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DISCIPLINE – ai purpose is better than ai roadmaps

• System of Discplined Agility Inc. • Season 1 • Episode 4

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What if the secret to successful digital transformation isn't experimenting harder but working with discipline? Our fourth episode tackles this powerful concept head-on, diving deep into the three crucial levels where discipline transforms organizations.

We begin by exploring how leadership discipline transcends titles and hierarchies—it's about people at any level insisting on good decision-making and aligning everyone toward shared purposes. The Leadership Diamond, an approach used by industry titans, examines how balancing vision, ethics, realism, and courage creates the foundation for sustained transformation.

The conversation shifts to operational discipline, where we unpack how OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) create clarity around outcomes while permitting flexibility in execution. This methodology, credited with Google's  extraordinary success, helps teams navigate the tension between rigidity and chaos in digital transformations.

We also explore discipline at a personal level, after all – digital transformation is about people, so it comes down to you, me, and all of us.

Most powerfully, we demonstrate discipline in real-time through a live OKR exercise. Listen as our team proposes objectives for the podcast, evaluates them through the diamond lens, and navigates the sometimes uncomfortable but necessary conversations about alignment and capacity. This raw demonstration reveals why discipline isn't about perfection but about honesty, intentionality, and continuous practice.

You'll leave this episode understanding why Andy Grove's observation that "there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little" perfectly describes failed transformations—and how discipline provides the remedy.

Whether you're leading a transformation effort or contributing from any position, these principles will help you direct energy where it truly matters.

Have you experienced the power of disciplined approaches in your organization? Do you have a story that could help others? We'd love to hear your insights, get in touch!


Credit where credit is due: mentions in this episode of New School IT (in order of appearance): 

Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting. Working Paper No. 09-083. By Lisa D. Ordóñez, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Adam D. Galinsky, and Max H. Bazerman. Boston: Harvard Business School, 2009. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/09-083.pdf

Leadership: The Inner Side of Greatness, A Philosophy for Leaders. New and revised, updated, subsequent edition. By Peter Koestenbaum. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.

fassforward

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. By John Doerr. New York: Portfolio, 2018.

stackoverflow 

  • https://stackoverflow.co/
Speaker 2:

Hello, this is New School IT. How can I help you?

Speaker 3:

Hi everyone, Welcome to Episode 4 of New School IT Discipline. I'm Roland, your host and creator of SOTA, the System of Disciplined Agility. I am passionate about actual digital transformations.

Speaker 4:

Hi, I'm John. I am passionate about actual digital transformations.

Speaker 3:

Hi, I'm John, my co-host. John is a tech executive and startup founder who brings real-life insights and hard questions to make transformation real.

Speaker 5:

Hi, I'm Nasheen.

Speaker 3:

My co-host, nasheen, is a data strategist and founder with a passion for developing transformational data and AI tools.

Speaker 3:

Hi I am Ryan, my co-host. Ryan is a systems sales executive who bridges tech, business and people and was a guiding light in complex situations. New School IT serves as a forum to openly discuss the challenges of transformation and to help leaders think of digital as an operational capability that has to be nurtured through practice. In the first two episodes, we explained why going digital is essential to survive and how developing your own software is the key to using data, building AI and creating great digital experiences. In our last episode, we introduced SOTA, our meta framework for making transformation real, and its three pillars systems thinking, discipline and operational agility. Today we're deep diving into discipline and we are doing that in two parts. In the first 10 minutes, we describe the principles for leadership, operations and people. It'll help you enjoy the second part, where we demonstrate discipline in a real-life exercise, using our own podcast as a case study. This happens in real time without any prep. Let's get started. Please hold.

Speaker 3:

I am going to take a few minutes to get through the ideas that explain discipline as we think about it for Soda. Andy Grove, one of the most famous tech CEOs, said there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. To me this feels like the perfect description of today's digital transformation Busyness without results. The way to fix that is with discipline. Discipline can direct that entire energy into a successful digital transformation and we cultivate it at three levels. It starts with leadership and then flows through operations, and both are built on people. Sota emphasizes disciplined leadership because leaders set the course by defining goals, and taking a disciplined approach in goal setting avoids crash and burn scenarios.

