I've been sharing OKRs with the organizations from all walks, both for-profit and non-profit for years. Now, let me tell you, I've got the speech down part, I've got my slide deck, and I can anticipate almost all the questions that we asked. One thing that never fails is that when I'm done, an enthusiastic person will come up to me and say, "Great presentation, Ryan. OKRs are so exciting, I can't wait for everyone else to start using them." I have to admit that's the one that leaves me speechless for a second. So I don't want to make it through this whole course without addressing one of the most common things I hear. OKRs are for other departments, not mine. These are typically the departments and individuals that don't see the point of OKRs for themselves. Maybe it's because there are a lot of things outside of their control like, client's not meeting deadlines, or contracts always changing, or a non-profit trying to get a policy passed. Maybe they deliver an internal service and they think their main function is just to keep the trains running like HR or a legal team. Maybe they're a sales team and they think that quotas should be the extent of their goals. Or maybe they're a software development team and feel like they already have a system thanks to Agile project management. What's my answer to all these folks? Of course, your team can use OKRs. There are a couple of questions that I asked to break down that gut reaction that I find helps people discover their own OKR light bulb moment. First, what do you want to change or get better at? Is there something, even one thing that your team or department could do better, or optimize, or overhaul? A department you'd like to interact better with. If you can't think of one thing to change, ask another department you interact with, I'm sure they have some suggestions. I'll keep saying it, OKRs are for enacting change. The team is able to look at where they are today and articulate where they want to be a quarter from now, a year from now, while they're already on their way to crafting some OKRs. Say I ask these questions to a legal team at a software company and their answer is, well, we're trying to work on reducing the time that contracts spend in the redlining phase. Great. Maybe you could adopt the objective, streamline our contract negotiations. Start thinking about how to do that and what successful streamlining means. Soon enough, you'll have key results. Sometimes I'll ask this to a sales team and their responses, "Well, we're all over here trying to meet our quota." Trust me, as someone in venture capital, I totally understand that. But hitting quotas is a business as usual activity. The question is, what are we trying to change about how you operate and contribute to growing and sustaining the organization? Maybe there's room to improve on how you interface with the product team or process improvements to be made that can help you qualify more leads. These are all seeds for OKRs. The second question I ask is, what are you collectively working toward? Can you frame that as an objective? Say a call center is wondering if they should be using OKRs because nothing was directly cascaded to them. They still have the goal and the desire to answer all of their customers questions correctly and that feeling is a start of an OKR to me. We can ladder the objective. All of our customers hang-up satisfied. They can start asking themselves, how would we make that happen? That begins the discussion on OKRs. Finally, if a department is still iffy on whether or not they need OKRs, I asked them to consider the North star of the organization. What do they have to contribute to that? Can they make it come true any faster? This brings us back to vertical alignment and laddering. With laddering, any team can look at the priorities of an organization, and write OKRs that are in line with them. Think about a nationwide restaurant chain that has a North star objective to serve the best families down meals people can get outside of their homes. Meanwhile, at the corporate office, HR is thinking they can live without OKRs. They've got plenty to do to manage and higher their large distributed workforce. Well, can they serve those functions while also contributing to the North star? Of course they can. They realize that that big workforce they manage is on the front lines of giving customers that family style feeling. They create an objective to assemble the friendliest front of house staff and dining, and the key results about hiring standards and training programs, they tumble forward from there. The bottom line is that OKRs and the best way to be a player in the things that matter most to an organization. No matter what service you deliver, or how you play into the overall mission, OKRs are the best way to contribute to the top priorities. All departments have a stake in making the mission a reality.