Busy isn’t an outcome. Neither is shipping.
Introducing OKRs inside Canada’s public broadcaster wasn’t about a management acronym. It was about forcing every goal to answer one uncomfortable question. What would have to measurably change for us to say this worked? Most goals couldn’t answer it.
8
Rewrites of one quarter’s goals in two weeks
2×
Where the final targets landed, vs. the comfortable ones
0
Goals allowed without a baseline and a number
Large organizations rarely suffer from a shortage of things to do. The harder problem is knowing whether all that activity is producing the outcomes that matter.
CBC Digital was the digital arm of Canada’s public broadcaster. Product, engineering, design, and content, at national scale, with more initiatives underway than anyone could hold in their head at once. In 2017, in a technology leadership role there, Matt helped introduce Objectives and Key Results, OKRs, as a way of changing how goals, priorities, and measurement worked.
The important change wasn’t adopting a new management acronym. It was forcing every goal to answer a much harder question: what would have to measurably change for us to say this work actually succeeded?
- Organization
- CBC Digital, Canada’s public broadcaster
- Year
- 2017
- Role
- Technology leadership
- The work
- Introducing Objectives & Key Results · outcomes, not activity
“Busy teams plus a delivered plan equals progress. Measure the work (shipped, launched, completed) and the outcomes will follow.”
“Activity isn’t an outcome. Shipping isn’t an outcome. Nothing counts until you can say what would have to measurably change, and most goals, written honestly, couldn’t say.”
The first discovery was how easy it is to mistake activity for results. The goals on the wall sounded reasonable, and none of them could tell you whether anything had been accomplished:
- “Improve morale.” Improve it from what, to what, by when?
- “Encourage more training.” Encouragement isn’t a result. A measured increase in participation is.
- “Grow the product.” How many additional users, over what period?
- “Make the experience better.” Better than what baseline, by how much?
Every one of them let a team work hard for a quarter and declare success without anything measurably changing. That sounds obvious once it’s written down. In practice, fixing it changes a lot, starting with how uncomfortable the honest version of a goal feels.
- 01
Make every goal falsifiable
Each objective had to name its baseline, its target, and its date. Not “encourage training” but a measured rise in participation. Not “growth” but a number of users by a quarter’s end. A goal that can’t fail isn’t a goal. It’s a slogan.
- 02
Push targets past the comfortable
People naturally commit to what they know they can deliver, which makes project plans comfortable and growth targets meaningless. In one planning cycle Matt rewrote his own OKRs roughly eight times in two weeks, doubling some targets in the final iterations. Not to manufacture impossible expectations. To find the boundary between predictable execution and genuine ambition. If you already know exactly how you’ll hit a target, it isn’t forcing anyone to think differently.
- 03
Define the outcome first, then chase the dependencies
At CBC’s scale, meaningful outcomes rarely belonged to one team. A goal might depend on product, engineering, design, and content all changing something. The discipline was to not negotiate the ambition away early: define the outcome that matters, identify what it depends on, then socialize it with the teams involved and work out where their objectives intersect. That turned OKRs into something more useful than a scorecard. They became a way of exposing where organizational dependencies would quietly prevent an important outcome from ever happening.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| A goal looked like | “Make the experience better” | A baseline, a target, and a date |
| Targets were set by | What teams knew they could deliver | Rewritten until they demanded new thinking |
| Cross-team dependencies | Discovered at delivery time | Exposed at planning time |
What measurably changed at CBC was the goals themselves: what a goal was allowed to look like, how far it was pushed, and when its dependencies surfaced. The candid part: the downstream organizational outcomes from that shift weren’t tracked in a way this page could honestly cite, so it doesn’t cite them.
What the work proved is the discipline, and it has run through every engagement since. Being busy isn’t an outcome. Shipping isn’t necessarily an outcome. Even completing the plan isn’t necessarily an outcome. What matters is whether something important changed.
CBC Digital and the role are Matt’s own history. The numbers on this page are about how goals got set. The downstream organizational outcomes weren’t tracked to this page’s standard, and this case study doesn’t invent them.
Looking at a business today, the number of initiatives underway is far less interesting than four simpler questions. What are you trying to change? How will you know if it changed? What’s preventing it from changing? And is the work consuming your team’s time actually connected to that result? Sometimes the fastest way to unlock growth isn’t adding another initiative. It’s getting brutally clear about which outcomes actually matter, and stopping work that doesn’t move them.
What are the things consuming your team’s time actually changing?
An X-Ray finds where the money is actually stuck (starting with whether your numbers are even real) and names each move, what it’s worth, and who runs it. You keep the map either way.