Speaker 3:

The Harvard Business School paper Goals Gone Wild emphasizes the danger of lacking discipline in this area. Here's the quote word for word Goals may cause systematic problems due to narrow focus, unethical behavior, decreased cooperation and decreased motivation. We sum that up in our mantra don't follow a plan or process to failure. What you do matters more than how you do it If driving towards the goal leads to a crash change course. Leadership discipline is less about managers in an org chart or titles or corporate authority those are important, but it's really more about people at any level, insisting on good decision-making and figuring out the right thing to do.

Speaker 4:

Roland, if people are looking for examples of where discipline counts, one place to look is at situations where functional objectives get prioritized ahead of corporate objectives. So someone will say in the marketing department, we're achieving everything we need to achieve. Sales has a problem and leaves it at that, and in a disciplined approach you need to unpeel that back a bit and find out what could marketing be doing more of to support sales while protecting their own objectives.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I love that, which in a way gets us to the next part of this, which is operational discipline. So, as a company, we have a certain goal. If marketing is pursuing its own goal and sales is pursuing its own goal, then that lacks the discipline of connecting everybody's objectives to the same purpose. For a bit of personal context, still about leadership discipline, about 12 years ago I got what I call life-changing leadership coaching from Rose Fass and Gavin McMahon's team while I was at Verizon. Their company, fast Forward, is still doing this and has served leaders for many famous companies Estee Lauder and others. At the time, they were coaching all of the top executives at Verizon, including then-CEO Lowell McAdam, who, before he retired, was an acknowledged titan of industry.

Speaker 3:

I share this to show that even the most powerful leaders have used the approach we use in SOTA to grow. It's rooted in the leadership diamond, a way of thinking that was developed by Dr Peter Kostenbaum, a Stanford and Harvard trained PhD. The diamond is a core part of SOTA and gives leaders a way to recognize the vision and gives leaders a way to recognize the vision, the realism, ethics and courage to and I'm going to emphasize this keep guiding ongoing digital transformation as the world keeps changing and evolving. Think of it as leading evolution, which obviously never ends. Our diamond approach requires effort and discipline in the beginning, but after practicing it long enough, it makes great digital leadership a habit To emphasize the difference between manager and leader. I like leading and I've done some of my best work in that area as a contractor that had no legitimate authority, and whether I lead or I support can change a few times in a single conversation. So if you're not comfortable being the first to dance a theme in our podcasts, support the person who is. That too is providing leadership in the sense that you are supporting the cause. The second to dance breaks the dam To what you were saying earlier, john.

Speaker 3:

After that comes operational discipline. Once a good goal is clearly defined, discipline work means focusing on what really matters. Track results, not just tasks, and get to the goals faster by training hard, not by cutting corners or cheating. That's discipline. Okrs make this real, aligning objectives at every level, from management to the front lines. Okrs make this real, aligning objectives at every level, from management to the front lines. This approach was created by Andy Grove and evangelized by famous venture capitalist John Derr, google's co-founder. One of his investments. Larry Page credits OKRs with Google's entire success and for me personally, I remember the first time I used OKRs.

Speaker 3:

What a change In digital transformations. Teams often adopt agile frameworks without understanding what should stay flexible and what must stay firm. Okrs, running alongside those frameworks, holds firm on outcomes and allows flexibility and execution. So in a way, okrs help with the realization that the key to successful outcomes isn't a prescribed process. It's the people on the teams, knowing when to yield and when to resist to achieve the greatest outcome. Building anything digital requires deep collaboration across teams.

Speaker 3:

So discipline again also comes down to people, which brings us to the third level. It's the foundation personal discipline yours, your team's and mine. There's no right or wrong person, but there are traits that are a better fit for a digitally transformed company and they can be developed through good coaching and positive feedback In practice. I've used the self-assessment survey to achieve that and to build awareness in people and teams around four key themes of individual discipline. I'll formulate them as questions.

