The Agile Strategies Podcast: Intelligence, Strategy, and OKRs

Joe Ryan is the Executive Director of the Crux Alliance. Crux supports six organizations that focus, respectively, on the six major sources of carbon emissions. Their mission is to impact policy in countries across the planet. Joe wrote a great article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about how robust stakeholder networks accelerate climate progress. We talk about what the qualities of these networks are, and how Crux has a...

Peter Compo has a delightfully provocative perspective on strategy, having worked in that area at Dupont for 25 years. What do we even mean by strategy? For many, it's a stack of vision, values, goals, and big projects. Peter would call that a "strategy framework." And by his definition, many strategy frameworks actually lack.... a strategy. Peter defines strategy as a central rule or policy designed to address tradeoffs and guide ...

In this conversation with OKR pioneer and best-selling author Christina Wodtke, we suspect that OKRs are in fact being overused. It's best to have very few OKRs that focus the whole organization on giant efforts. Instead, what's happening in many cases is that there's a feeling that every function, and sometimes every person, needs OKRs in order to align with strategy and feel like "one of the cool kids." To do that is to miss the ...

In this conversation with Agile industry veteran Evan Campbell, we talk about Strategic Agility, and particularly, the need for resource fluidity. This plays out in any organization's portfolio management process. Evan sees too much emphasis on quantitative models for prioritization of innovative experiments that often deny resources to innovative projects because the risks and benefits are so hard to quantify in adva...

Paul Niven has published six books about Balanced Scorecard, strategy, and OKRs, including the recent OKRs for Dummies. In this episode we talk about how the practice of OKRs is evolving, based on our mutual years of consulting experience working with both Balanced Scorecard and OKRs. OKRs have been enormously popular in recent years, but viewing them as a standalone solution doesn't bring the ...

The view we hold of the future has a direct impact on the plans we make and the action we take in the present, so it's very relevant to strategic planning and goal setting. Frank Spencer is a futurist - but with a perspective that goes far beyond technology, openly questioning the dominant narrative of technological determinism. Frank is the founder of TFSX, offering training, consulting and certification in strategic...

Chuck Whetsell is an old friend and classmate, an accomplished Rolfer, body worker, therapist and meditation teacher. In this episode we take a deep dive into the nature of somatic intelligence. In times of rapid change, cognitive flexibility - our ability to change our mind and see things differently - is absolutely critical. But the mind can't change itself. Chuck's perspective is that we can only get out of our heads by cultivat...

Christian Ulstrup is an MIT graduate and startup founder turned OKR consultant. He has gone further than anyone I know in the field using AI as a productivity tool. He'd be the last person to say that AI can generate strategy, but has found ways to make the process faster and get the best out of the humans. He produces new content on LinkedIn every week with his latest thoughts on how to use the best AI tools for deve...

Giles Crouch is a  Digital Anthropologist and Marketing Consultant who produces provocative (and prolific) content on culture and technology on both Medium and Substack. Giles is a student of how culture absorbs technology, and he predicts that before long, AI will actually become boring. He talks about how earlier technologies like the telephone have gone from being bright shiny objects to just part of the woodwork of our lives. H...