Eliminating Bad Execution: Making Strategy Work with Daniel Mälsjö

Welcome to Strategy Candy, the podcast that's about doing better work with great strategy, setting and achieving audacious goals, using OKRs and building products that people love. I'm your host, Tim Newbold. I'm really pumped about today's episode. We're going to have an incredible conversation with Daniel about what are those key ingredients of good strategy and how do you execute them well with okr. We're also covering a bunch of learnings around how do you embed OKR the right way and what are some of the common mistakes to teams make? So this is going to be very powerful. If you're already using okrs and you're trying to make them closer to your strategy and actually make a meaningful impact, or if you're just about to get started and want to get some tips on the way to do it, let's get straight into it. Daniel, I am so pumped to have this conversation today. It's really fantastically fantastic to finally talk to you. So we've had so many chats online. I think we've been commenting on each other's content, but yeah, we get to speak to each other. Not quite in the flesh, but at least in real time. That's very cool. Likewise. It seems like, yeah, we said earlier that we got know each other over the last year and a half but never actually talked. I'm glad to be here. We have. That's it. I think we've worked out. We've. We're both pretty keen to get out into nature a little bit. I'm not quite yachting like I've seen you doing. That's a bit next level. But getting. Getting out into the country is always. I thought that everyone in Australia was yachting, but no, that's not the case. It's a. It's definitely a thing here. I live on the bay and a lot of people went into it. It's pretty incredible. Daniel, I'm sure I know you very well, but a lot of the audience might not have heard of the work that you do. I know it's very much focused over in Sweden. So can you share with us who are you and what are you doing? All right. I run together with a small team, a company called Huge Works. And what we do is that we are trying to eliminate bad execution and we do that in two different ways. One, we have a software for OKR implementation and excellence, and then we also provide training and coaching and challenging management teams, primarily in terms of rolling it out or rebooting, which has been very common the last the last year actually rebooting an existing OKR program. I like it. That's going to be one we have to. Yeah. So we can spread out. There is in Stockholm, we have one guy in southern Sweden, we got one in Norway and we got one in Thailand. So we little bit all over the place. But our prime focus is the Nordics for now and then Norway, Sweden primarily. Yeah, yeah. And then just got an expansion casually into Thailand. It's just people like you have a colleague that's on a boat, right. Sailing around. Yeah, yeah, we got a. We got a guy in Thailand. Yeah, that's cool. I tell. So this is the other thing that I've learned in life. If you can work with companies and people that operate in the destinations you want to go to, they're by far the best. Exactly. I think having a team member in Thailand that's a really good approach. So I'm curious, tell me a little bit more about the customers that you typically work with. Obviously yeah, you got that great coverage through Sweden and a little bit Thailand. What's. What's the typical customer that you're working? I would say that we are focus size wise is primarily companies from say 200 people upwards towards a thousand. That's our prime target group. But in terms of businesses we are very much spread out. So I work with everything from SaaS companies to I work with Sweden's biggest funeral home agency to some of these old Swedish industrial companies. So it's in terms of businesses and I do a lot of work with hotels. One of the largest organization in the Nordics called Strawberry, I love that name by the way. And it's very spread out in terms of business. And in Norway not so much in Sweden but in Norway we do a lot of work with public, not public, what do you call that state run municipal and that type governmental owned organizations which is interesting because they have gone out in Norway with a decree to all these. That OKR should be the preferred method of gold staring. So the interest. Yeah, really that's. Yeah, the interest has been enormous because they do what they're being told. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. And then if you want to, if you want to make it happen the right way and not waste a lot of time and not make it a hard process. Better off talking to someone who knows what they're talking about. Exactly. And but if you boil it down to if usually when people ask me so who do you work with? I usually don't refer to the businesses or the type of companies but rather the type of individuals, because we always start working with the management team. And that requires brave people, basically, brave CEO, a brave management team that are willing to do things differently moving forward. And I think that's because the whole setup, the way you work is the culture shift is usually a bigger thing than the actual structure that they apply with okrs. So this is where we're getting to an interesting insight right from the get go. And I'd love to pull on this thread a little bit more because I think I talk to a lot of people and if I'm honest, this comes from a lot of HR teams. I get this sort of inquiry where it is. We've just got this. We just want to put the system in, just tell us the cadence. We're going to put it on people's performance plans. Like we just want to have the thing in. What's the bare minimum we need to do that. And then it's actually this is a bit more about strategy and execution. So when you talk to COOs, chief of staff, CEOs, often the conversation starting from the right perspective, it's that, okay, how