGN’s Justin Davis “one of the best-looking mobile games ever created.”

Over the last few years, Synot has showed a strong commitment towards the growing startups ecosystem in our region and we are delighted that they have chosen StartupYard as their preferred partner, helping us to support ambitious seed projects.