 Welcome to another interesting session, discuss, define, do playing your way to amazing goals. I am also excited to listen to this topic. So I'll give it to Tadia. Thank you so much, Savita. It's so lovely to be here. Let me just share my screen. Awesome. It's so lovely to be here. I wish that we were all in person. I came to India in 2019 before COVID, and it was one of my favourite conferences. So hopefully soon we'll be doing these in person again. So today we're here to talk about goals and just a bit about myself. I'm Talia Lancaster. I'm an agile coach for a bank in South Africa called EBSA. And I'm also known as the sketching scrum master. So I also do a lot of visual work, graphic recording, design, sketch noting in the agile space. So you would have seen that Angie was supposed to present with me. Unfortunately, she's not able to make it today. She's just had a big move to a different country, but she will be here in spirit. So just to give her a bit of recognition as we did develop this game together. Okay. So we're all familiar with goals. I just want to ask a question, and it might be a bit of an unfair question given our times. But how many of you have set New Year's resolutions? If you could maybe just give us a reaction, like a thumbs up or a smiley or in the chat, you can say yes or no. Don't believe in it, Ankit. I see some thumbs ups. Okay. So given our times, I think it is a hard question. There's a lot of uncertainty at the moment. For those of you who have set resolutions, how many of you have stuck to them? That's the hard part. No, no. Okay. So we're all familiar with setting goals, whether it's in our personal lives or with our agile teams. So goal setting is really important, and a lot of us do it. But what we've realized with working with teams is that often it's very difficult to do, and we don't always do it well. So it's very hard to set goals that are really tangible and meaningful for teams, where teams can actually take action against those goals. Often what you find is the goals become these kind of beauty queen statements, like we want world peace, and they become very vague. So in this session, we're going to be talking about goal setting. We're using kind of OKRs as a framework to discuss that. And there's an amazing game that we're going to play to show you how we can have better conversations with teams and set better goals with our teams. But before I get started, I just want to quickly chat about some other ways that you may be familiar with before we get into OKRs. So how did we set goals or how do we maybe currently set goals with our teams? So a lot of you may know this one, smart goals. So smart stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. So this is a really awesome technique to make sure that your goals are, you know, achieve these criteria. But what I found working with teams is that smart goals are sometimes difficult to connect up to a broader organizational goal. So you can set a really great smart goal in isolation. But how does it link into the broader organizational strategy and the organizational goals? Not to say that smart goals are bad. It's actually a really brilliant technique. But it does have limitations in terms of connecting up and cascading down to the teams. Another one that you may be familiar with, if my slides work, is KPIs. So KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. And this is quite a common one used in organizations. It measures the success, the output, the quantity or quality of an ongoing process. So the challenge with KPIs is that it often measures something that's already implemented, that's already happening in the organization. You can always allow room for innovation or for aspirational goal-setting. So you can almost think of it as a dashboard of a car, maybe more a classic car, because new cars nowadays do have GPS and all of that. But basically this dashboard of a car will tell you kind of how fast you're going, how much fuel you have. But it won't necessarily tell you where you are going, where do you want to land up, and your destination for the final outcome. So KPI is also good technique, but does have limitations. Okay, and then the last one, balance scorecard. So I don't know how many of you are familiar with this one. This is where you look at kind of four metrics, financial, customer, internal processes, and then learning and growth. The challenge with this is that often we set it for a whole year. So when we talk about agile goal-settings, it can be quite limiting in that we don't have kind of a way to show progress and we don't have a means to maybe change throughout the year. Often also what happens in organizations is that we place a hyper-focus on one of these areas. Often it's financial. So all the other things fall to the side and we only focus on the financial goals on the balance scorecard. So it's not as balanced as we think. Okay, so these traditional goal-setting processes, I'm not saying that they're bad. I just want to kind of outline some of the limitations around them. And then into the OKR. So OKRs have gained a lot of popularity lately. I'm going to be using this as a framework because it's quite a lightweight framework to kind of learn. Obviously goals are a lot harder than they look to do. But OKRs have become very popular and it's a really powerful way of setting goals with teams. So OKRs became popular because of Google. Thank you, Google. So Google has been using OKRs for years since they were a startup. And maybe just a note before we continue is that the goal here is not to kind of be an expert in OKRs. I hope that you see some of the benefits of it. But it's about really just having better conversations with our teams and setting better goals using techniques such as this Discuss Defined Do board game. So Google attributes some of the benefits of OKR is that it helps create focus within the organization. It helps with transparency so teams can see kind of what they're working towards from an organizational perspective. And then everyone can see what each team is working on by looking at their OKRs. It also helps with alignment. So OKRs are a great way to kind of set a large organizational goal and then cascade it down to the different departments or teams within that organization. And then it's very much results focused. So objectives and key results. So you set an objective of where you want to go. And then you set key results to measure progress towards that objective. And so it's very much focused on an outcome as opposed to measuring activities or actions. And so that's those are kind of the benefits of OKRs that companies who use it have have seen. And it has been around for a while. So at the moment OKRs are top of mind and they're very popular. But they actually come from Peter Drucker's management by objectives which is from 1954. So the thinking around goal-setting and managing based on outcomes is not new. And then Andy Grove co-founded Intel and he kind of creates this OKR thinking in 1968. I think where it really became quite embedded and quite popular is a guy called John Doer. So he then joined Intel and learned this OKR framework. And then he introduced it to Google in 1999. And Google has attributed a lot of their success to using a framework like OKRs. John Doer has a really awesome book called Measure What Matters. I would definitely recommend if you want to read a bit deeper on OKRs as a framework. Other companies also use him like Facebook, LinkedIn, Adobe. So it is becoming more and more popular. I know a lot of the work that I do in the