do we make strategy happen? What's that? What are those sort of conversations that you're having? Are you getting that same sort of audience coming in, wanting to be able to more effectively execute strategy? What does that look like at the moment especially I said that the last month or the last year or so, I've helped a lot of organizations to reboot their existing. And usually the reason why I've helped them with that is because they have done it the way you said from the beginning. They had drawn it up and said everyone should work with this. And then they find out a year later that it doesn't work. It doesn't give them the outcome they're looking for. So I'm very, especially in the initial phase, I'm really eager to find out why they want to do this, what's the purpose, what is it that you want, what's going to be different tomorrow than today? Because just implement the structure is not going to give you much. And it's fascinating because I meet a lot of companies and CEOs that say that we already work with OKR. I have one big case right now. They said we've been doing this for five years. I went in and talked to a bunch of teams, a bunch of managers. No, they don't. They may call it that, but they don't because it's more about establishing habit, mindset, culture shift, rather than the structure itself. Yeah, it's really fascinating. Right. What's often talked about and what's referred to as OKRs. And it's like a tick box activity. Yeah. The teams are doing it. That's great. But when you actually get into the practice of, okay, are they picking up a problem to solve? Are they measuring the impact that they're making? Are they tracking that as they go through a quarter generally and these sort of situations, the answer, that's what you want to do. Right. That's what I love the most, to dive into that management team and. And be there in the meeting with them and challenging them and twisting and turning and make them see that shift. And that requires brave people to let someone from the outside come in and actually coach them live basically in front of their peers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's interesting. That take from a. I guess I'm curious to come back to the why behind this. Why did a lot of them start on this journey to begin with? But just a quick comment on the style of leaders that we work with. You find those two sort of modes, like as a. It's like the old statement, there's always two types of people. It's obviously much more complex than that. But in terms of. I often see these two modes where they're either bringing you in to really, they've got that courage to go, okay, I actually really want to get this right and I'm willing to be challenged. You can challenge my team, we can challenge everything that we're doing. Let's really shake things up. Or it's, I just want you to give me that list. And I don't want you to shake things too up too much. And I don't want to change things too much. Which therein lies the problem. Right. If you want to get better at execution and delivering on your strategy, you really do need to rethink about how you approach things. And it often goes well beyond. I don't know if you've hit this problem as well, but well beyond okrs. A lot of people go, it's just going to sit in this quarterly cadence. But no, it often shifts down to your day to day. How do you work? How do you deliver value as a team, right down to the micro detail. And that's why I find it is so important that they don't just apply a structure, but they apply a way of working. And you can call it whatever you want, actually, if you're going to be honest. But once they get into the cadence, and I'm not talking about the quarterly cadence, but the Weekly cadence frequently. Then you won't be able to tell in the beginning what other things do we need to deal with. But over time that will appear itself, that will show itself in terms of what's working, what's not working. But many times people are so busy with day to day and day to day job gets in the way of the transformation or the strategy implementation or whatever they choose to call it. Yeah, it's interesting because the sort of line of helping organizations embed okrs, you're leading with a solution rather than a problem to solve. Most organizations, most consultancies, training organizations, it's we've got this problem, how do we solve it? And I think with OKR it often is such a well defined problem. But I'm curious from your perspective, why, why do people come to you looking for support? What are they telling you that they want help with? What are they trying to achieve? And then is that the same as what they really need help with? Good question. I think that people come to me because they have an idea of what they want to accomplish. But often I feel as they want someone to drive that much faster, they know that they might be able to fix it, they might be able to do that transformation, but by bringing in outside help or bringing in me, they do that half the time because it provides someone that holds them responsible for, for what it actually is that they want to accomplish. And it's usually the things that need changing regardless if that they want a faster growth or they want to another type of transformation in terms of digitalization or whatever it is that they want to make a significant shift within. That's what they usually are looking for. Yes. So there's some sort of burning problem for them that they want to solve. And it is that sort of might be growth, it might be around that sort of cohesion alignment. Is there anything you think that sits under. No, I was just thinking because one thing that I've noticed, if they have a really acute problem, people have a tendency to get much more motivated with the feel of failure rather than the hope of success. So if they really had a problem that needs to, they don't need me, they don't need okr, they solve