(2019-11-12) Castro Bland OKR And Experiments Have To Go Together

Felipe Castro interviews David J Bland: OKR and Experiments Have to Go Together. If you ever read any of my content, you know that OKR is about delivering value, and that good OKRs measure outcomes and pass the “So What?” Test. The whole point of using OKR is to agree on the outcomes we want to achieve and then let the teams test different ideas quickly to find which ones will work

David J. Bland teamed up with Alex Osterwalder, the creator of the Business Model Canvas, to tackle this topic in his new book, Testing Business Ideas. My blog editor Melissa Suzuno recently sat down with David to learn more about the book and David’s advice on experimenting in a business setting

No matter what type of company I’m working with, we focus on identifying the riskiest thing they have and how to test that so they don’t find out they’re wrong much later and fail slowly.

I was approached by Alex Osterwalder who created the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas. He said, “There’s this need in the market where people aren’t sure what experiments to run and when they should run them.” Our goal was not to build a giant encyclopedia of them, but to help people understand how to choose an experiment and what it should look like.

we essentially ended up with this list of experiments. We have 44 in the book and we applied a taxonomy to them, to help people understand whether an experiment will help them determine the type of risk—if something is desirable, viable, or feasible.

The core of the book is the list of experiments, but then the wrapper around that content addresses questions like: What kind of team do I need? How do I set that up? What kind of ceremonies does this involve? How do I make this a repeatable process?

Usually when you’re starting anything new—if you frame this as discovery versus validation—you’re doing probably a lot of discovery just to understand if there’s a problem there. And then as you learn more, you want to be able to put things in front of people and get feedback on them and then get higher and higher strength of evidence.

With outcomes, it’s essentially where you are focused in your business model.

if we were trying to achieve this outcome, what are some different experiments we’d run?

there are three big biases that come up time and time again

One is confirmation bias. It’s this idea that you’re just confirming your beliefs in theories

Overconfidence bias comes up time and time again. Your perception of your judgment is actually much greater than it really is, so you have excessive confidence in your own answers and might question whether you even need to experiment.

Finally, there’s experimenter’s bias.

we usually discard anything that doesn’t agree with our hypothesis

How can companies get better about embracing a culture of experimentation?

it’s very much about the culture of your company and your mindset. If you have something that you feel like you’ve tried to solve a few different ways and it just hasn’t worked, that’s usually because you don’t understand the problem very well

For leaders, the best thing they can do is try to design an environment in their organization where this can occur. That’s things like giving people time to work on this, not micromanaging, leading with questions instead of leading with answers all the time.

be open to the idea of being wrong

in your organization and your business—and your life for that matter—there’s rarely one right answer. They’re just choices.

It’s not at the end of the world. It’s really a small test (Little Bet) that you’re running. How do you learn from that and try again?