bank, we've kind of adopted OKRs and it has seen a lot of benefits for us as well. OK, so what are OKRs? And essentially there are two parts to it. So it's quite a simple framework but again quite difficult to actually put into action. So the O in OKR stands for objectives. And this answers the question, where do we need to go? Or what do we want to achieve? So your objective is a qualitative statement. It's not going to have any numbers or metrics in it. But it's there to kind of inspire the team. It's an aspirational statement of where we want to go. It should set a clear direction and it should be very inspiring and galvanizing for the teams. So that's what the O of OKR stands for. And then the KR is key results. So this answers the question, how do we know we're getting there? And your key results kind of fulfill a lot of the smart questions in the sense that they need to be very specific. They are quantitative so they need to have clear numbers and metrics in them. But these key results would measure progress towards that outcome. The difference between OKRs and some of the other goal-setting techniques is that your key results should be something that you can influence and not necessarily something that you do. So here we're not trying to list actions. We'll have a time and place to make sure that we're doing what we have to. But your key results here is measuring an actual outcome or a result that would help you achieve that objective. It should be difficult but not impossible. So we talk about stretch goals. We want to be quite aspirational here, but we also don't want to set our teams up for failure. So we need to make sure that these key results are specific, a little bit stretch, but they're not kind of impossible. Okay, so what does this look like? So this is typically how we would structure an OKR. And it's a statement we will, and then you'll have your objective statement there as measured by, and then you'll list your key results. So what we try to do is not actually have too many key results because exponentially it just becomes too confusing. We want to focus teams in the right direction. So your key results, you want three to five key results per objective, you don't want 10 or 20. So you want to be very specific about what those key results are. When we talk about setting OKR as an agile way, it's also important to look at the timeframe that you're looking at. So traditionally with goal setting, we'd often set goals for the whole year, and goals change and things change. So we want to allow the feedback loop to ensure that we can actually come back and assess what we're measuring. So depending on what level you're setting these at, for an organization they may set it for a year or for six months, but for your teams you want to set it in shorter timeframe. So maybe a quarter, if you're a large organization or monthly or every two months, you want to actually come back and reflect on whether you've achieved these results or not. Okay, so here's an example. We will improve customer satisfaction. Often this is where we stop. So in organizations, often we're given these beauty queen statements by our executives to say, we want to improve customer satisfaction or we want to reduce cost. But the power of OKR is that we actually get very specific about what that looks like and how we're going to measure success for the team. So we will improve customer satisfaction as measured by, and here you see that we've got three key results. The first one is increase average overall customer satisfaction from seven to eight out of 10 points. Okay, so whatever kind of metrics that organization is using, they want to improve it by one point from seven to eight. The second key result is we will improve average turnaround time for queries to less than 24 hours. Okay, so again you see that's very specific and it does contribute to that customer satisfaction. And then the last one is we will exceed customer feedback rating scores of 90% overall. Okay, so that's kind of how we would structure typical OKR. And then depending on which level you're setting this for, it may be very specific to that team. So how would certain teams contribute to that seven to eight out of 10 for the overall customer satisfaction? And then how do we measure these? So depending on, oh, I see my dots have moved a bit. So depending on what kind of organization you're in and the organizational culture, you would then set an achievement score. So Google aims to only achieve 70% of their goals. So that means that they want people to be very aspirational. They don't want to set goals that are too small because then they're not stretching the teams. Some organizations, though, want to see all green. So depending on your organization, you would then set how many of these key results are we aiming to achieve within that timeframe. And then you track kind of have we met this key result or not. Talia, there is a question. Do you want to take it? Yes. Can you please elaborate key result one and three? Yeah. So I mean, this is just an example. So depending on your organization, they may have different surveys. So, you know, the one might be an NPS, that's seven or eight out of 10 might be your NPS. And then the key result three may be a different metric in a different kind of feedback survey. So I think this is just to illustrate the types of key results you could have. And it's also to illustrate how specific they are. So you see, we've said often, often it would be improved from this to this. So KR one kind of shows where we are currently and where we want to be. And KR three kind of just has a specific target. So this is to illustrate how you would phrase those key results to make sure that they're specific enough that you can actually measure yourself against them. In case the KR is not achieved, should we then set the same objective for the next cycle? That's up to you as a team, right? So I think within the agile framework, what you may decide to do is do a bit of reflection to say, you know, what happened? Why didn't we achieve this? Is it too ambitious? In which case, do we kind of manage those expectations down or were there certain impediments that we could remove, et cetera, et cetera? So I think it's very context specific for your team. What I like about it is that it does make things visible to actually have those conversations. So in the past, if you just had that improved customer satisfaction, how do we know that we've achieved that? So it gives you another feedback loop to kind of say, did we hit this goal? If not, how do we adjust for the next for the next goal? Obviously, the shorter your timeframe, the more opportunity there is then to adjust and to assess. So if you're setting something like this for the whole year, you won't know necessarily if you've reached it or not and you don't have the opportunity to adapt. Whereas if you're setting it for a shorter timeframe, you can then have those conversations to say, okay, for the next quarter, how do we adjust these to make them more tangible or realistic for the team? Does that answer the questions? Yes, Talia. Could there be different OKRs for internal and external customers? It completely depends on the organization. So what you may have is you may have an objective that speaks to external customers. So this one kind of would fit nicely for that. And you may have another objective that speaks to internal customers, depending on kind of what your metrics are there, are there different teams that work for kind of external versus internal customers. So those teams may have different