Epic Outcomes | Coaching & Consulting

I’ve continued to experiment with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as a tool to help teams focus and deliver awesome results. One thing I’ve discovered is the power of the “confidence check.” Inspired by Christina Wodkte and the idea of teams assigning confidence levels to OKRs, I gave confidence check meetings a try for the first time awhile ago, and it’s become one of my favorite tools.

Confidence checks are opportunities for safe conversations about how confident a team is in their ability to deliver a OKR, or OKRs — and, if confidence is low, to brainstorm actions. This keeps the team grounded in top priorities, and thinking proactively about how to deliver those high-value results. Speaking of top priorities: it’s also a good time to check in on whether the OKRs are still legit. (I part ways with Wodtke here; I feel like modifications are OK. I don’t think of OKRs as contracts; I think of them as tools to help us focus, and de-risk value delivery. Priorities change all the time, and we want to make sure our OKRs keep up.)

For me, confidence checks are one hour meetings of people who are working to deliver an OKR (or 2, or 3 — you definitely can’t cover more than 3 in an hour, and… wait, why do you have more than 3, anyway? 🙂 In a quarterly cycle, I’ve found it’s best to run confidence checks every 2–3 weeks — every week is too frequent, and every four weeks isn’t frequent enough.

My current team’s confidence checks look like this:

• Everyone does a silent read of the OKRs.
• Facilitator prompts: “Are these still top priorities?” This could be a short head nod, or a longer conversation that could take over the meeting. With my current team, we tend to want to fiddle more with key results than objectives, and we get right into scoring.
• Ready for scoring! First, everyone does a silent read of the first objective, and the first key result.
• When everyone appears ready to score, the facilitator counts to 3 and, on 3, each person shows their score using their fingers. We use a scale of 1–5, 1 being “hardly any confidence” and 5 means “we’re super confident we’ll crush this.”
• People then take turns talking about why they gave their scores. The facilitator takes loads of notes. At this point, we may also talk a bit about the key result itself; have we come across a better indicator of our delivering this objective? And at some point, typically fairly early in the conversation, we start talking about…
• Actions! This is the fun part. The facilitator might prompt, “What could we do today to boost our confidence?” Facilitator takes lots of notes. (These are likely stories for our backlog.)

That’s it. In one hour, we re-center ourselves in what matters most, and brainstorm ideas for to-dos we believe will help us deliver crazy value.

If you’re inspired by this and want to give it a try — and you have time within your OKR cycle to take some of the actions you’ll come up with in the meeting — do it! And let me know how it goes? I’d love to learn about your own experience with confidence checks, and with OKRs in general.