A studio runs on projects. Every week is shaped by a submission date, a client review or a site visit, and good people are good because they respond to that pressure. The trouble is that the goals a principal cares about at practice level, such as winning better briefs, reducing unbilled hours, building a specialism or raising the quality of design review, never come with a deadline. They are agreed at the partners’ meeting, then the next competition entry arrives and they wait another year.
Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, give those practice-level goals a rhythm of their own. The method came out of Intel under Andy Grove. An Objective is a short statement of what the studio wants to be true by the end of a quarter, and the Key Results are two to four numbers that would prove it. Most published OKR examples drawn from other kinds of teams belong to sales or software groups, so it is worth translating the idea into studio terms.
A quarterly layer above the project plan
OKRs do not replace the project programme. They sit above it, at practice level, and are reviewed weekly rather than at the end of a job. A studio sets one or two Objectives per quarter, agrees the Key Results with the people who will do the work, and spends twenty minutes each week asking what moved and what is in the way. That check-in is where the value is; the goals are just a way of making the conversation specific.
Research supports keeping the targets demanding. The goal-setting theory developed by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham over several decades found that specific and difficult goals produce better performance than vague or easy ones, provided people are committed to them and receive feedback along the way. The check-in is the feedback; agreeing the numbers with the team is the commitment.
Three worked examples from studio life
Consider business development first. The Objective might be: “We are shortlisted for the work we actually want.” The practice counts the last twelve months and finds it was shortlisted on 20 % of submitted bids. The Key Results for the quarter could then be: raise the shortlist rate from 20 % to 35 %; reduce speculative bids from eight a quarter to four; and hold a structured go/no-go review for every opportunity above a fee threshold, up from none. The second and third results are what make the first plausible.
Delivery is the second example, and here the Objective concerns profitability: “Projects finish close to the fee we agreed.” The studio looks at its last six completed jobs and finds an average of 120 hours of rework per project and a fee overrun averaging 18 %. The Key Results become: cut rework hours per project from 120 to 60, and bring fee overrun from 18 % to 8 %. None of this tells a project architect how to run their job; it tells the practice what it wants to change about how jobs run.
The third example concerns people and craft. The Objective: “Design quality is a shared discipline, not a partner’s afterthought.” Key Results: every live project receives two peer design critiques per quarter, up from less than one; each junior member of staff leads one review during the quarter, up from zero; and the share of reviews with written notes circulated within two days rises from roughly 30 % to 80 %. The figures are illustrative, but they turn an aspiration into something a studio can check on a Tuesday afternoon.
What to watch for
Goals of this kind have side effects when pushed too hard. Goodhart’s law applies: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure, and people start managing the number rather than the work behind it. A shortlist-rate target chased too hard pushes a practice towards safe bids; a rework target can discourage the iteration good design depends on. Keep the Key Results few, keep them in the open, and never attach them to pay.
Where OKRs do not fit
OKRs are not a tool for delivering an individual project. A building has a programme, a Gantt chart and contractual milestones, and those instruments suit the job far better than a quarterly goal. A planning submission written as a Key Result is just a second place to record the same date.
They are also unnecessary for a very small practice. A studio of two or three people already knows what it is trying to change and discusses it over lunch. OKRs start to earn their keep at around eight to ten people, when the principals can no longer see every job and the practice-level goals begin to drift. At that point, one Objective, a handful of honest numbers and a short weekly conversation are usually enough to give the practice a rhythm of its own, alongside the project deadlines rather than in competition with them.