objectives for each. So at an organizational level, you may speak to internal, external customer satisfaction. When you cascade those down to the teams, you may actually then say this team works on external customers. There, OKRs are going to be very specific to external customers. This team works on internal customers. But when we roll that up, we should achieve that organizational goal. So again, I think a lot of this is very kind of dependent on the context and on the team and the organization. Thank you for the questions. There are a lot of questions, Talia. I know there are a lot. So maybe just to say here, I want to kind of get to the game. Maybe we can answer some questions at the end. There is one about measuring it, which speaks to this. So again, I think it depends on your organization in terms of how many of those your managers expecting you to achieve. So companies like Facebook and Google, they only expect their teams to hit 50 to 70% of the goals because if they hit 100% of the goals, they believe that the goals aren't or the KRs aren't ambitious enough. In organizations that I work in like banks, sometimes that could be seen as a negative if you're not reaching 100% of your KRs. So really you have to set it in a way that you're comfortable within your organization. But I would kind of encourage you to be a bit aspirational and set some stretch ones. But maybe what you would say is that this is a stretch KR. But we want to be ambitious. We may not achieve this, but we want to at least try. In terms of measuring it 0 to 1, they're different kind of brackets. So you say if we achieve, I think it's 0 to 40%, and you give it different scores. But I won't be going into that amount of technical detail around this. But yeah, I can maybe answer it at the end. Okay, cool. So I think some of the questions in the chat let's circle back to them at the end just in terms of time. Okay. So goal setting is hard. Even though KRs look simple, it's only got two parts, objectives and key results. There are some challenges in the organization. And maybe this is where some of the questions are coming from. So one of the challenges that I've seen is that they're vague organizational goals being filtered down to the teams. So this is, I keep saying these beauty queen statements. This is like these very vague statements that executives just pass on to the teams without maybe sufficient information for the teams to action these goals. So we want to make sure that our goals are specific enough that the team can actually take that and run with it. You'll see in the activity what we try to do with teams is actually create a framework where teams can really ask the tough questions to make their goals more specific. And then the converse of this is that they're not goals, but they're actually detailed actions that are being filtered down to the teams. So this is maybe managers or executives who are trying to micromanage the teams by giving them very specific actions as opposed to aspirational and inspirational goals. So what we want in agile teams is, we want the teams to have relative autonomy in terms of how they contribute towards the organisational goals. We don't want to tell teams exactly what and how to do their jobs. We want to say this is what we want to achieve and let the teams actually figure out how to contribute to that organisational objective. Another challenge is that goals aren't achievable. It's not stretch. It's impossible. So this is also something to be conscious of. We don't want to set goals that end up demotivating our teams. So we want a bit of a stretch because sometimes that leads to new thinking and innovation. But we don't want to, from the onset, know that this is actually impossible because that can lead to actually demotivating our teams more than anything else. So we want to make sure that the goals are somewhat achievable for the teams. What if objectives and key results keep changing? They're such brilliant questions. Let's do them maybe after the game. Okay, and then the other challenge is that goals are not stretch at all. And this happens in organisations maybe where they penalise people if they don't achieve all of their key results and they're maybe not kind of supportive in terms of failure. So this is where people would set goals that are very small. They would set kind of very operational goals that they know they can achieve. The problem with that is we often then stifle innovation and new thinking because we just carry on doing what we've been doing in the past. Okay, so what Andrew and I did is we actually gamified a way to have conversations and a way to define your goals better as teams. And this is quite important to us because gamifying things really help people engage. And it's a lot more fun than just kind of sitting and trying to wage your way through these challenges. So it promotes collaboration within the team and it can be quite fun. Just a quick question. Do any of you like to play board games? Select Monopoly, Catan, of course. Okay, awesome. And, you know, some board games are more difficult than others. But the first time you play that board game, do you know it perfectly or do you have to read the instructions? Yeah, so I know Catan, when I first played that, it was a lot of kind of going back to the rulebook and checking and a lot of debate. So as we learn this board game, be kind to yourself and be aware that, you know, you won't get it perfectly the first time. But this is an opportunity for you to practice the game so that you can actually take it back to your teams. So we want to kind of go through it to make sure that you're comfortable so that it might be something that you could actually use with your teams to help set better OKRs. What we do is serious, but it doesn't mean it can't be fun. Okay, so kind of especially in these times, making sure that we really engage with our teams and make things as fun as possible. Okay, so this is the board game. It actually started out as a physical one, but it's now virtual, which is awesome. And Evan will receive, you can download a copy, I'll send you a link of the Google Slides pack and you can take it and use it with your teams. It's shared under Creative Commons. So we want people to use it because we've spent a lot of time and effort creating it. Okay, so the challenge is with these conferences is that we don't all work for the same organization and we're not all in the same team. So when you play this with your team, when you go back to the office, it's going to be much easier coming from the same context, the objectives you're working with are real. However, for workshops, we're going to have to simulate a case study and that's just to make sure that, you know, we can practice the game together. So the case study for the game we're going to play is we will improve internal employee engagement. So that's our objective statement. And what you'll notice with the key results here is that they're not the best key results. They're quite vague. They may not be the right things to measure and that's intentional because as we play the game, we're actually going to make these better. So by the time we finish the board game, these should be a lot more specific and measurable. Okay, so the key results as it stands for our case study are key result one, interview 50 employees on how to improve our work culture. Kind of sounds like an action. Key result two, improve weekly employee satisfaction score. Okay, it's pretty vague. Key result three, increase number of employee engagement activities. Okay, so this is often where