Make your OKRs big and your initiatives small.

Big Goals can be overwhelming. Small Work → Big Results.

We’re just finalizing 2023 OKRs at Alpaca — the objectives, key results, and initiatives that will help us achieve big growth this year. This is my 7th year of setting OKRs in a company and the biggest thing I’ve learned is this: keep your OKRs big, and the initiatives to achieve them bite-sized.

This idea is one part Measure What Matters and one part Atomic Habits.

We’ll start with the OKRs — that is, the results we’re trying to achieve. John Doerr’s advice is to make them so audacious that at the end, you should be able to grade each OKR on a 100 point scale, and if you’ve set your OKRs high enough, you’ll average 70%.

Aim high, run like hell toward that goal, and even if you don’t hit 100%, you’ll achieve more than you would have if you’d aimed low. And sometimes, you’ll surprise yourself with what you’re capable of and hit it at 100%.

In my experience, this creates initial discomfort among teams (“why set the goal so high if we’re okay with hitting 70%!? Why not just set it at that 70% level?!”). But in the end, it creates better results and bigger, more creative thinking.

The counter-balance to OKR audacity is to keep your initiatives teeny. Atomic, if you will. James Clear’s strategy is to keep the work small, establish little habits, and watch as it adds up to big results.

At Alpaca, each OKR has specific and clear work (initiatives) that we’re betting on to achieve our results. But we’re following this rule:

If it can’t be done in less than a quarter, it’s too big of an initiative.

Bigger initiatives must be broken down into smaller projects, and I’m challenging us to break those projects into monthly and even weekly sub-projects.

Why? Because if the audacity is so overwhelming that it’s paralyzing, we’ve quit before we get a chance to start. Small work → Big goals.