Speaker 3:

Do you take responsibility for your actions, especially when things go wrong and even when no one's looking? Discipline in this area leads to learning new skills. Do you push yourself and stay motivated? Do you stay focused on what matters, even when things feel uncertain and confusing. Discipline here leads to achievement. Is your thinking clear and are you not afraid to put in the effort? Here, discipline leads to quality. And then the fourth question is do you know how to pace yourself to cross the finish line as a winner, but avoid burnout? Do you adjust your speed for a sprint or a marathon? Discipline here leads to stability. To make Soda work with any existing framework, we suggest that you think of these as concepts that can adapt to your specific needs. For example, ethics might simply mean fairness in your company, and if OKRs feel too loose, focus on the purpose behind them, not just the process.

Speaker 4:

Just thinking about leadership and personal discipline, I will first of all put my hand up. This is something I've had to work very hard on myself. One area, for example, just for people to help sort of focus in on, is building a culture where people feel that misturns, mistakes, finding better ways of doing things is going to be welcomed and well-received rather than blamed and punished, and to do that you have to be readable. As a leader, you will have to be able to depend on how you're going to react to difficult situations, and the way you do that is by telling people beforehand exactly how you'll react rewarding people as they were making mistakes because they're finding out new things, celebrating learning and then, when things get tough, living up to what you've said well said, well said.

Speaker 3:

To me. That also sparks a thought about trust. People have to trust that the leader is not going to do bad things when mistakes happen, and that trust also extends to your teammates. I was tempted to introduce the concept of trust as part of this discipline conversation, but but to me, I feel that it's another topic that would fit well into our agility episode. Without trust, these honest things that need to happen for discipline to occur can't happen either. But it affects agility even more than discipline. You could be very, very disciplined without trust, but you can't have that agility without trust.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I totally agree with you and I think I'm glad that we're going to be talking about trust. Being able to trust the leaders in the business as someone who's trying to drive really hard against a tough assignment is really, really important. I'm glad to be talking about that.

Speaker 3:

Okay, this covers the ideas, so let's switch gears and get into our exercise. Please hold.

Speaker 3:

Let's start the exercise with sharing our purpose with our listeners again. New School IT challenges leaders to rethink digital as an ongoing system of disciplined agility. The purpose statement is kept as short as possible so it's easy to remember and it's meant to be timeless. So this will be true today and it will be true six months from now or a year from now. The exercise that we're about to start is, if that's our purpose, what would be an objective and some key results to support that purpose that John has, that Nasheed has and that Ryan has. And then together we are going to evaluate each one from the perspective of the diamond. So there's going to be four questions, essentially, that we want to answer for each one of the OKRs. One does it put us forward with ambition and clarity of direction? That's the vision bid. Does it provide the best scenario for everyone who's involved? That's the ethics bid or the fairness bid. Is it grounded in our current stage of maturity?

Speaker 3:

We're a new podcast. We haven't been doing this for years. What is possible today is different than what is possible in a year or in two. That's the reality of the situation. And is it a decisive move? Is it bold and courageous? John, do you want to get us going?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, happy to. So I've adopted this from a point of view of a CEO perspective. So one thing we need to do as part of our endeavor here is enhance knowledge sharing and collaboration, and as we work against that, there are a number of areas where I think that we should have OKRs in. So, first of all, launching an online platform for sharing case studies, best practice and delivering to our audience tools they can use, and get that in place by quarter three. The second area would be to really test ourselves and really build value by facilitating at least 10 collaborative projects between community members to solve for real-world challenges. So really being grounded in making things happen of very high value. And then, thirdly, publish quarterly thought leadership pieces that really look at digital transformation trends and the best practices emerging there. I would offer this up as an OKR against our purpose.

Speaker 3:

Okay, I love the conversational style, which, to me, already shows this is conversation. If we were to write this down, john, would this be and I'm going to try to do this slowly because obviously we're audio and I'm personally a visual learner, so if this was on a whiteboard, I would write enhanced knowledge sharing and collaboration. Yes, okay, so that's the objective. Three key results you said launch an online platform to share case studies and best practices Exactly.