teams start. Teams start with things that are quite vague. Things that are not really measurable. And that's fine. We want you to kind of start with your team with what you have. Start with, even if they are vague, start with what you've been given or what you have and then work through this process to have the right conversations and to prompt your thinking around how to actually measure these goals. Okay, so I'm actually going to exit presentation mode. So I can demo that. Yeah. Okay, so when you get into the game, you'll see that there are instructions. So again, think about the first time you played Catan or Monopoly. And you may have to go back to the instructions every now and then just to check. But this is a space for you to practice to take back to your team so that you are 100% confident when you play it with your teams. So this is how we're going to play it. So we're going to have two facilitators. The first facilitator when you go into your breakout rooms is going to share their screen. And they're going to help kind of move the tokens, pick up cards and help kind of guide through the game. The second facilitator will help roll the dice and work the timer. So you know us Agilists, we love time boxing. So there are links on the slide here where you can access a dice widget and a timer. Also happy if you use your phones. If you have an app on your phone, you're welcome to use that. So what the dice looks like is this. So you click roll and it rolls. You see we have to improvise working virtually. And then your timer is here. It's a two minute timer. But again, you can use any tools that you like. Okay. So facilitator one will read the key result and then kind of help work through the game. So let me actually demo this for you. It's easier. So the way this game works and what you'll notice here is that we actually are not, we're not playing against each other. We actually playing together as a team. So, okay, there we go. So the goal here is not to have one individual win the game. The goal is to have better conversations as a team. And at the end kind of refine and create better goals together. What I've done in our organization is also invite executives or management to play this game with the team. They can act as SMEs. So if the team has any questions as they go, that person is there in the moment to answer them. And that's a great way to ensure that there is alignment between the team and maybe a broader organizational objective. Okay. So this is how it works. There are three different card packs. So you'll see these are actually movable cards. The first one is discuss. So these are questions and you'll notice, you know, some coaching questions here. These are questions that are prompting the team to discuss and have conversations around the actual goal or around your key result. Define these are questions that relate specifically to how do we make it more measurable. And then do these are questions that may help you come up with actions that when you finish the session, you actually walk away with some tangible actions for the team. So how the game works is you'll see on the side here, you've got, this was from our case study. So you've got key result one, key result two, key result three, each of them on stickies. I think this said 50, but it doesn't matter. The vaguer, the better to start. Okay. So when we start, we're going to play one key result at a time. So the goal of the game is to get your key result from the start to the finish. Okay. So you'll see a key result one token. So which key result are we discussing? You can actually start with anyone. I'm just going to start with number one. So you're going to drag the sticky into the hot seat there. And then you're going to grab, drag the token onto the start. So if we start with key result one, what we're going to do is we actually got to roll the dice. So it works similar to mini board games. We're going to roll the dice one. Okay. So now I'm going to go and I'm going to move this key result token one spot. So I landed on the blue, which you can see as a discuss card. So on the board, you'll have different colors and those correlate to your different cards that you pick up. Okay. So now what we're going to do is you can either move the top card away or you can actually just delete it. Okay. Now we've got a question. What is the tangible benefit of using this key result? Okay. So our key result is interview employees on how to improve our work culture. What is the benefit for our organization in terms of interviewing customers? Okay. And then what will happen is we're going to time box the conversation because what we want here is we want to promote thinking and get a lot of different perspectives and ideas. We don't want to get stuck on one question for an hour. So we actually going to start this. We're going to start this two minute timer. And then we're going to have a conversation as a team. So everyone's going to discuss what this means in terms of that key result. For the rest of the team members that are playing the game, I'm going to ask that we go very low tech and if you could just get paper and a pen and just jot down any notes that you think are useful in terms of the conversations you've had for that key result. And then at the end that will help you craft a better key result. And then you just repeat. So once your timer has stopped, okay, so two minutes up, then we move on. Okay. So now we're going to roll the dice again. Six. Awesome. Oh, sorry. You actually write what do the arrows mean if I'd landed on one, I would have jumped the apologies for that. So the arrows is almost like snakes and letters. So if you land on one with the arrow, you move up or down. So we should have actually been on define. Okay. It's okay to not get it perfect also. I'm the first time. Okay. So we would have actually been there and then we go six, one, two, three, four, five, six. Okay. So it's a measure define. So we're going to look at that. What is the baseline from which we'll be measuring? So if we're talking about interviewing employees on how to improve work culture, have we interviewed employees in the past? If so, how many, how many are we targeting for this key result? So this is really talking about those numbers that we want to include here in this, this measure. Okay. So in your teams, when you play this, I want you to also pick an SME. So your SME is going to be like your executive who's going to answer all those questions. And that SME can be, you can use your own experience. So you can use your own organization as an example. So when you get a question, question like what is the baseline? When you play this with your teams, you'll know the answer because you're all working in the same organization. But for the purpose of this conference, I'd like you to just pick one executive SME who's going to answer your questions. So what is the baseline that SME is going to say 50. Last month we interviewed 50 employees. Okay, cool. So now how many do we want to interview this time? Okay. So you're going to have facilitator one, share the screen, help move the cards and the tokens, and facilitator two, help roll the dice and set the timer. And then an SME who will help answer any specific questions. I don't want you to get too caught up in those questions because it is a case study. It's not like a real situation. So rather just pick someone who can answer any questions that are very specific to that case study. Okay. And then what happens? But we'll see how far we get. So the objective here is actually to get all of your key results. So