it. All Right. The problem is that often what they the transformation is about a better future in two years time, three years time, five years time. Right. And that's the hope of success. And apparently it's harder, it's a harder sell internally, the hope of success rather than the fear of failure. Because if they say if we don't Solve this. We have to lay off people. Then you get start things start happening. But often the transformation they want to do is a brighter future. And that's sometimes hard to get people to prioritize because when I look at the managers and teams that I work with, they can show up for work every day and they don't have to plan a thing. Things will just come to them. Keeping busy is the least of their problem. So to carve out that extra time every day, every week to, to push the needle, that's what makes it very difficult. And I realize with the teams and the managers that I work with, yeah, you're right, it's very tricky. And certainly setting, choosing really impactful goals, whether it's via OKR or any other means, it's really hard, like to really do it well, right? Like really get under the covers of what you're working on, why you're working on, why your team is there ultimately, what is the purpose of your team? That's really hard stuff. And then actually going, okay, when we're doing our stuff, how do we know we're being successful? These are tough questions to ask. And when you go from a state of here's the thing, just go do it. To have to ask these quite really deep questions, people do find it very hard. And so there's that almost a natural friction that can come up where unless there is some sort of crisis, it can be quite. It does. You don't have that same level of motivation. You do get those inspired individuals, I call them missionaries, that are there to really. They want to see things done better, they want to see the organization transform in a certain way. But it's quite hard. But yeah, getting that initial, I think in many cases these, these champions that you have internally, if, I mean they need energy, they need, you need to fuel them one way or the other. Right. And they can push and they can drive things. But if, especially in larger organization, if they don't get everyone behind it, or even worse, they don't have management support, they are either going to just going to crumble up and go back to their corner and keep doing what they've always been doing or they're going to leave. And usually the latter, they leave, which is a shame. So that's, that's a challenge for a lot of people. That's it. And that's where like thinking about some local companies for you, Spotify organizations like that, that they're trying to drive change and be impactful, they'll soak up that talent. They've got plenty of places to go. It's. It's that sort of thing where it's like you've got to be fighting for the best talents and create an environment where they feel inspired. You do? Yeah. Love it. I'm curious. We talked a little bit about the why here and I want to rewind the conversation a little bit about what got you started with okrs and why. You're very passionate about it. You talk about it a lot. Why are you so into it? I. I came across a version of this back in 2010. Right. Previous to that, I've been doing leadership training, sales training, internally for a big media house here in Nordics. And I got fed up with the fact that people showed up for my trainings, especially managers, and then I knew that by the time they got to the airport, they probably forgotten half of what I said. And by the time they went back to the office, they implemented 5%. All right. So I wanted to make a shift. And then in terms of all right, if it doesn't create value, them coming to me, I'll go to them. And that's why I got into working with goal, the whole area of goal setting and strategy execution and OKRs. And I did that for several years. And I saw the impact because I saw that when you challenge people and you challenge people over time, you gradually push people outside their comfort zone and that's where the magic happens. Right. And that's where people actually want to be. But we are as individuals, often quite. If we're going to be frank, sometimes we're lazy. We take the easy route. And for a lot of organizations, they dare to perform a task and they have a job to do and they get paid for that job. But when you get that excitement about something in a team, you can create enormous difference in results. That's where my passion actually grew. And then I left being the consultant for a few years because I thought, all right, now I've been the consultant, now I have to actually try it for myself. So I worked as a sales director and the CEO within media for several years and then. But I also. Always in the back of my head, I just love doing this and work with so different, many different industries. I went back to being the coach about. Yeah. Four years ago or something. Yeah. It's interesting. It's that draw of wanting to be in the game, then also knowing that you can help and support a wider group. It's something that I battled with, I think. I love how you've got your own product. That's something that I come from a product and tech background. Right. This is why we often talk about OKRs, but also we know that particularly for businesses, so software businesses. Right. So we work with like you a lot, a wide variety of different organizations. A lot of them do have a foundation in tech and so we often talk about the product operating model. How do you better solve customer problems, how do you better build products? How do you find better ways of build, of prioritizing the right things to build? And OKR is a cornerstone of that. So these things go really nicely together. But yes, definitely getting back into the product world is something that is a draw for me. But then when you know that this work that you're doing and it's going