Speaker 4:

And the third element was actual tools that people could use and do that by Q3.

Speaker 3:

Okay. Facilitate collaborative projects within the community to solve real-world challenges yes, and publish thought leadership articles.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, but for me there's also something about quality in here, and I think, as an enterprise, we should practice what we preach, and one of those things would be to listen very, very carefully to our audience and our members that these things are really high quality and delivering real value. Something like a 90% satisfaction score from each of these elements.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, okay, we, the team, have feelings about this and let's calibrate the response to this. There's four questions we're going to go through. Can one of you maybe share your reaction to whether this OKR pulls us forward with ambition and clarity of direction? Is it clear and is it ambitious in terms of ambition?

Speaker 5:

I think it's definitely ambitious in terms of clarity. I think it goes beyond the initial idea for the podcast because it now requires us as a team to find ways to lean in and engage more actively with the audience. So I think it's ambitious in that nature, but in terms of clarity of purpose, I think it's starting to extend beyond what we set out to do.

Speaker 3:

I think this is really really great feedback, john. Maybe Nasheed has a point that this would go beyond starting a conversation among digital leaders. It's starting to go into knowledge sharing and providing additional tools and a number of other things that help the digital transformation for the company, but might not necessarily be what we want to do as podcasters necessarily be what we want to do as podcasters.

Speaker 5:

One thing I had down as a possible key result would be to have inbound leads who are requesting that type of guidance which could extend to what Soda is already developing as an entity.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we have a different initiative, a different undertaking that has a separate purpose, and part of the reason why we separated soda, the company from the podcast is so that we could keep the podcast clearly aligned with its purpose to be conversational, but not necessarily drive digital transformations in a specific company, which is what soda would be doing I think that this is a great example of discipline in discussion.

Speaker 4:

We have an idea on the table which really needs to be hammered home in terms of the implications for the business of adopting that idea and encouraging the debate. That says no, this is going further than we possibly could do or want to do at this stage is absolutely right. We don't need to resolve it right now. I mean, there's a lot to talk about in that exactly. But I absolutely think these are the sort of discussions you want to be having getting challenged, having to pause, having maybe to rethink and recalibrate, sort of you know exactly how far we're going to go. That I really welcome that feedback from the sheet. It's really helpful and it does demonstrate discipline.

Speaker 3:

Awesome, great. The other thing that it demonstrates is how the diamond facilitates that discipline. But, looking at the different angles, this would have been an example of how we started a very healthy debate and, ultimately, alignment around the vision of the objective. Brian, do you have an opinion about whether the objective and the key results think of it as something that we all have agreed to, whatever the final version of that is? We think this is great, we're all going behind it, we're rallying. Does it provide the best scenario for everyone who's involved?

Speaker 6:

I was thinking about that and it's not the best for everyone involved, but it supplies as a springboard for everyone. We all agree we all have different specialties and if it does fall into your specialty then it can, because the whole thing for the podcast is really to ignite discussion and be thought-provoking and inspiration. And then when you get into Soda and someone says, hey, can this company help me? There's a big division there with the podcast and Soda.

Speaker 3:

Okay, so you reiterated that the objective as stated gets us outside of what the podcast was supposed to do. But if knowledge sharing is part of our podcast purpose, is that an objective that serves all four of us, in your opinion?

Speaker 6:

Thanks for repeating the purpose again. I was thinking something else. So saying that then? Yes, absolutely it does. You know, it affects all of us equally.

Speaker 3:

I would say it's a good objective in the sense that it serves everybody on the company. One of the things that might be useful to highlight here is that the CEO's objective could then be cascaded or translated to other people's objectives also that support that. So it starts with a purpose. That's the highest order of this. But then different parts of the organization have different perspectives on work, and for the CEO I'm looking at the entire company. For an engineer it might be. This is what this means for me in the next release.