key result one, we're going to keep playing, pick up cards, discuss, take notes, and then we're going to finish. So key result one has gone through the game. Now we're going to move on to key result two. Okay. So this one is going to go to the hot seat here and our key result to token is going to move on to the start line. And we're going to repeat the process. If in your breakout rooms you run out of cards, there is a slide right at the end with more cards. So these are actually stacks. So when you select them, you can just kind of select all of them, copy, paste, and put it on your board. But I'm hoping that we don't run out of cards for this workshop. Then what happens at the end? But I don't think you're going to get this far. So after the game, after you've taken all your key results through the board game, you've had awesome conversations. You've had prompting coaching questions on how to improve those key results. What you're going to do as a team is have a conversation. And you're actually going to reword and refine your objectives and your key results. So from all your notes, you're going to say, this key result interview employees on how to improve our work culture. Is that the right thing? How do we make it more measurable? How do we actually reword this key result so that it's meaningful? OK. Decide on a timeframe as the team. I would say maybe a quarter, three months. It's a nice timeframe as you think about the example. OK. Clear as mud. OK. It's exciting. You guys can practice here. And then if you have any questions, we can answer them when we come back together. So what's going to happen is we're going to put you into breakout rooms. Savita is going to help put you all into breakout rooms. And I ask you all to be adventurous and brave and give it a try. It doesn't have to be perfect, but this is a great opportunity for you to practice. If you're not in the mood to run your own game, and I do understand with these conferences, sometimes it's nice to sit back and watch. I'll be running a demonstration in the main room. So if you go into a breakout room and you don't want to play the game, please just exit that breakout room and come back to the main room. What I'll do in the main room is I'll ask for some volunteers, three or four people to act as a team. And I'll be the facilitator. And we're going to play the game together. So Savita, we might just have to see after a few minutes, we might have to reshuffle if there's only one person left in the room, we can reshuffle. We'll do the how much time, Talia, for this day. I think let's do 30 minutes. OK. Sorry, my time zone here is different. So we're ending at hop costs. So let's do 30 minutes and then we'll come back and do a closeout and questions. OK, fine. Let me, sorry, just before I forget, I'm going to post the link to all the slides. So there's a folder, there are 10 rooms, but obviously just corresponding to which room you go into. We may not have 10 depending on how many people. How many rooms would you like to do, Savita? We have 90 people. OK, so we'll do 10. OK, perfect. So can I just, ooh, do I not have rights to paste in the chat? You have. You did right now. OK. I just want to give you the links to all the boards. So each of you will have your own board game. Just check that you're in the right board for your breakout room. OK, let me do this. So this is a folder. You'll see all the different boards in there. Breakout rooms 1 to 10. So just go into the number that correlates with your breakout room. So you'll see something like this. The link is not clickable. It is not. No, it is working. Can you try again? You copied in the chat, isn't it? Yes. It's in the chat. OK, great. Copy first. So you guys will go to the folder with all the boards, but just click on the one that is your breakout room. OK, I'll go ahead and create if you have all seen the link. Perfect. Good luck, everyone. Have fun. 15 minutes for this game. 50 minutes. OK, I've created the room. You would have all got an invite to join the room. Please. I can see people going and joining. Talia, you are a host, so you could join any room. Yeah. So I think what I'll do is I'll stay in the main room and do the demonstration. If people have questions, I may just have to address them. I'm just seeing whether people have enough room, people in every room. OK, we have room 7, 1-2 people. I see some people are staying with us in the main room. Yes. So I'm just checking the number of people in each room. OK, room 3, room 4 has enough. Room 5 has 5 people. Room 6 has 3. Minimum is 3, right? Talia? Yeah. I think 3 should be fine. OK, so only one room has an issue, which is room number 7. Can you move that person to a different room? I'm doing it, Dari. Thanks so much, Savita. OK, and everyone who stayed with us in the main room, I am going to ask for some volunteers. So not all of you are off the hook, but the rest of you who are not part of the demonstration can just observe. OK, so I think let's get started on hour 1. One sec. OK, so can I ask for what I'll do is I'll play the role of facilitator, so facilitator 1 and 2. So I'll my screen is shared and I'll roll the dice and all of that. But we need a team who can have some awesome conversations. So can I get some volunteers who want to be part of the team? I think about three or four people should be enough. Maybe if you could just give me a reaction, raise your hand or a thumbs up. Oh, wait. OK, there we go. Kavita. Thank you, Suresh. So anyone I'm not seeing. OK, let's get maybe one more. A team can't be two people. Can we get one more volunteer? All you have to do is kind of have a conversation if you have input, be part of our awesome team. Can we get one more volunteer? There we go. How do I say your name, Anu Suya? Yeah, you're right. You can call me as Anu. Awesome, Anu. Thank you, Anu and Rishmi. OK, perfect. We've got our team. So Kavita, Suresh, Anu and Rishmi. OK, who wants to be our SME? So you as an SME are going to base this case study on your company. So if it's a small startup or if it's a big organization, if we have questions, we're going to lean on you to answer our questions. So maybe just come off mute as part of our team members if you want to be our SME. Rishmi, is that you? Volunteering. Hi. You've got a very young SME there. OK, I'll be SME then. Sorry, I can't see if your hands are up to be SME or to be part of a team. So I'll place SME then. So I'll base it on our big bank. OK, awesome. So as a team, we're going to start with this first key result. So remember our objective we've been given from our executive is improve internal employee engagement. OK, quite vague. And now what we're going to do is we're going to take the first key result and we're going to play the game. So the first key result is interview employees on how to improve our work culture. OK, so I'm going to take the key result token one. I'm going to move it there. And I'm going to roll the dice. I'll show you so you can trust me. Five. OK, awesome. So this one, just keep me honest with the arrows. One, two, three, four, five. OK. So the first question for us is going to be a define card. So the define card speak to measurements. OK. And I'm going to read the question and then start the timer. So the question here is how much, how many, have you expressed the key result using a number, percentage, or amount? So I'm going to start the timer and then I'm going to ask our team to come off mute and maybe give their opinions here. Tanya, good question. Is it possible to zoom in a little bit? Yes, sorry. Perfect. Let me do this. OK, there we go. So how much, how many, have you expressed the key result? Let me just get a piece of paper so I can also take notes. Have you expressed the key result using a number, percentage, or amount? So we haven't interviewed employees on how to improve our work culture. OK, so we want to add some measurable criteria to this then write some numbers. Definitely. Thanks, Surya. Some percentage can be added. Cool. So that's a good idea. So if we were to express it with a percentage, what would it be? Interview X percent, what would that percentage maybe be? Maybe five percentage. Five percent. Yeah. OK, awesome. Would that be a good representation or 10 percentage? I feel like it might be a little low. Is it possible if we can increase that? We said 10 percent. 