
Are you imagining "What can be, unburdened by what has been"? Or are the margins “Too Big to Rig.”
Whichever side of the fence you are on, the winner of today’s election will be the team that has best aligned their activities with their strategic goals.
In 2012 for Obama’s re-election campaign, his team used a data-driven approach to set clear objectives and measures to track progress against them. Increasing younger voter turnout was one such objective, and the measures included registering a specific number of new voters on college campuses, and achieving an increase in social media engagement.
Biden’s campaign in 2020 set objectives around voter outreach and engagement in key swing states and tracked new voter numbers and the number of virtual townhalls and community events within those states.
High performing organisations use this type of approach as well.
They set objectives to be achieved within a certain timebox (outcomes), and they track specific metrics that allows them to assess their progress towards those goals, readjusting accordingly.
This approach is commonly referred to as OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and there are some compelling statistics on how using OKRs leads to greater organisational performance:
Organisations that effectively use OKRs achieve between 2.5-4x greater growth than those that do not. Couple this with the fact that companies using OKRs see a 10-15% improvement in employee engagement and you can see why an outcome focussed culture is vital.
At Agilicist, we’ve built our name on helping organisations perform better by laying the foundations of systemic change using a combination of OKRs and lean and agile methodologies.
You can read my thoughts on how organisational leaders should approach an OKR implementation and what to look out for on our blog: