Nishant: Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our small group. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here. We truly appreciate you spending your valuable time with us. Our goal is to make this session as useful, interactive, and easy as possible so that you can get something meaningful from it.
A little bit about me—like was mentioned, I’ve been a strategy consultant for a while now. I’ve been in the agile space for over 20 years, playing, experimenting, and learning throughout this journey. It has led me to work with wonderful colleagues, including my co-host today, Dee Gray. In just a moment, I’ll introduce her to you.
Also joining me is Eric Robertson, a veteran in this industry. He has played a crucial role in bringing value streams to life. Eric has served in numerous executive positions across various startups and large companies. Today, he’s here to share his journey—from traditional planning to an outcome-based approach—and to provide practical insights that can help you apply these concepts.
Dee, on the other hand, is the most experienced among us. She’s an entrepreneur, a marketing specialist, and has led numerous startups to success, year after year. She has witnessed the shift from traditional ways of working to more outcome-driven approaches.
Dee: Hello, everyone! We really appreciate you joining us. I can’t wait for you to hear not only about the seance piece but also, what I consider the highlight—Eric’s case study, where he’s going to walk you through real-world customer challenges.
Nishant: Awesome, thank you, Dee. Now, I know many of you have been through numerous learning series and discussions about outcome-based strategy. So, rather than covering the theory again, we’re going to take a different approach today.
We will start by identifying the key challenges that organizations face today and explore how outcome-based strategy can help solve them. Then, Eric will take you through his personal experience—his pain points, why he made the shift, and how this approach is working in his industry.
If you have any questions, please drop them in the chat box. Since this is a small group, we want to make it interactive. Feel free to raise your hand or jump in with your thoughts.
Strategic Alignment in the Market Today
Let’s talk about strategic alignment. You might be surprised by what we found in our research when we started working with clients.
We discovered that only 65% of companies have an agreed-upon strategy. Even more shocking, out of that 65%, only 14% of employees actually understand the strategy. That’s an incredibly small number. Many employees are just executing tasks without understanding how their work contributes to the bigger picture.
Even more alarming—less than 10% of companies successfully execute their strategy. In today’s fast-paced global market, it’s shocking to see that only a small fraction of organizations can effectively implement their plans.
John Doerr once said, “Ideas are easy, execution is the problem.” Companies can spend millions developing a strategy, but execution is where things start to fall apart. Many organizations invest heavily in strategy consulting, but few succeed due to a lack of alignment, focus, and commitment.
Common Problems in Strategic Planning
Through interviews with industry leaders, we identified key pain points:
- Competing priorities—leaders spend more time competing than collaborating.
- The perception of not moving fast enough, without clarity on why.
- Annual strategy planning is a painful, months-long process that no one looks forward to.
- Funding models that act as blockers rather than enablers.
- Widespread silos across organizations, causing misalignment.
- A focus on deadlines rather than customer needs.
I’ll share an example. A client we are working with is using SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) and, in their PI (Program Increment) planning, committed to 2,800 story points. By the end of the PI, with just one week left, over 2,000 points remained unfinished. When we asked why so much unfinished work was included in the plan, the response was, “We have a deadline of August 17th, so we need to push as much as possible.”
Clearly, this is not an outcome-driven approach. It’s a task-driven approach where success is measured by completion rather than value delivered.
Why Traditional Planning Methods Fail
For years, companies relied on multi-year planning, assuming they could predict customer needs far in advance. However, this approach consistently leads to failure, with projects running over budget and under-delivering.
SMART goals provided some improvements by introducing specificity and measurability. However, tying them to performance management led to “sandbagging,” where employees focused on easy-to-achieve goals rather than meaningful impact.
Ultimately, traditional methods lack adaptability. The market moves at an unprecedented pace, yet many organizations are still stuck using outdated planning processes that don’t account for rapid change.
The Need for Adaptability
If you operate in a predictable, slow-moving market, traditional methods may still work. But today’s reality is different. We live in a volatile, fast-changing world, and organizations must embrace adaptability.
Take the pandemic as an example. Some companies reacted by cutting jobs and struggling to survive. Others, like Zoom and Netflix, thrived because they were prepared to adapt.
As Forrester Research put it: “Successful businesses will focus less on predicting consumer needs and more on adapting to them.” Organizations that fail to listen to their customers and adjust accordingly will struggle.
Moving to an Outcome-Based Strategy
To thrive in a rapidly evolving market, companies need a strategy that is:
- Focused on outcomes rather than tasks.
- Aligned with business priorities.
- Adaptable to changing conditions.
- Transparent from top to bottom.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) provide a structured way to achieve this. OKRs extend SMART goals by adding measurable outcomes, transparency, and alignment.
How OKRs Work
OKRs were first introduced by Andy Grove at Intel in 1968 but gained widespread adoption thanks to John Doerr, who implemented them at Google.
Key principles of OKRs:
- Objectives define what we need to achieve.
- Key Results measure progress toward the objective.
- They must be specific, time-bound, and aligned across the organization.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make is tying OKRs to compensation. This turns them into performance management tools rather than strategic alignment tools. OKRs should inspire teams to focus on meaningful outcomes, not just checking boxes.
Eric’s Case Study
Eric will now share his journey implementing OKRs in a real-world setting. He will walk through how his organization transitioned from traditional planning to an outcome-driven approach and the lessons learned along the way.
Eric: Thank you, and let’s dive in...
(Case study content follows)
Nishant: Thank you so much for spending your valuable time with us today. We truly appreciate it. We hope this session was insightful, and we’re happy to answer any follow-up questions. See you at the upcoming conference!