10 percent should be fine. OK. And remember this will be, it'll depend on what organization you're in. If you've got 10 people, does 10 percent make sense? Or if you've got 50,000 people, 10 percent should depend. Can we know how big our organization is in this scenario? So I'm working on me as a case study. Can you hear that horrible sound? We're out of time. OK. So in my organization, I work for a big bank with 40,000 employees. But I think we're going to take it as the team that I work for, the department, which is 120 employees. Because otherwise it's just too big. So 10 percent helped me with maths. And employees. 12. And also it should be a mix of different departments, right? Exactly. In case of a large organization. Yeah, exactly. Maybe different age group. Yeah, different like demographics. Yeah. Age, gender, race. OK, awesome. Different part of a pre-order. It's a multinational company. Maybe different zones. Countries. So it needs to be kind of representative. Yep. OK. Awesome. I'm just taking notes for when we debrief. OK, so our time's up on that card. We're going to move on. Because we want to just get as much thinking as possible about spending too much time on one. So I'm going to delete that one. OK, let's roll the dice again. This is more fun in person where you can throw the dice. Two. OK. One, two. OK, so we've landed on a blue block, which is the discuss cards. So let's see what the question is here. What is the tangible benefit of using this key result? Oh, let me start the timer. I'm a bad facilitator. OK, start. What is the tangible benefit if we interview 10% of a representative sample of our employees? What would we get out of that? We'd be able to gather some feedback from people who are representing the company. OK. How is the current situation? Cool. And how can we improve it? Yes. So maybe you'd get areas to improve or areas at school very low or something. And since we're sampling at different levels, different regions and whatnot, we would have a good chance to have a holistic view. So actually here what would come out of that if we do that is to have a holistic view of the current areas that need attention maybe. OK. So anything else on this? We've got 30 seconds left. What do you want to move on? Yeah, just one point. Maybe we can also get an idea of something which works for someone might not be good for other set of people. So we get an idea about that also. So the culture, yeah. OK, so get an idea of different strategies for different people. Yes. Awesome. OK, well done. That one's done. OK, let's go to the next one. Zoom bars in the way. OK, I wish you could all take turns. I don't know if I'm a good dice roller. OK, three. OK, one, two, three. And I've landed on move back to one. Two. OK, so we're on a measure. Are you trying to achieve a positive target metric where more is better? I'm going to start the timer. This is a bit of a difficult one. So we said 10% of a representative sample is at a positive target. So increase as opposed to decrease. So for this question then, trying to achieve where more is better, meaning like higher percentage, is that what's the question asking? OK. Yeah. Because you can also get key results that are positive or negative, right? So you could phrase it to say, I want to increase X to X. Or you could phrase it, I want to decrease this to this. So that could be also positive or negative. So for example, if in the past we've interviewed 5% of employees, our key result might say we want to increase the number of people we interviewed from 5% to 10%. OK. Yeah, in my opinion, interviewing more people in the company will be good, given if it's not a expensive, because depending on the interview, it could be like a quick survey that could be sent out kind of form. So those kind of questionnaires could also be able to increase the sample size without adding too much cost. Yeah. This is also my question. At this point of time, are we free to change the key results for 5% to 6%. So what we'll do at the end, at this point we're kind of just taking lots of notes and taking lots of ideas. And then at the end, what we're going to do is we're going to reword it. So then we're going to come to this and we're going to say, is this even the right metric? You know, is this even the right thing? Because remember key results should be very focused as this sounds like an action. So when we spoke about what benefit we would have out of that action, that may actually be more of a key result in this. This may be an action. And then what we're going to do right at the end is we're actually going to take, just as an example, we're going to start to actually define what those actions look like. So from our conversations we've already had, that might actually be more of an action. Okay. But yeah, that's a good question. But I think for now let's carry on because we might even get more thinking around this. Okay. So, Yas? So in that case, can we as survey suggested, can we include the survey also as part of this? So it is not only the interview, the survey to cover more sample? Yeah, so you can. So you can say, but what I would suggest is, because otherwise you're going to spend a lot of time rewording that now. So what I would suggest is you take notes as a team, you're going to take notes and say, it's not just interviews or the survey. Okay. You know, because that came out, that was actually a good idea. We need more people if we do an online survey, instead of an interview. But we're going to take a note of that and then at the end we're going to say, okay, given all of our conversations, how do we reword this and what are actually actions and not bowls. Okay. Just one more minute for the breakout session to end. Okay, perfect. It can go at, was that 30 minutes Savita? 