Speaker 4:

I think we should be entirely comfortable in this sort of discussion. If someone was to say and it could be a person or a function, could say that that seems like a thing that the company might want to do, but I can't help, this is not something I could contribute to. That's a high integrity contribution, rather than sort of invent, make work exercises and pretend to be helping. Now the danger is, if almost everybody's saying that, then you've clearly got the wrong objective there. Yeah, but the individuals or groups of people pulling away from it is absolutely fine, and as long as they do it up front, with real integrity, yeah that transparency, I think, is extremely important, Both the discipline to say no and then being transparent about it.

Speaker 3:

The companies that have had the best success with OKRs will tell you that OKRs are published. John Durr's got this story about how he worked at Intel when he was first learning about this, and Andy Grove insisted that everybody has their OKRs pinned to their cubicle wall so as you were walking through the company you could read what somebody was working on, and he's got examples of saying no to people who would say this is the stuff I'm focused on right now this objective and these three results, and this is what I'm working on for the next few weeks. You're just going to distract me. Sorry, I can't help you.

Speaker 6:

That reminds me of this one leader. He always used the term fall on your sword. At first I was like, who is this Jacko? I was just offended by it, but like I kind of didn't understand what he meant. And then, going backwards, after a quarter or two under his leadership, I got it. But but I like what you said, roland. It's like if you, if you said, hey, I'm going to do this, and you didn't do it, you know. Or like John said, or you can't do it, fall on your sword, just be like you know what. I tried, I screwed up, I don't know how to do this, I don't know how to fix this, and I'm doing this publicly in this company because I need help. And then when you create that kind of culture, other people will step in and help out. You know it comes from like that individual discipline to like the operation discipline. You know those two start linking together.

Speaker 4:

It depends what sort of leader says it. I've known a few leaders where the response to that would you go first 100%.

Speaker 3:

That's great, john, okay so two more questions for John's great John, okay. So two more questions for John's objective, and then we'll move on to the next one. The other two questions are is it grounded in our current stage of maturity and is it a decisive move? Is it grounded in our current stage of maturity? Improved knowledge sharing, nasheed, what do you think? I say no, okay, okay, please explain.

Speaker 5:

Because the reality is we're all busy with the things that are our time and producing the podcast in and of itself is a task to add additional responsibilities to start developing materials that we share out, because it begins to feel like a burden based on the way we're currently staffed. Begins to feel like a burden based on the way we're currently staffed. So if I put on my data hat and I'm sitting in the CDO seat, I'm thinking about who are the resources, who are going to actually operationalize these key results, and we don't have the resources outside of individuals here to do those things at the moment. So that's why I say that to do those things at the moment. So that's why I say that.

Speaker 3:

I love the response. Is this an adequate goal or an adequate objective for our current state of maturity, for our current skill set, is a really important question that drives discipline.

Speaker 4:

And what it maybe provokes is, given our current state with the four of us, if we're going to create content beyond that, maybe we need the community to be so engaged that the community creates the content. Exactly. There you go, yeah, and that might be the way to approach this and solve for it. And again, you get to that by having this type of conversation.

Speaker 3:

Love it. Exactly Now we're being innovative and creative as a way to work around limitations that we have, because we're real about what we can and can't do. Today, ryan, the last one of these four questions and this goes to courage and boldness and action, like doing things that are first to dance. Again, I'm using the same cliche that we've been using for the last few episodes here. Does this objective and its key results feel like a decisive move? Improve knowledge sharing in the community?

Speaker 6:

It's very bold, but what if the community doesn't respond? Well, let me give it like a real life example. Like what is that? That company Stack Overflow. They put it out there and they really leaned on their community to build what they're actually building, which was beautiful, I would say yes, but it really depends on how we guide the community to respond.