well and you're having these great sort of conversations and working with so many incredible people, it's very hard. Yeah, it is. And I don't know if you primarily work with product companies, but I, I, I work with product SaaS companies as well. But also a lot of other companies. Take their hospitality business for example, which is quite fascinating and they are an excellent example of how many other industries work in terms of are you winning now or are you going to win later? And because they are so extremely operational. Right. Their customers are in the building 247 and there is nothing hospitality people love more than anything than a crisis. They elevate a caught fire or you have a guest that XYZ and whatnot and they love it. They get all excited and they're extremely sufficient in sorting things out and being effective and so forth. But their challenge, like other companies, is to, all right, we're all going to be different six months from now or a year from now or two years from now because you get caught up in, in, in operations. In their case, it becomes so apparent the customer is right in front of you. So obviously who can say that's not more important than anything else? Right, yeah. So I have to make those difficult decisions along the way as well. Yeah, I find it like, I think it's really interesting that you work with these sort of organizations in the hospitality space and in the hotel space. So we like, we work with flooring businesses and all sorts of stuff as well. So I do come from that tech background. You pick up, do pick up some strange ones. But yeah, I love the hotel side of things. That must be a whole different line. But definitely you see these different sort of modes of working in Terms of the SaaS and product businesses actually get strategy for the most part pretty good. There's always A probably always competitive. Better, I'd say overall, they get it really well. Then you get these sort of other industries where they come from pretty simple beginnings, where it's a pretty simple process for their growth. It really. It's like sales and marketing, you manufacturing something or you're delivering a service and then that turns into profit. And it's always been a pretty linear process for them. But when they realize, hang on, what could be possible? What could be. What could we reimagine in our customer experience? How could we redo our customer journey? That what could we be as an organization, particularly in an industry, be one of the leaders in that industry? What would it take? And that's where you do see that really fundamental shift. Yeah. And often, especially if you work with manufacturing companies, which I do as well, it's their concept of what is the product. And they come from an engineering background. And so the product is the product. But today the product is not the product. It. The product is much more than that. It's how you find the product and customer service and aftermarket. And it's a whole, you know, the whole. Yeah. Full experience. Right. People are buying experience. And obviously, when one company that I work with is. It's global, it's huge. And they are being challenged by smaller competitors in other parts of the world. And obviously they're smaller, more agile. They don't have the legacy that can be really quick in anything that is, you know, before and after the core product, which is. Could possibly gain momentum. That goes for us as well. Obviously. Our challenge with this every day, since we're ourself building a product with a small team, with three developers, a thousand different requests from different clients, and it's not easy. It's not easy. And it's not that you set a way of doing it and then you're done. You need to work on this every single week. And if you stop working on it, you can decrease in skill. It's like training. Yeah, it's like. Exactly. It's like a slow death, isn't it? It's fascinating, I think, how many organizations underappreciate the importance of their customer journey. We. I've actually, I. He's. I mentioned to you earlier, I did a podcast episode and my mic glitched out, and so I've got to do a bit of a audio record on it. Be funny if people listen to this and then jump back to that one and see what it is. That conversation with Juan, I think we touched a little bit on the podcast, but he had an interesting experience. He bought a Porsche and he took it to a track day. This is over in the States, and the gearbox blew in it, right. On a track day. And you think most car companies will be like, oh, look, maybe they'll send out a tow truck, but you probably got to get it to the local dealer and then they'll deal with it then. His experience was he called up the company, of course, he called them up and explained the situation that happened. They said, look, no worries, open up the app. We've got your address, we've got your location, where you are now. Someone's going to come out. He's getting notifications at each step. It's been assigned to this driver on their way. This driver's taking it here. It's now gone to the shop and here's a car to pick you up and take you home. But he said what would have been a horrendous situation, right, A day ruined. He's been gearing up for his first track day to go in and show off his new car and race with some friends. He's got this great opportunity and on that day, the thing dies. You can imagine how bad that would be for a customer. But the way they handled it was just such a great, seamless experience. He was like, this is amazing. Everyone should get a pullback. I've never heard someone say, yeah, a car breakdown is a reason why you should buy a car, but it's no, they just handled it so seamlessly. So that customer experience is what counts. And, yeah, it doesn't matter what you're selling. The price, product is the experience. I love that. And like, the example shows how we deal with problems, kind of defines who we are. It's. It