20 minutes over. I thought it's 15 minutes. You want 30 minutes? Can you give them another five, 14 minutes. Five minutes. Okay. Okay. Awesome. Let's play one more round. Okay. For the sake of trying it out, is it possible if we do a green card? Yeah, so I mean it, what do you think? Yeah. Since we did blue and purple. Just trying it, yeah. Honestly, where we land, one, two, three, four, five, six, yeah, we would have, oh wait. Would still be purple. But you see it can go quite quick, depending on what you roll, like we almost finished actually. But yes, I agree. Let's do a green card. What are the prerequisites? Okay, so I'm going to start the timer. So if we say maybe now we've got maybe interviews and questionnaires, what would we have to have in place to start that? Well, we need to have a list of questions that we want to ask. Yeah, exactly. We should have the user group identified to whom we need to interview. Yeah, exactly. The representative group. So what we'll do is we'll take notes. You could also, when you play this with your team, have someone capturing actions, right? So, you know, list of questions or survey. You know, define user group. List of questions, user group, and then you'd say, who's going to do that? I know I'm going to volunteer you. Yeah. You know, or whatever. So then you'll have who's responsible by when next Tuesday or whatever. So from this, what's quite nice, especially the green cards is it prompts you to think of actions. So as soon as you come out of the session with your team, it's not just this pie in the sky goal, but you can actually go and start working towards this goal. Okay, I think the breakout rooms might come back soon. In terms of the demonstration here, thank you so much to our volunteers. You guys are an awesome team. Kavita, Suresh, Anu and Rishmi. Are there any other questions from the demonstration? Dolly, I just had one request if you can give us an access. I have a question. Use it. Sorry. I think it was in the link just now. The template was provided. Yeah, and I lost it. I got disconnected, so I lost that. Don't worry. I will share with you. I've got a download link where you can copy the template. So when everyone comes back, I think I'll pop this link in the chat. Do you think it's something you play with your teams? Yeah, it's very good. Looks like we can even use this for other brainstorming sessions or other discussions. We can customize it, right? Definitely. We're sharing this under Creative Commons so as long as you don't go sell it for money, you're welcome to use it, change it, reach out to us if you want help or if you have ideas. I have another question. On the stack of cards, how many questions are there? How many cards are there? It's a good question. I think there are quite a few for Discuss. They're not that many. They're less for Define. If you run out of cards, I can answer that for you. I just don't know how. I must find my document with the original thing. So maybe let's say 10, 15. But often you can reuse the same questions for different KRs. So in the template, we've actually got different shuffles. So this is a stack of these questions and then this is a shuffle same questions shuffled differently. So if you run out, you can actually just copy all of these and put them back on your board. You can also come up with your own questions and add them if you like. Thank you. Sure. How do we know when it runs back? I have to close the room. So I've given them 30 seconds. Perfect. Thank you so much, Savita. Okay. What I'll do when everyone joins is we'll just discuss kind of how we wrap up the game. We have touched on it a bit already as with our team. And then I'll give you all the links to access the game. I think they're all deep in discussions. Nobody wants to leave. And that's why it's nice to have enough time to practice because I think when you're doing this for the first time, it takes time to figure out how to do it. It was a really awesome experience. I'm just back from the room. At first, it was difficult to get started. But once we started, it was a really good one. After iteration 2 and 3, we got really how to play it around. It really helps to define the better key results. So thanks, Talia, for sharing this. Thank you. Sorry, I can't see you. I don't know your name. But thank you so much for the feedback. There is Rajesh Pancham. Thank you. Okay, awesome. So yeah, maybe... Yeah, they're all back, Talia. Okay, great. Let me just share my screen again. I just want to... Just over 15 minutes left. So, I just want to get some feedback and then I'll show you how we end the game because it's a short time in this conference. If you play this with a team, it may take about an hour. Again, as a facilitator, you want to be quite strict on the 2-minute time box. Otherwise, you can spend an hour on one KR. Okay, so, how did it go? We've really had some feedback. Anyone else want to offer how did it go in your rooms? I think it was really... Sorry, go ahead. Okay, so I think it was really good. I like the iterative way of discuss, define and do through the ladder. We were coming back and discussing on the goal by looking at what was behind the stacked cards and the gamification I think would work really well. So, it's a nice framework, Talia. Thanks. Awesome, thank you so much. I think with any board game, the first round, first two or three rounds is a bit... You're not sure what you're doing and then it repeats. So, you get into a rhythm and it becomes quite easy Thank you. Anyone else? Yeah, that was really great activity. We get to know many things. There was one landing point that was skip. So, skip was something that the old output needs to be skipped. The skip on the board. Which one? This way it says move back or the arrows. No, the last letter, skip turn. Skip turn. Yeah, true. We can take that out maybe. It's a bit horrible for people. So, that would be... That would make more sense if you... So, how we'd play this with a real dice is we'd actually... Everyone in the team would take turns rolling a dice. Whereas now it's one person so it doesn't really matter. So, yeah, that's good feedback. Thank you. I think we should take that out. Hi, Tanya. Yeah. By learning this game we are supposed to be defining the key result by answering all the questions and as a team. Overall motive of the entire exercise is essentially working with your management or whoever it is who is an SME and kind of create this key result. Now, in your experience, how that has been taken because this is kind of a team-based OKR. So, if it's a team-based OKR and at the same time you've mentioned about the aspirational part. So, when it's the team which is signing up for it, the intention is good because the team is signing up for it so it will ensure that they hit that particular goal or they work towards that goal. But when it comes to aspirational part and how do your management sees to it because management would always want to push more stronger aspirational how this is kind of taken care. So, yeah. It's a good question. And again, I think as with any of these techniques it's not going to be a silver bullet to solve all the challenges within an organization. So, I understand when you say executives will come with these outrageous goals or they'll expect you to push harder and that kind of thing. But what I've done with this is either I invite it depends on the culture of the organization. So, if you have an SME or an executive who's willing to be part of this process it's much better because then you can ask questions and have the conversation in the moment. You could say, we feel we need to interview 50 employees and the executive would say, no I want you to interview a thousand. And then you say, okay, we very far apart here can we come to compromise? And then you can have the conversations in the moment. But I think a lot of that actually speaks more to kind of the organizational culture. This technique may not solve everything. But what it does do is it helps a team because you're right, this works well for team okay ours. It helps a team get alignment and be very specific on what they're working towards. Then what you can do is you can take those to your executive and say, you've told us to improve employee satisfaction this is how we want to achieve it in the next quarter. This is specifically what our kind of key results are. You know how do you feel about that? Is that okay? So you want to kind of make sure that you are communicating it up in your organization. I'm not sure if that answers your question. Kind of, yes, it's okay. It's basically I kind of got that just kind of work