Speaker 3:

It's a good response in a conversation about discipline and great leadership. One of the reasons why the diamond has a component to it called courage is to drive bold action and actually lead. Part of the psychology of that which the book talks about and experts like the company I mentioned earlier, fast forward that gave me all that coaching. If you're perfectly comfortable with your plan of action, if there's no concern whatsoever, if there's not a little bit of anxiousness or anxiety or doubt that it might be risky or that you might fail at it, then maybe it's not leading the first out there, even when you're comfortable, because you've been doing it for a while with leadership itself. In a specific situation, you're going to send some sort of a danger or risk and you just articulate it what if our community doesn't respond? Well, Okay? So yeah, I agree. If that's the first thing that you feel when you hear that, then I would agree that it's bold.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, no, and I really liked that. You said that because you're right, because it's leading to where you want to get to, and then still continue guiding them as a leader. Yeah please hold.

Speaker 3:

Okay, nasheed, do you have an OKR?

Speaker 5:

Yeah, I do, let's do it. So my objective, not my objective. I believe a worthwhile objective would be to establish New School IT as a go-to podcast for C-suite data executives seeking modern, practical insights.

Speaker 3:

Nice.

Speaker 5:

So key result number one would be to publish six podcasts and have within those podcasts featured three C-suite leaders who would join the podcast and share their insights, challenges, opportunities, et cetera. Who would join the podcast and share their insights, challenges, opportunities, etc. The second would be to reach 1,000 total downloads. Number three would be secure three inbound leads, someone reaching out mentioning the podcast by name and asking for an opportunity to have a conversation around how to implement what we've talked about. And then, finally, I think we would want to measure how we're being reviewed have a minimum of 4.8 when it comes to stars across all of the platforms.

Speaker 3:

I love that OKR. That's good stuff, Nasheed. So same thing, though. Let's go through the exercise. John, do you want to start with what you think about in terms of ambition and clarity?

Speaker 4:

I want to ask Nasheita a question of clarification. He very particularly picked the C-suite as the target for this OKR, but for me, one of the things that we've talked about a lot is trying to be relevant to anybody who's engaged in trying to do digital transformation at any level. Do you think that it's compatible with that sort of direction we've been trying to set, or could be made compatible?

Speaker 5:

We could make it compatible. I think that's a great call out. I know we talked about in earlier episodes whether or not we want to start with a top down or bottom up approach, and if the C-suite is the right level for the conversation, I think we could broaden it because I think the conversation can happen at either level. There can be a lower level who carries it up the chain, or vice versa can come down. So I think that's a great call out.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, if I can bounce off of that for the objective, we might consider revising it to something like rather than C-suite, like I don't know if the right words are claimed or known or famous or infamous or acknowledged leader, regardless of what level of the organization they're at. In some company, it might be the CEO. In some other company it might be the director of something. In another company it might be the manager. In another company it might be a developer that everybody respects tremendously in the entire company. So, regardless of what your title is in the company, if you're a digital leader in your organization, we want you on our podcast.

Speaker 5:

I like that. Yeah, it's nice, I like it a lot.

Speaker 3:

Sure, all right, ryan, is it?

Speaker 6:

the best scenario for everyone involved 100%. I love all the OKRs for this. It's the best for everyone and not only that, everyone can actually contribute to push for those numbers, so absolutely.

Speaker 3:

Spot on. It's almost like Nasheed has done this before.

Speaker 4:

I'm thinking of hiring Nasheed for something.

Speaker 5:

That's one of three, right, it could be Okay.

Speaker 3:

John? Is it grounded in our current stage of maturity?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, the thing that really resonated with him in the sheets. Ok, I suppose exactly that. I think it's something we could achieve, we could take pride in achieving, and it would also move on what we're doing. So, yeah, absolutely, I'm 100% behind the sheet on that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I want to ask the last question because it's a disciplined thing to do, but I know that we're all going to agree that it's a decisive move.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, maybe you know it'd be great to hear from the folks who have listened in on this If they themselves feel they could participate in a podcast, or if they themselves feel they could participate in a podcast, or if they know someone who could and be really helpful, then to give us a reference to that person. It'd be great to see what comes back from the community on that.