shows you the culture. Yeah. And also, and I used to say that when we are facing challenges with teams, for example, it's not just because you write set okrs, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to hit them, you're going to run into bumps around the road. But the way that we, as a team or as a management group deal with that defines who we are, what happens in the room. And it's fascinating in terms of the dynamics, to quote a famous actor, Russell Crowe, we get a better chance of survival if we stick together. Right. In the epic movie, and that's not always the case. And people walk in and they're going to talk about their OKRs. For example, in the management team, and someone is telling a story and the others are looking in their computer or writing notes or doing apparently mentally being somewhere else. And you need to call that out because it's not a structure, it's a culture thing. Yeah, I think I like what you said there. For me there's this interesting interplay. I'm curious your thoughts on this, on the role of, let's just say leadership. It doesn't need to be CEO or executive. It's really just for any team. The role of leadership versus the team members, how are they best to support. Support better ways of work and we can keep it focused around. Okay, but what's their role? And as a team member, do you just accept the situation that you're in? If let's say we're doing okay and it's not working well, my manager's not on board with it. Do we just roll with it or do we start to challenge those things? I'm curious, like what do you see as the role of both that sort of leadership level, but also the team level. I believe that in order to make it work, in order for people to have a fruitful engagement, there need to be trust or psychological safety or call it whatever you want within the team. If you have that, obviously it's easy to call it out, but you still. I have some seriously fucked up projects where I've realized a couple of months into the project that there is absolutely no psychological safety within this team. And then it doesn't matter what you implement, call it OKR or whatever, it's not going to happen anyway because people are just looking out for themselves. There is no trust in between. So the role of leadership is to create the. Create the circumstances. No, that's the wrong word. But create the foundation to succeed. And being as we all know, it's all about transparency. And as a leader you need to take the first step in terms of letting the guard down. Show where are me, where do I go wrong? And if the leader doesn't do that, all right, then it's up to the team to do it because they can put. They can create that snowball effect themselves. Even if the manager don't start because I sometimes I'm sitting talk to team members and they complain about the manager. He should do this or she should do this and that. All right? You can never change that person's behavior. You can only affect your own behavior. That's within your circle of influence. So start there and if that doesn't work, well, do it somewhere else. Yeah, that's it. I like what you said, that it's like you can't change other people's behavior, but you can create the, the foundations. But even then I like you said circumstances and you said that's the wrong word. But I feel like it fits here, which is you create an environment for how the team will perform and if you, if your behavior reflects the right sort of values and you're showcasing the psychological safety with the team, then the team will typically follow along with that. It's another thing that we've, we do is that we've got bit of a what we call an OKR capability model. So it just looks, it's not like I'm not a big believer of maturity models and all these sort of things. I don't think the journey is ever that linear. There are certain things where it's like, where are we strong? Where do we have some foundational weaknesses? And one of the first things we, we went from a sort of version one to a version two. It's not never that clean. Right. It's over a number of years. But we just recently did a big upgrade and it's. The underpinning foundation is psychological safety. And as part of when we do an assessment, we look at, okay, where is the team psychological safety? And often leaders, some of them are really good with it. Some go, I don't know why are we asking these questions? It doesn't feel like this relates to okr. But I think the point you made is exactly why we do that assessment and how do you do that? And then do you ask everyone in the team or in the entire organization or there's different modes and it depends on how long the organization's been doing it and whether they're brand new to it. So we have a lightweight version which is we do it ourselves. We get in there and have a bit of a look around. We often do that. Now as a starting point when we first start these conversations, we're not going to send a survey out to where everyone. It's generally you can get a pretty good idea before that. And so we'll capture these insights. If it's like what you call the reboot, we call it the OKR revitalization. So it's funny. Very close name, same intent. Clearly we might do a more detailed questionnaire that we send out as part of that. And yeah, if it's someone that we've been working with, literally we're about to kick one off with a customer tomorrow. That one is a quite a detailed assessment. And what it does is it gives us back a score that we can then assess and work out. Okay, where do we sit on each of these? How we do that? Yeah, but it's good. It's good. You need to get the insights from the team members. That's the key thing. If you just do that exercise, because we've done it in the past where it's just with management. So, yeah, then you got to talk to the team. And it's not exactly. And one thing is asking the question. But I also know that sometimes people answer what they think