Let's keep working on improving our OKRs. First, the best Key Results work as leading indicators. They give us early warning signs of how our efforts are adding up. Like how home sales and jobless claims are leading indicators of the economy, I tried to have leading indicators as Key Results as often as possible. Many teams are tempted to use revenue as a Key Result, and of course the amount of money coming in is important, but the trade-off of using revenue as a Key Result is that it's a lagging indicator. Revenue comes in after a bunch of other work has been done. You can't tell if you're on track or not until it's often too late to adjust. What can help is turning a lagging indicator into a leading one. Let's look at sales and revenue again. Closing a sale is usually the end result. You know you've succeeded once you made the sale, but in almost every process there are leading indicators that can predict whether or not a sale is going to be successful. Most teams know what they are, but not all teams track them. Maybe you're able to predict a sale, whether or not a rep is able to get a meeting with a potential client's leadership team. If that's the case, you could structure Key Result around how many leader-level meetings the sales team is able to get in a cycle. Less of those meetings could give you an indication that sales are about to lag, or vice versa. A second piece of advice, pair quantity goals with quality goals. With Key Results, most teams solely focused on quantity, describing how much something needs to be done and, yes, Andy Grove did say every Key Result has to be measurable, but he also stressed that when we're pushing for quantity, we have to safeguard quality. There are plenty of organizations who've chased quantity by sacrificing quality, and ultimately failed. In Measure What Matters, John brings up the example of Wells Fargo, who suffered that incredibly damaging scandal when they began to focus on just one-dimensional sales targets. The result was that the branch managers felt all this pressure, and opened up millions of fraudulent accounts just to meet those demands. Balancing quantity with quality can be expressed as a measurable goal. And here's a quick example: Say that a sales team has a Key Result, of making 10 sales calls a week. That increases the volume, but it's not necessarily going to end up in more sales if the quality of those leads is low. If we take that Key Result and pair it with one to land two new orders a week, we're now covering quantity and quality. The team making the calls will be motivated to improve the quality of the calls they make in order to land those deals. A question we often get is, "How should I set targets for my Key Results?" Calling an OKR committed, aspirational, or learning is how we are defining the finish line. For a committed OKR, there's really no room for falling short. For an aspirational one, stretching is achieving. And for a learning OKR, we're in the mode of exploration. Now the specific targets you set are going to shape how your team executes on those OKRs. Some targets are going to be incremental, they're going to push your team to improve on the things that are working today, or you may set a target that's a leap, and when that happens, your team is often going to try new things to take that big step forward. But then there may be the case when you're going to ask your team to hold -- and pick a target that's just more of the same, and when you do that, it's likely because the progress it took to make it to where we are today was really hard, and we need to prove to ourselves that we can hold it and continue it. Let's think about holds, increments, and leaps in the context of a team with the Objective to improve the efficiency of a car, and this car currently runs at 30 miles per gallon. The team may want to hold a 30 miles per gallon if there's other priorities, like they're adjusting the weight of the car, new materials. In that case, maintaining 30 miles per gallon is an achievement in and of itself. Maybe the team is able to combine several improvements and getting the 35 miles per gallon is the right Key Result. This would qualify as an increment going from 30 to 35. But let's say the team sets the target a bit further out, like 50 miles per gallon. It's going to force the team to rethink how they can take their existing vehicle, which is performing a 30 miles per gallon, and almost doubling that performance. They're going to have to consider new approaches, like, maybe, a hybrid engine. To push this example even farther. Let's say the team sets a goal of reaching a 100 miles or more per gallon. That leap completely changes the approach to what needs to be done. They're just going to have to be innovative, out-of-the-box thinking to make that Key Result a reality. Classifying your measurements as a hold, increment, or leap is another tool that will allow you to be intentional about how you're directing the efforts and tactics of a team. As you look at how the Key Results are developing, ask yourself how the measurements you're including are inspiring the people who are using these goals to shape their work each day.