What Is OKR Brainstorming? How to Set OKRs Effectively

OKR brainstorming is a goal management method that many businesses use today. It is fairly simple to use and brings many benefits. The tool aligns the activities of everyone in the business around a shared goal. To understand what OKR brainstorming is and how to do it, read the details in this article from Mona Media.

What is OKR brainstorming?

OKR brainstorming is a creative process for developing objectives and key results for an individual, a department or an organization. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, an effective goal management tool that aligns the activities of the members of an organization with its overall goals. OKR brainstorming helps you define what you want to achieve, how to measure progress and which actions to take to reach the objective. Some benefits of OKR brainstorming are:

• Generates many different ideas and initiatives for objectives and key results.
• Boosts team members' participation and commitment.
• Makes sure important or hard-to-reach objectives are not missed or confused.
• Fits the strategy and vision of the organization.

The role of OKR brainstorming

OKR brainstorming is a very important process and plays several roles in building and developing objectives and key results for individuals, departments or organizations. Some of its roles are:

• Generates many different ideas and initiatives for objectives and key results, which diversifies and enriches the objectives.
• Boosts team members' participation and commitment, and strengthens collaboration and communication between individuals and departments.
• Makes sure important or hard-to-reach objectives are not missed or confused, which helps optimize the effectiveness of OKRs.
• Fits the organization's strategy and vision, and aligns each person's objectives with the organization's overall goals.

What does an OKR brainstorming session include?

An OKR brainstorming session is a creative process for identifying objectives and key results for the next OKR cycle. An OKR cycle is usually a quarter or a year. The session is usually held as a meeting or workshop with people from different levels of the organization, from company and department level down to working teams. An OKR brainstorming session includes the following basic steps:

Schedule the session

First, schedule and prepare for the session. Scheduling includes identifying the current OKRs, the agenda and the problem space.

Prepare the meeting room

If you want to prepare an online meeting room, you can use a whiteboard tool such as Figma to help. Add animated images, voting dots or useful articles on the topic so everyone feels at ease in the meeting.

Introduce the problem space

Spend at least the first 10 minutes presenting the objectives, ideas and problem space. Explain OKR brainstorming in detail and adjust the OKRs together if needed.

Generate ideas

After covering all of the above, you need to think about how to solve the problem. You can guide everyone to write their ideas so that they relate directly to branding, sales or marketing support. First, though, help everyone understand that no idea is a bad idea, so write down every idea you come up with so the group can analyze and assess them together. -> How to find creative, fresh ideas for writing content

Present and cluster

After writing down ideas, everyone should meet to present and hear each other's views. Each person should present their idea briefly but completely enough that everyone in the meeting understands the gist.

Vote on the ideas

After hearing all the presentations, the next step is to vote on the ideas. The most-voted ideas are usually the ones many people agree are feasible.

Priority matrix

Next, split into groups and discuss separately with the product manager, the technical director or other stakeholders. Each voted topic is analyzed again for potential value, complexity and feasibility before it is carried out.

Interview stakeholders

If stakeholders did not attend the session, collect their feedback and send them a progress report. They can then give you advice on OKR brainstorming and help further with ideation.

What comes next

Once you have plenty of ideas and objectives, you can create a separate group for each topic. Each group takes on different tasks to get started.

How to do OKR brainstorming

The OKR brainstorming process works in detail as follows:

Collect all ideas and initiatives for objectives

When doing OKR brainstorming, the first thing to do is write down all the ideas and initiatives you have come up with. You can look for ideas in sources such as work items from the previous period, department plans, big goals or project-based goals. Once you have a list of objectives to pursue, define the Key Results that will achieve them. Each objective should have about 3 to 5 key results, and each one brings you closer to the objective. To make this idea-gathering step easier to picture, use tools such as mind maps, logic trees or planning software to build the objective list in a more systematic and creative way.

Assess the value and feasibility of objectives and results

With a list of ideas for objectives and Key Results, the next step is to assess their feasibility and value, and whether they fit the business's overall goals. Value can be assessed against these criteria:

• Importance: The objective of OKR brainstorming must truly contribute to the overall goal.
• Clarity: The OKR brainstorming objective must be specific enough to be measured and assessed. Instead of a general objective, give a more specific number or data point.
• Inspiration: The objective set in OKR brainstorming should be challenging enough to motivate employees to achieve it, but not so high that it is hard to reach and discourages them.
• Direction: The OKR brainstorming objective points toward the business's overall goal, with a set deadline.

Besides the criteria for objectives, pay attention to the criteria for assessing results in OKR brainstorming. Results should be measured with specific, realistic numbers and a specific deadline.

Choose suitable objectives and results

The next step in OKR brainstorming is choosing suitable objectives and results. Because of limits on time and resources, most businesses cannot carry out every objective idea that was raised. A business needs the knowledge to select the best ideas and results to include in OKR brainstorming. In general, selection should weigh two criteria in particular:

• Feasibility of the objective: Assess how likely the results in the objective are to be achieved by looking at factors such as human resources, materials, time and other related factors.
• Impact of the objective: Assess the objective's contribution to broader goals, as well as the key results it brings to the department or business.

To set the priority order of objectives more easily, you can arrange them in a matrix like this:   With the matrix above, you can easily order the objectives as follows:

• High priority: Choose right away the objectives with high feasibility and high impact.
• Long-term plan: For objectives with low feasibility but high impact, plan to carry them out over a longer term.
• Consider later: Objectives with high feasibility but little contribution to the overall goal can go on a list to consider after the important objectives are done.
• Drop: Objectives with low feasibility and low impact should be dropped immediately.

OKR brainstorming is a very useful goal management method for most common fields today. Its power is fully realized only when users know how to set objectives to the right standard, but its benefits are undeniable. We hope these tips help you understand OKR brainstorming and build effective objectives. See more:

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