Core and Explore OKRs

OKRs are a goal-setting tool. They help organisations, teams and individuals to focus on the things that really matter.
OKRs are often described as a road map: they help us decide where we want to go – our most important goals – and they give us directions for how to get there.
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But many startups find it difficult to know what OKRs they should be setting or exactly what initiatives they can undertake to achieve them. The founders have a clear vision of ‘the big picture’ – of the new company’s purpose and mission – but exactly how to achieve those will inevitably be unclear.
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A startup is always disruptive to a lesser or greater extent, setting out intentionally to do things in a new and different way. It is hard to know what intermediate OKRs to set in order to make progress towards achieving the grand vision, or what activities will produce key results that will definitely achieve those intermediate objectives.The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and opinion leader Steve Blank suggests the following as a definition of a startup: a temporary organisation designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
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Blank’s point is that a startup is not an established business. A startup is ‘temporary’ because it will evolve into a proper ‘business’ only when it has established a number of key processes that can deliver the key results that will deliver the organisation’s overarching objectives. There is a lot of learning to be done.One way to help startups ‘search for a repeatable and scalable business model’ in the early days is to use two different types of OKR: Core and Explore.
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Every business that gets off the ground in any meaningful way is doing something right. It has a core idea that is working, at least to some extent. And, for good reasons, most businesses focus all their time and energy on doing that core thing right, and on doing as much of it as they can in their search for growth.

This approach carries two major risks:
- There may be a far more effective, more disruptive way of achieving the same result
- There may be something else the organisation could be doing that would achieve the overarching objective but has far more dramatic potential for growth.

Working with two types of OKR – Core and Explore – allows startups to focus on both core activities at the same time.

Knowns and unknowns

Core OKRs

focus on the goals of the current ‘business’ – the thing that seems to be working – and aim to grow that business as far and as fast as possible.

For Core OKRs, many things are ‘known’. We know the objectives we need to achieve, what we can measure to tell us that we are on track to achieve them, and the initiatives that will deliver those key results.

Explore OKRs

are about learning, not ‘business.’  Explore OKRs are a series of ‘what if’s?’ Many things are effectively unknown.

For our Explore OKRs we know what we would like to achieve, but we don’t know if it is possible. It’s not about setting a ‘stretch’ objective; the objective may simply not be possible to achieve.

We may think we have a set of key results that will achieve the objective, but we can’t be certain.

And, finally, the initiatives that would deliver those key results are at this stage unknown – nobody knows which initiatives will work and which will not.
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Where Core OKRs are about ‘do’, Explore OKRs are about ‘learn.’
Because all startups need to learn as quickly as possible, Explore OKRs need to have a very rapid cadence: possibly weekly.

Explore OKRs also need to be prioritised ruthlessly: the team must use its experience and expertise to focus on the best and brightest ideas and to test them rigorously (and ideally inexpensively).

Different mindsets

The mindsets needed for Core and Explore teams are very different.
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It is very hard to do blue sky thinking when we are immersed in handling our core business. And the skills that are needed to critique and question and probe in order to explore are not the same as the skills needed to deliver our core business.
Some of the people in your team probably have that probing, questioning, thinking-outside-the-box kind of mentality, but they are too busy taking care of core business to apply those skills. The solution is to pull some of them out of Core and task them with Explore.

There is a natural tendency to see OKRs as a way of getting focus, alignment and incremental energy behind a ‘known’ goal – something that we understand well enough to be confident that certain activities will deliver the key results that will ensure we achieve our objective.
But it is also possible to use OKRs to explore the unknown and to deliver against learning objectives by using both Core and Explore OKRs.