you expect them to answer. And what I love the most is when you've asked around a little bit. But one thing that I do a lot is that I say, okay, I want to. I just want to be a fly on the wall. I'm going to be an observant. I'm not interacting at all. You have described the way you work today. Let me be part of these meetings. Let me see how people talk to each other, how they respond. Do they coach each other? Do they ask questions? Are they talking? Is it. And that's where I find the good stuff comes out. Because then after a while they actually forget that I'm in the room and then they start acting like they usually do. And the learnings are amazing in terms of behavior. Says a lot areas has luck. Yeah, it really does. It really does. It shines through very brightly. I think that's. That's why I like it. What you're saying earlier about the foundations and the circumstances, that is the role of leaders. I'm curious just to dig into a little bit of the team, like, what's your take for the team members? If I'm part of a team and the organization's committed to driving outcomes and making a better impact than what they do today. But my manager's not quite. Quite on board. What do I do? Do I just pack up and go or. You mean that the company is striving forward, but my manager. My manager's. My manager's not on board. She or he doesn't like it. I. I back to. You cannot change other people. You can only change yourself. What I. What. There are two things. One thing that you shouldn't do and one thing you should do. One thing is don't talk about it. Because people spend so much time talking about what they don't like and what's not working. Act. What can you physically do to have an impact on your manager or on other teams? So they get influenced. I mean, there are still a lot of organizations that are, Even though it's 2025, that are very hierarchical in terms of command and control kind of structure. So if you can't influence your manager, can you influence other managers? But not talking about it because by the end of the day, if this surface, they almost going to choose the manager over you. You need to, you need to act in a way that shows a way forward rather than complaining about it. Unfortunately, a lot of people spend a lot of time with a lot of opinions about others. Yeah, what I like there is you've almost done a bit of a uno reverse on that one. And if you're the manager, you need to be setting the foundations and the circumstances for the team to be successful. But at the same time the team members need to be doing the same thing. So it's their responsibility as well. And if you feel like you're stuck, start living out that behavior that you're hoping the rest of the team follow. And when you get into a discussion, especially if you disagree with someone, I don't know what your experience is, but my experience is that people walk into that with a profound will to, to. To be understood, to get their point across. And I always say, all right, start by trying to understand before you try to be understood. Figure out exactly what is it that makes a people or person act or reason in a certain way. Because there are probably things there that you don't know about. Start with that before you try to be understood. Otherwise as the tenderness would be like this. Yeah, I think that's a really good call out. Yeah, that's like getting down to the why they feeling that way. And then ultimately it's taking that presumption that people, most people don't have ill intent every now and you do again, you do hit a bit of a corporate vampire and they come out, come out of the corners. But generally most people are trying to do the good, the best thing. Yeah, they're out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're trying to do the right thing. And so it's okay. We've got slightly different two interpretations around this. How do we get onto the same page? I love this. Look, I am conscious, I don't want to take too much of your time, but I've got a few questions and I just wanted to hone this out because I think we've talked a lot about the leadership journey and the importance of leaders and executives going through and helping them really make the most out of okrs and how to helping organizations be incredible. I'm wondering what are some of the sort of top mistakes that you see people making with OKR at the moment and what's the latest thinking that you've had or how are you hoping organizations start to do things differently. I'm looking for what are some of the big mistakes that people make but then also what's some new thoughts that you've got around how it can be done better. When it comes to big mistakes, I must say on top of the list is inability following up. We, we set our goals and then we don't talk about them for length of time. It could be different, it could be okay. We don't talk about it for a month or we don't talk about it for a quarter. And obviously this could be different depending which organization you're in and how transactional is and the speed of the organization itself. But the general is we don't talk about it enough often in comparison what we should. And I think that because people makes it too complicated, they have big meetings and they are ill prepared so it becomes a hassle to talk about often. And that's usually objection that I get. We don't have time. You're going to talk about it for 15 minutes a week. You have 15 minutes, trust me. All right? And if you don't have 15, make 15 minutes and I can. So that's number one and just jump in on that. I think that's such A good point. 