Poker in the Pandemic (Part Two)
In the last entry, we looked at how Texas Hold ‘Em players and organizational goal-setters both benefit from a disciplined approach that focuses on what they know and can control, but leaves room for the unknown.
That's not the only way in which OKRs are like Texas Hold ‘Em.
At their foundational level, OKRs are grounded in metric- and data-driven Key Results that we track to determine whether we are on our way to achieving an Objective. It’s all about numbers, outputs and what the best-known OKRs author, John Doerr, memorably terms “measuring what matters.”
Similarly, the foundation of effective Texas Hold ‘Em play is the ability to internalize data and metrics — to look at the developing set of community cards and realistically assess not only the odds that you will make a certain hand (what cards are still waiting to be dealt?) but also the odds that another player is holding cards that will complete a strong hand for them. How you assess those odds should factor into whether you bet or fold your hand.
But in poker and OKRs, numbers aren’t enough.
In recent years, tournament poker has famously been overrun by data-driven math savants — the same “quants” who have had such a huge impact in fields like finance and professional sports. Similarly, OKRs often hold strong appeal for organizational leaders who want to build a numbers- and data-driven business. Many of them dream that OKRs can be a “set it and forget it” solution for organizational execution against goals.
In her book The Biggest Bluff, author, psychologist and tournament poker player Maria Konnikova makes a convincing argument that math skills aren’t enough in poker and that science must combine with art — the ability to read other players and make reasonable guesses about what they’re holding and whether they’re bluffing. That art extends into your own "feel" for how best to play a given hand.
As Konnikova told Stephen Dubner in a recent episode of the Freakonomics podcast, “The quant side is not my strength. I’ve mastered it to the point that I don’t make horrible mistakes of addition and subtraction when I’m calculating pot odds, but that’s about it. I think the way that you become a great player is to figure out what works for you. What (coach and poker champion) Erik (Seidel) taught me is that there’s almost never a right way to do something, a right way to play in a certain situation. There is a right way to think about it.”
My experience with OKRs parallels this. The “science” is in drilling down to Key Results, understanding your organization’s processes and tying them to metric-driven outputs. But that’s not enough. With data alone, OKRs are just another checklist or to-do list.
The OKR “art” is in building on that foundation a set of people-driven Objectives that inspire teamwork, collaboration and alignment across an organization through a sense of shared purpose and accountability.
The art is in the right balance of “business as usual” objectives and team-driven “change” Objectives; in allowing individuals the space to build Key Results and metrics they can truly own; in developing a native OKRs language that organizational leaders can use to find alignment and elite-level execution.
A team truly aligned around its Objectives and committed to working across an organization to achieve them? That’s the ultimate unbeatable hand.