Speaker 3:

Call to action for our listeners. John just said it better than I would, so if you know anybody or if you're interested, send us a note. Please hold. Brian, your objective.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. So the objective is to take the leads from the podcast to bring it to a CRM, you know, operationalize it and from there figure out a go-to market plan. That would be my objective, and what I would love to see from that would be conversion rate. Of course, I would say conversion rate of 25%, so one of four actually like hiring Soda From there. I would want to study what our sales cycle is and then try to reduce it by 25%. Everything moves a lot faster.

Speaker 3:

Could I reground you on the purpose? Yes, what you just said I think is a great objective for a salesperson.

Speaker 6:

Oh, okay, Maybe I misunderstood the no no, it's all right.

Speaker 3:

If the purpose of the podcast and your help and support of the podcast is to drive a conversation among digital leaders that soda is the way to think about digital, then there's no sale and that was very clearly part of our purpose for the podcast. We're not selling anything, yeah, yeah. So I don't have any other objectives around the podcast from a sales guy's perspective. But I wonder to the conversation we were having earlier. Sometimes the right answer is I can't help with that. That said, as a co-host for the podcast, the same as a conversion event in sales could be to acquire more listeners. Got it? Might there be an objective where now we're brainstorming. You have hundreds or thousands of people that you know because of your job. Maybe, as the sales guy on the podcast, an objective for you would be to reach the people who know you best, to try to get them to listen to the podcast.

Speaker 5:

right, so that conversion would be listeners or or people who open the email exactly or click on the link exactly yeah, start generating demand for the podcast.

Speaker 3:

And the conversion would be they downloaded an episode which then supports the sheets goal of a thousand downloads.

Speaker 5:

Yeah.

Speaker 6:

I like that A hundred percent.

Speaker 3:

Okay, if we define your objective as that and it's symbiotic with what Masheed was saying, and we have two OKRs that are now living side by side, driving towards the same purpose, which is perfect, what would be some key results that you would think the key results that would be ambitious and clear reflects a decisive move. What would be the how would you measure in key results that you would think the key results that would be ambitious and clear reflects a decisive move? How would you measure in key results that you have achieved the objective of converting as many people out of your database to listeners for musical IT?

Speaker 6:

Let me marinate on this one. So I see what Masheed and John did now, but I think I misunderstood the exercise.

Speaker 3:

Good, and we have that covered. Also Good stuff. Please hold. Imagine, in 20 or 30 minutes, with a little bit of discipline, the kind of conversation that can happen. And now you implement Soda, where it's a part of a systemic approach. You go to meetings knowing that this is the conversation you're going to be having about important decisions, whether that's your purpose, whether it's your objectives, and that happens once a quarter or once a week, depending on what it is that you're working on. Wow, right.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, that's phenomenal. Yeah, and I wasn't sure. To be honest, I wasn't sure how the live exercise would go.

Speaker 3:

It's a little risky, right, it's a bold move.

Speaker 5:

It is a bold move and I like the comment you made about leadership. If you don't feel a little bit of angst, you know a little bit of uncertainty, then you're not leading. I thought that was a powerful statement.

Speaker 3:

I appreciate that. I got coaching years ago and I changed my life.

Speaker 6:

And real life. You know, like, what happens when you fall on your sword, Like I said, you know what I misunderstood. What happens when I say I just openly admit it, you guys come in and say, no, what about this Exactly?

Speaker 3:

And then here comes everybody rallying down. That's exactly it.

Speaker 6:

I love it.

Speaker 5:

Yeah.

Speaker 6:

I don't have anything else to add. That's a great way to wrap it up, actually.

Speaker 5:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

All right. Bye everyone. That's a wrap for this episode of New School IT. We felt courageous today, practicing what we preach with our live OKR exercise. Discipline isn't about being perfect. It's about being honest, intentional and continuously practicing. Thanks for joining us in that spirit. See you again as we dive into the next element of Soda in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep leading, keep learning, stay digital.

People on this episode

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Roland Hoffmann

Host
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John Maltman

Co-host
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Nasheed Sabree

Co-host
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Ryan De Mesa

Co-host