Tim Newbold: Doing Less with More

Management has a long habit of inventing instruments to turn intention into action, and an equally long habit of watching each one harden into paperwork. When it happens, we blame the organisation rather than the instrument. Tim Newbold, founder of OKR Quickstart, has spent the better part of a decade coaching organisations through Objectives and Key Results, and he has watched more of these rollouts succeed and fail than most people will see in a career.His view is that the tool is rarely the problem. What fails is the organisation around it: leaders who use goals to tighten control, teams run so close to capacity that nothing can improve, and a culture in which nobody will put their name to a decision. From his first internship, writing specifications that never became working systems, to the clients he now turns away, Tim explains why busy organisations get less done, why people set low targets on purpose, and why the most useful thing a manager can give a team is permission to say no.It is a practitioner's account, frank about its own failures, and it leaves open a question worth sitting with: if every failure belongs to the culture, what would it look like for the instrument itself to be wrong? TakeawaysAn organisation that cannot say who may approve a decision optimises for non-decision, and the waste that follows looks like activity.Running people at full utilisation produces gridlock rather than output; in trying to do more with less, organisations end up doing less with more.Where goals are used for control, teams set deliberately low bars and get on with the work they believe matters.Saying no is a gift a leader can give a team, but only when the team understands the strategy well enough to know what to refuse.Make someone's job depend on hitting a target and the number will be hit, whether by gaming the system or something worse.Chapters(00:00) - Highlights, and why management instruments harden into paperwork (04:48) - Eighteen years of specifications that never shipped (09:57) - Nobody teaches leaders to lead, and tenure shows it (15:31) - Fragile by design: control and the view from the top (21:27) - Lean is not the same as fully utilised (29:49) - Busy work, and the gift of saying no (38:51) - Escalation, borrowed authority, and whose fault it is (48:01) - Making space: problems, capacity and the time audit (53:00) - When a measure becomes someone's job (57:26) - A strategic house is not a strategy (01:08:06) - Lightning round: one objective, Drucker over Grove, and OKR theatre Guest Links & ReferencesTim Newbold on LinkedInOKR QuickstartStrategy Candy PodcastL. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around! (2012)Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (1990)Peter F. Drucker, The Practice of Management (1954)About the ShowOn the Subject of Leadership is a long-form interview series, with a written companion, on governance, organisational culture, and how decisions are actually made. Guests are challenged rather than affirmed, and the argument continues in writing after the recording stops. For people who are sceptical of easy answers. Hosted by Dr Robert N. Winter. Subscribe / FollowNewsletter / Website: robert.winter.inkLinkedIn: dr-robert-winterX: @DrRobertWinterInstagram: DrRobertWinterMastodon: social.winter.ink/@robertYouTube: @OnTheSubjectOfLeadership CreditsRecorded remotely via RiversideMusic: The Hidden Thread by Roberto Prado / Artlist