John Maeda, professor of design at MIT, sums up his book “The Laws of Simplicity” in a single sentence: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful”. Applying this principle to this methodology, if an OKR is within the obviousness of what a business has to do, then it does not add much value to have it; on the other hand, if the OKR challenges the obviousness of the business because it adds relevant and valuable information that provides guidance and breaks “the normal,” then it is an OKR worth having.

Let’s understand the above with an example. Let’s suppose that the concrete plant “A” has been achieving outstanding safety and occupational health (OHS) results for 4 years, it is in the world benchmark of indicators and the I Promise system is embedded in the DNA of all its employees. In this plant, thanks to years of work, the I Promise system has become the obvious, so it makes sense that next quarter’s OKRs will not be focusing on OHS matters, but on other aspects of the operation, for example, improvements in the logistical operation or in the optimization of the mixes. The fact that none OHS-related OKRs are written for this particular quarter for plant “A” plant does not mean that they will not continue to maintain their standards or that in the event of an incident they will fail to rigorously apply the incident investigation process (equivalent to the body temperature rise analogy in the previous section).

On the other hand, suppose that concrete plant “B” has had three OHS incidents in the last six months, this means that the I Promise system is not yet part of the obviousness of the operation. This means that its personnel, at all levels, must continue to focus on efforts to reach the necessary standards and OHS results. In the case of plant “B”, it makes sense to write OKRs related to improvements to the SISO management system.

 The above example shows that there is no single, rigid rule for writing good OKRs. It all depends on the context. The muscle that leaders develop to write good OKRs is gained with the experience of several cycles and the intelligence applied to the context of each team.