Hearing a lot about Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), but still a little unclear what they're about? Maybe you're hearing all the chatter and it's tweaking your interest! Well, join me for a farside chat and all will be revealed.

In this session we'll get under the hood of OKRs to understand the history, the core concepts and cut our teeth in a manner which allows us to take them back to our teams for further exploration.

At minimum, you'll walk out of the session with some clear goals for the coming quarter!

Building a healthy organisation with an aligned executive team can create one of the most powerful and easily accessed competitive advantages, but this will only be achieved with commitment starting at the top. Join us while we share our journey working with the MLC Life executive team, preparing the organisation for the future.

Background:

MLC was an insurance business contained within a large traditional bank, purchased by a Japanese insurance business with a dream to create the best standalone digital life insurance business in Australia. One year into the journey, the CEO identified the need for the executive leadership team to lead differently and optimise the business for change rather than run - he explored agility as the mindset and mechanism.

Our transformation journey:

Building a relationship with the CEO and his executive leadership team, we portrayed the art of the possible – sharing what a healthy, aligned adaptive and agile organisation looks and feels like as well as expressing the risks if they continued with the current operating methods and practices. We reflected on past and present to understand constraints and pain points, co-designed a new operating rhythm to enable the leadership team to think and work differently and executed a safe experiment to test and learn from.

The co-design resulted in a structure and model where the team spends just enough time running the business and have more time to focus on the deep work of changing and transforming the business. This new way of leading includes cascading priorities through the organisation enabling everyone to understand what’s most important, how they individually and with their teams can contribute and how they can innovate to support the strategic direction.

By co-creating and experimenting with the new working practices and cadence, we established the importance of designing how an executive team can amplify their collective time and resources to:

• Understand and leverage the strengths of the team to find ways of working that stimulate and boost the performance of their leadership capability
• Create a shared understanding of what the strategic imperatives are, choosing how to execute on them, and building strong working relationships to accomplish
• Build a cycle and rhythm to deliver value on immediate priorities with flexibility to adapt based on internal and external influences
• Influence the ‘system’ to adopt curiosity, creativity and innovation to solve customer pain points whilst aligning to strategic priorities
• Establish an approach that supports the CEO in gradually dialling up the focus on aligning the team at a course and speed enabling the business to both run and transform

To aid the broader organisation to respond positively to the adaptive ways of working we established a ‘pull based’ approach to change where lower level teams embraced agile, lean and design thinking approaches rather than forcing a particular model or issuing a directive.

Objectives and Key Results are a powerful goal setting approach which inspire alignment, clarity and cohesion, which was originally created by Andrew Grove (President of Intel in the 1970's). Since this time they've been popularised by John Doerr and embraced by some of the worlds most innovative, disruptive and fastest growing companies such as Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and many many others.

The structure is simple: the executive team comes up with a set of 3-5 objectives and each objective has up to 4 key results. In a top down, bottom up approach, the OKRs cascade through the organisation with each team taking a lens and applying their own interpretation to how they can contribute to the higher level goals.

But that's all theory and no one really gives a shit about that. If you're familiar with the Market of Skills technique, then forget that because this is next level.

How we'll saddle up this space jockey:

In this immersive workshop, the really interesting part is learning how to create OKRs, cascade them through an organisation and adjusted for each team, manage against them throughout a quarter and finally reflect on how the organisation and teams performed at the end of the quarter. We'll be including material and a bunch of tips based on our own experience introducing OKRs to various companies and teams.

The epic part is where everyone will set their own OKRs for the quarter outlining what they want to achieve at a stretch personally and professionally, followed by a marketplace where everyone will trade their knowledge and skills with each other to help the other party achieve their gaols. The outcome will be a number of collaborators who can help you on your journey.

MLC Life was spun out of NAB in 2016 and purchased by a Japanese insurance business with a dream to create the best standalone digital life insurance business in Australia. One year in the CEO realised Agile approaches could help the business deliver on its purpose, however he recognised a fundamental culture change was needed to make it happen.

How would we enable the culture change? Why by changing the system of course! A quarterly based operating rhythm won't change the culture itself, but it creates regular reflection and improvement cycle that drives change in itself.

In this talk, we'll cover two key elements: How Lani and Tim worked with the CEO to initiate the journey to agility, and how the new rhythm sparked change across the organisation.

Initiating the change

Building a relationship with the CEO and his executive leadership team, Lani & Tim portrayed the art of the possible – sharing what a healthy, aligned adaptive and agile organisation looks and feels like as well as expressing the risks if they continued with the current operating methods and practices. We reflected on past and present to understand constraints and pain points, co-designed a new operating rhythm to enable the leadership team to think and work differently and executed a safe experiment to test and learn from.

How a healthy rhythm sparks change

The change began at the top with a new operating rhythm that established quarterly goals which cascaded though the organisation. This new operating rhythm was not imposed, however high performing teams quickly identified the new pattern and adapted their operating cadence to match. This created a different way of thinking across the business, where people focused on the vision, purpose and strategy, but optimised for adaptability and value creation.

MLC Life was spun out of NAB in 2016 and purchased by a Japanese insurance business with a dream to create the best standalone digital life insurance business in Australia. One year in the CEO realised Agile approaches could help the business deliver on its purpose, however he recognised a fundamental culture change was needed to make it happen.

How would we enable the culture change? Why by changing the system of course! A quarterly based operating rhythm won't change the culture itself, but it creates regular reflection and improvement cycle that drives change in itself.

In this talk, we'll cover two key elements: How Lani and Tim worked with the CEO to initiate the journey to agility, and how the new rhythm sparked change across the organisation.

Initiating the change

Building a relationship with the CEO and his executive leadership team, Lani & Tim portrayed the art of the possible – sharing what a healthy, aligned adaptive and agile organisation looks and feels like as well as expressing the risks if they continued with the current operating methods and practices. We reflected on past and present to understand constraints and pain points, co-designed a new operating rhythm to enable the leadership team to think and work differently and executed a safe experiment to test and learn from.

How a healthy rhythm sparks change

The change began at the top with a new operating rhythm that established quarterly goals which cascaded though the organisation. This new operating rhythm was not imposed, however high performing teams quickly identified the new pattern and adapted their operating cadence to match. This created a different way of thinking across the business, where people focused on the vision, purpose and strategy, but optimised for adaptability and value creation.