15 minutes, is this not your most important goal right now? Is this not the most important problem for you to solve? If it's not, then sure, I can imagine you don't have 15 minutes. But if we've all agreed this is the most important thing, bloody hell, I'll have a lot more than 15 minutes. Fifteen minutes should feel like it's exactly. And I think that kind of goes back to the way that things have been implemented and obviously if they sit in corporate at some function and create this is the format, this is the template you're going to fill out. All right, Everyone fill it out. Everyone needs to have X number of okrs. You get what you ask for. If people are not involved and it's not a clear connection to what you the strategy or what you actually want to achieve, it's it's not going to be the most important things. So that's probably the number one. We don't and we know that regardless if we're talking about OKRs or anything else, all the science say the same thing. You know that more often you are confronted with a goal that you said the more likely you are to reach it. Simple, everyone would agree on this. But the difficult thing is not that People don't know that they should. The problem is that they don't do what they know. It's like, it's like going to the gym, you know what you're supposed to do there, but you're slacking basically. And then the second most common thing, and I assume that you may feel the same way, but that is that we're looking at, we're looking at data or outcomes that there's two we, there's nothing we can do about it. Meaning that we are tracking lagging measures rather than leading measures. So by the time we look at it, every time we look at it and follow up on it, we look in the rear view mirror and we have a discussion about what went wrong, what did we do, what could we have done rather than looking forward in terms of what can we do moving forward. So those are probably the most. And then there are a bunch of other stuff as well. But, and if I were to ask a third one then. And add a third one. Yeah, hey, before you jump into the third one, I just want to jump on that because I think it's so true because we so often hit this, oh, we don't have leading indicators or it's too hard to pull out or we don't have that type of business. I have two defense customers right now. Defense, we're talking like for a lot of the bottom line numbers, we won this, we won this deal and for some of them it's like a hundred million dollar deal. We only won this $100 million deal. And I'm like cool, like when was the work that happened for that? And it's oh yeah, that was years ago, right, maybe 10 years ago. But they can find leading indicators. Like having worked with them, they've gotten down to some bleeding edge leading indicators. And a lot of these companies have quarterly okrs where they were having to see the impact straight away. And it's like if a defense company can do it, I don't care who you are, like you're fine, you can do it. Maybe if it's like some ultra long term we're trying to like anti gravity machine business, we're coming with an anti gravity machine. I don't know, maybe that one could be a bit, but it doesn't matter for everyone else like you can find, you can always find leading indicators. And I also work with fast growing company within the defense industry. But I'll give you an even worse example. I, I, this is a couple of years ago, but I work with nuclear plants. All right. Yeah, one of the big nuclear plants in Sweden. And they developed the plant continuously. All right. So the engineers were building stuff that were supposed to go into the plant in eight years time and be completed. They worked with 14 year projects. And we got it down to, okay, so what's the most important thing this quarter? How do we measure progress? Because if you start. And the general idea when we walked in was that every engineer he was or she was working on their little part and they said, it's 14 years. What does it matter if I slip a week or two? If everyone does that, we're going to have a problem. It's not going to be 14 years, it's going to be 18 years, which was actually the case back then. It's also important to say that. And the objection is that it's difficult to identify these leading indicators. That's why you need to train it. Right. That's why you need to. You set in, you learn. This worked, this didn't work. We set it again. And then continuously in, in five, six quarters, you become pretty good at it. Yeah. And that's so good. I cut you off on a third. Yeah. And the third is that you. Which has been the case with a couple of my clients, unfortunately, is that they set it, they roll it out. Everyone is excited, but the excitement ebbs out. How do you call it? It diminishes in the top layer. So they stop talking about it even though the rest of the organization is still working on it. And they get good effect, but not nearly as much as they could have because top management have moved on to something else. Exactly. So I say you get 1% of the value from individual OKRs, you get about 69% of the value from team OKRs, and then there's about a 30% value from the executive team. So like I, and I've had the same situation. I've also come into businesses where basically the whole business works with it, but the executive in land is doing something else. And. But when you see that momentum lost at the executive level and you see the buy in the teams, it's like you're still getting a huge amount of value. But it is, it's really taken away that last little bit because teams are actually pretty good when it comes to choosing the right things to solve and working on the right areas. They're pretty good at that. But when you don't have the whole business working in that one cohesive way, it really does diminish. Yeah. And you lose on one key area and that is alignment. Because the Alignment needs to start at the top because it has a ripple effect throughout the entire organization. So that's primarily. You can get a lot of effect out in the teams, but you lack the alignment from the top out. Yeah, it's amazing. All right. I know I've already gone over time with you, but I did have that one last burning question which was what is like something either something that new that you're