Achieving goals and everything involved in getting people behind organizational priorities has always fascinated me. I’ve been working in sales and sales management roles for the good part of my career and goal-setting, or rather goal-negotiation, was always an important topic at the start of the year. Then, funnily enough, I had a full year to succeed or to fail. When I founded Objeqts back in 2010, it was my aim to innovate by providing meaningful insights to employees to help them to progress. The relationship between what keeps you busy every day and the value that work delivers, is lacking total transparency for most people. Providing this insight was my main proposition when I started. Today, Objeqts has evolved into a Strategy Execution Consulting boutique with OKR as our methodology of choice.

OKR is an open source framework. People have different opinions and different approaches when it comes to implementing OKRs. When I met Roger and Nick some time ago in Berlin, I was instantly attracted by their approaches; both different but both surprisingly effective. When we shared our knowledge and methodologies we all felt the need to join forces. Not just for ourselves but for the entire community that, just like us, believes OKRs make a real difference in today’s workplace.

It is without doubt that OKR is gaining attention in Europe. We need to thank our colleagues in America for sharing their success stories and best practices, but not every American approach will fit well within our European culture-pot. By sharing best practices closer to home and developing implementation models, which take the differences in culture from the various European countries into account, we want to bring OKR to a next level of European maturity. In the end, any company from the South of Italy to the very North of Finland should be able to benefit from this impactful framework.

Although working on OKRs is always good fun, in my spare time I like to go out on my racing bike to unwind. I also love travelling with my family with whom I just spent 5 amazing weeks crossing through Southern Africa. Even OKRs can’t compete with that experience!

I’ve been working in the fields of performance, operations and leadership for over 15 years in multiple sectors ranging from agile technology businesses up to mature infrastructure and oil & gas. I’ve always believed that it’s only the majority of organisations who know how to execute really well and motivate and sustain great team performance. Much as the traditions of project management were challenged by the advent of Agile, I believed strategy execution could be disrupted in a similar way. I believe OKRs are that disruption and I see businesses and teams who embrace them making quantum leaps in their achievements.

I find myself instinctively wanting to provide leadership when I see there’s a need for clarity and direction. I also believe that I don’t have all the answers either, which is why I’m delighted to be collaborating with Nick and Jan-Paul whom I know I am highly aligned with and will bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to the ecoe for the wider benefit of the growing OKR community.

Drive wider adoption. Looking at uptake, we can see OKRs have moved from “innovator” to “early adopter” so we now need to see them pass the tipping point of 17-18% adoption to become common place. It’s no surprise that the digital sector sees the highest use of OKRs, but I’m starting to see insurance, finance and other “traditional” sectors turn to OKRs to become more agile in the face of the disruption in their sectors.

I have two dogs I’ve had since I rehomed them seven years ago and you will often find the three of us up a mountain in the Lake District. I’m also a qualified rowing coach and enjoy watching (not playing anymore) rugby.

As a Brit, who’s lived in Germany for over 20 years, I work all over Europe together with a tight team of Progress Coaches, who are on a mission to rid the workplace of boredom and depression. By re-engaging everyone with the reason they applied for their job, we help teams to align and get focussed on driving true impact, each and every quarter. Done properly, OKR takes the guesswork out of progress and innovation. That’s why we’ve taken the OKR framework, mixed in some New Work methods and docked on our own Change tools to create Win With OKRTM – our 12 week zero to hero programme aimed at established organisations taking the first leap into OKR.

The original reason Rog, JP and I met was to lay our training cards on the table and openly challenge each other. We expected that sharing and criticising our approaches would help us all to deliver a better OKR experience. It didn’t take long to realise that we are all three right in the middle of the same page and passionate about making a real impact. So we decided to give OKR a place to go in Europe, where we can raise the OKR bar and make sure new practitioners get real quality support.

Riccardo Semmler once said “if you feel the need to give something back, you probably took too much in the first place”. OKR is such a powerful force for good. It’s simple, scalable and adaptable to so many environments. Just like learning to swim or ride a bike, you need a little practice and a helping hand to get started. So I really hope ecoe will help as many people as possible get the right kind “swim” trainer and use OKR to have a massive, positive impact on the World they live in.

Well we also run family OKRs, so I guess it’s hard to find time outside the OKR world, but with a 19 and 16 year old who love skiing, sailing, hiking and partying, we seldom get bored at home.