After a particularly difficult one-on-one with a stubborn direct, Jay took a moment to reflect and center himself. The report’s claim, though posed at him abrasively, had actually been interesting – “OKRs are simplistic bullshit, you know no complex system can be boiled down to these isolated measurements. If anybody seriously believed in OKRs we’d use them in our real lives.”
Truth was Jay, despite being a very successful middle-manager, somehow felt like there were some focus areas for his home life.
So Jay continued with the exercise: Well my relationship with my wife has been rocky since I gave her a “Meets expectations” review in our last cycle, he thought. Of course there was no hard data that she was unhappy because there was no dashboard or OKR on it. The very idea that his wife had any positive or negative feelings toward him was a philosophically unfalsifiable statement, devoid of any meaning, until somebody put an operational definition on it.
He took a deep breath. Maybe that stubborn direct report was right. Maybe I should assign OKRs to my personal relationships, starting with my wife. Maybe I can write a book about it afterward. The world really doesn’t use business methods for some odd reason… they all have so much to learn from me.
——
“Welcome to my Ted talk,” announced Jay to black mass of seats and faces.
“I’m going to tell you how to optimize your marriage in 2 cycles.” He clicked the clicker showing a slide of graph going up to the right. The audience chuckled nervously.
“Oh I’m not joking, this is very real. Exciting, isn’t it. The possibility that your life can increase on every dimension simply by measuring and iterating?” The audience went silent in what Jay understood to be anticipation.
He clicked to the next slide. “Let me take you on a journey,” he announced while pacing to stage left and swinging his arms. “Last year my wife and I were on the rocks. Things were tough. We weren’t happy.” He paused for effect.
“How do I know that?” he strutted to stage right. He paused again.
“The data.” He clicked the clicker. A chart came up showing “Times we tell each other we love each other per day” chart came up showing a drastic up-to-the-right trend. The audience murmured uncertainly. It may seem incredible, but in one short year we achieved a 300x increase. Indeed his chart did claim that they told each other they loved each other over 80 times a day presently, and a few audience members began to chuckle.
He swang his arms and struck a pose while looking across the audience. The giant screen behind him now showed a second chart, “Self-reported infidelity incidents,” which went from 3 to zero in a year. More audience members chuckled. “At the start of the year there was a problem with infidelity. How did we fix it? Well I found a better measurement. By relying on self-reports we were able to get a much better graph of something that’s normally very hard to measure.” Jay didn’t understand why the audience was laughing, but interpreted it as adulation.
“Once you realize what love is, once you simplify it to an operational definition with OKRs, you realize how many things don’t matter. That’s the beauty of OKRs, you get to pick a few numbers and ignore all the irrelevant things. What does that mean in practice?”
“Well in our case, with our two OKRs, we could make the marriage much simpler by subtracting out activities that didn’t contribute to the OKR. Things like sleeping in the same room, talking to each other, spending time together, or even living in the same house showed no statistical correlation to these charts.” The audience was laughing uproariously now.
“And so I’m here to announce: OKRs work just as well in real life as they do in business! Read about it in my new book.”
The audience stood and cheered. He looked down at the audience where his wife and her new oddly close friend (that she now lived with) watched. And deep down he could feel her love, 500 times as strong as it had ever been, the charts proved it.