experimenting with or some more. What's your latest thinking about? Okay, something that you're thinking needs to change a little bit. What's something new that you're playing with at the moment? I'm playing a lot with. How do you challenge team members in coaching each other? That's one thing. So the craft in itself, basically what I do and I try to pull them as far outside their comfort zone as possible. Regardless if this is done digitally or physically, I still probably 80% of everything I do is online. But once in a while with these teams, you go out and you get people together. That's one thing. And also in larger organization experiment. How can you. How do you fit the OKR framework into other governance structure that they have within the organization in terms of. Because there will be other things as well. And they need to be very clear on what are their OKRs and the transformative goals versus their KPIs and their business as usual or perform goals, whatever you want to call them. We work a lot in terms of how do we. How do we drive those to catalog. Both of them are important, but we need to be really focused on the transformation part. Yeah. I love it. I love it. I think there is so much to be said about that. I think again, a lot of our listeners, they're either starting out in their OKR journey themselves or they're trying to learn different ways of doing it. I think something where if they're thinking about how do we get the teams to help collaborate, encourage each other and challenge each other. That to me there's a bit of magic somewhere in that. That's really. Yeah. And I think that that's one. One of the things that we've done with our platform as well, that we put a lot of focus on the meeting module or the execute thing because obviously any OKR system is supposed to be provide transparency, ease alignment, so forth, but it also needs to be able to drive that execution, make sure that you establish those good habits over time so it get embedded in everyone. Yeah, okay. I love it. That's very cool. So on that note, that's a neat little Segue. Let's. Let's land this plane. If people want to find this tool, where do they go? They go to future futureworks.com and then sign up for a free account. And if you're a small team and you want to try it out, no charge up to five people. So just go in and we, we just launched a new version about a year ago so feedback more than welcome. Would love it. We are building this together with all our stakeholders, partners, customers, friends and family. Yeah, very cool. Getting onto it. Love it. Oh definitely. People should check that out. I always like to leave people to have a bit of a think about different books that have inspired you or got you thinking or just a book you're reading right now. Anything that jumps to mind for you in terms of books? It's funny, when I read that question in your email, I realized that I gave a book to my 15 year old son the other day and he started reading it and he goes what the hell is this? And it's an old. It's an oldie. Our iceberg is melting cochlear. Have you read it? Yep. That is a cool book. It's a very cool book. And I thought it's like a fable or story and I figured ah, you can get a hang of it. And I realize it's a frame because of how accurate it is even today, especially with the AI transformation. I was talking to a law firm the other day and they go, they expect like 45, 50% of their work to disappear due to AI. And that goes with a lot of my clients. And yeah, so for a lot of people the iceberg is actually melting and you can hold on for your life or you can start to transform and you probably need to transform way faster than you think or at least you want to be in the top 20% that transform the fastest. And in, in those cases the OKR methodology is a good tool to speed that up. Basically, yeah. Oh, that is so good. I tell you what, you've just hit the AI topic. I wish we could go into that but I know we've already taken up heaps of time so I'm going to call it there. Daniel, it has been amazing talking to you today. I hope you have an amazing rest of your day but thank you so much for your time. This is. Thank you, Tim. There you have it. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I think there was some really great takeaways that Daniel shared there. First, it's all about being a little bit brave and courageous when you're a leader. It's about introducing new habits that get people engaged and helps them understand what they're focusing on and why. This often requires some difficult conversations and having to challenge the way things are done. So as a leader, you need to step up. Number two is follow up is everything. So making sure that you're tracking your goals regularly, but also checking in with your team, seeing how they're doing, making sure they're successful, that's a key stepping stone for teams to be focused on the impact and the outcome they're creating and making sure they're always making progress. And that's key to keeping teams focused on the outcome and being empowered to be successful, making sure they've got everything they need to be successful. That then leads me to my third takeaway, which is culture defines execution. What I mean by that is your culture in your organization around psychological safety, openness, people being willing to challenge things, and that natural curiosity about work is absolutely critical for OKRs to be successful. As always, I've got the show notes and they contain links and references to everything that Daniel talked about, so you can go and check that out. If you want to learn more about product leadership objectives and key results and general getting strategy executed in the right way, then check out OKR quickstart podcast and we've got a bunch of resources there ready for you to go and including a crash course on OKRs. Till next time, keep focused on the impact and I will see you soon. Peace.