on negotiating the way. Yeah, thanks. Okay, thanks. I think as with anything it helps to make things visible. So if your team knows what they can and can't achieve, at least you've got it and it's visible and it's tangible and you can take it and have the conversations you need to have with your stakeholders to manage expectations. Okay, cool. So maybe one more any other questions or comments before we close out? I did see a question in the chat which said, what if we keep getting the same color card? It's up to you as a facilitator. So what I sometimes do is say, we keep landing on blue, let's roll again. Or you could just say I'm just going to move us one more onto the green or something. So it really depends on your luck but as a facilitator you can kind of pick different colors. We actually did it in the room where we said we keep getting the same cards. Let's pick a green. So the game is more to just kind of facilitate those conversations but you don't have to stick to it as a facilitator. You can always adapt it if you need. Yeah, I also would like to add something here. Okay. So we had in our breakout rooms we had some other thoughts like why we are considering a 50 even though it's just an example. So it is I think the counters could be based on the strength of the organization that say if one organization has only 100 employees and the other one has 1,000 employees so 15 number could not be a correct representative of that. So what we discussed internally in our breakout session is why not we define a percentage of the organization let's say 10%. So if the organization is of 100 then we interview 10 people if it is 1,000 we interview 100 people and the 10% employee will be from different departments so that we should target only one department for the improvement but we also consider thoughts from the other departments as well. Awesome. Exactly and we actually had that conversation in our group as well and I think it's because we picked up a card that says can you measure this as a percentage or can you so it prompted thinking for our team and it just shows that although this is a simulation it's an example it shows that it's quite a powerful conversation to have so if you do this with your teams for real goals how it can maybe change thinking around some of the goals that you have. So awesome thank you so much for that feedback okay so I'm going to show you quickly how we would wrap up and then I'm going to send you a link to download your version of the game. So this is from John Dewar who literally wrote the book on OKRs and he says ideas are easy implementation is everything so the way that we've structured this game is so that by the time you come out of playing this as a team you should have identified some actions and some things that you can actually do right after that session so it helps you not only define your goal but also it helps you maybe with the starting point of actions as a team because it's great to come up with these goals but if we don't take the actions and take the steps then they just fall flat so here's an example and this is just my example right so what you would do after you've played this game is you would go back to your key results and now you would start to really think about them deeply so this is my opinion improve internal employee engagement I haven't reworded the objective but you could if you want what I said after I played this game with our teams is interview employees on how to improve work culture kind of sounds like an action so for key results what would be the result or what would be the outcome of that action and we actually got one of those cards in our team where we said what was the benefit of this thing so for example this is very much just an example you could take a measure like an employee net promoter score for example and say actually our key result would be increase the ENPS from 20 to 30 within the Dragon Slayer team by Q1 so that's a lot more tangible and specific and it speaks to an outcome so in order to improve that score we have to interview employees there's going to be 20 to 30 different actions we have to take as a team part of that is interviewing employees you know so then you would go from all of your notes that you've taken from your conversation I don't know you can see my screen's blurred but I've been scribbling notes here from our conversation we're now going to say okay so interview employees might be an action to identify areas that we can improve on and there might be lots of other actions that we want to do here but how we're going to measure success is actually through this for example the ENPS does that make sense any questions or comments there so by the end of the game what you should have had is you should have had really in depth awesome conversations you should have thought about these a bit differently and then you're going to craft them in a way that is measurable and meaningful for your team given the context of your organization and then what you're going to do is you're going to take all the notes hmm that sounds like an action that's something we could actually do interview employees or come up with survey questions our team had some actions here you know come up with survey questions you know these sound like actions for the team so when we walk out of this game we've actually got a starting point that we can begin with okay so what I'm going to do just before I forget I know that our time is running out I'm going to share a link on the chat and this is just to download or to copy that board and then you can come to use it to edit it to share it with your teams and then also just as a another note we do have a lot of other techniques some of them we've developed into virtual techniques like needs games values games etc so I'm going to share with you a link where you can find activities as well okay any other questions or comments before we close I tell you so this is Ankit I just want to know so we figured out that at least in our exercise one was totally dependent on usually happens sorry there was a little bit of background noise Ankit so KR1 was dependent on KR2 at least yeah what we were discussing we found that we cannot move ahead on KR2 at all unless we are done with KR1 okay and then as a team you would say do we then say KR1 we want to finish within a month and then we can move on to KR2 so I think a lot of it is about having that conversation with the team and what makes sense for us is this a real dependency if so we're going to have to focus on that first and then move on to the next or are we creating a dependency where we don't need it can we separate them so I think it's very hard to do it in a simulated environment but I hope that at least the framework in the game is something that you can take back and try with your teams and I think when you play it with your teams you'll see it's a lot easier because you all have the same context and you know the organisation, you know the teams etc absolutely thank you awesome I just want to thank you all so much for joining the session and for being so willing to play games with me and I hope it's valuable yeah just one clarification yeah so the end objective of this whole technique is to refine our OKRs or come up with a better OKR correct is my understanding correct or do you want to clarify yes that's correct so the goal of the game is so that the teams can have deep conversations and then use that to actually refine those key results refine their OKRs so that they're a lot more tangible than just vague statements yeah okay thank you okay thank you