In Pursuit of Operational Rhythm: The Three Pillars of Koan

‍We’re different at Koan.

Founded in 2016, we offer a Saas-based platform to help leaders and teams become more efficient by providing them with a simple, collaborative platform to manage goals and OKRs across the organization. With collaboration at our core, Koan offers value through three fundamental product pillars: Teams, Reflections (aka Weekly Updates), & Insights.  These lead to our core value propositions of transparency, alignment, and accountability, driven by the following straightforward premise:

If you’re not involving everyone who’s responsible for delivering on your goals, you won’t get the information and insights you need to know how you’re progressing and make the right decisions.

Fostering Visibility, Staying Aligned

We believe that collaboration is the foundation of our Three Pillars.

A collaborative approach to goals fosters transparency and visibility, helps organizations stay aligned, and improves efficiency. The collaborative elements of Koan include:

1. Bringing the team, and information, together in one place.  
2. Making information visible, so any individual in your organization can see all the different teams.
3. Aligning goals to the company’s top objectives.  
   

Koan’s Key Differentiators: The Three Pillars

1. Teams deliver on strategic objectives

Teams are where your organization’s work gets done and great things happen. Fostering teamwork and communication among teams enhances productivity, transparency and alignment. Teams need to involve all stakeholders in goal progress to ensure they regularly collaborate and communicate. The elements of Koan’s platform that help you create efficient teams include:

• OKRs are established within each team (where progress is measured and monitored);
• Weekly reflections, which are a core building block (and invaluable for a variety of reasons, including the enhancement of productivity, motivation, trust and knowledge); 
• The ability for every team to customize these reflections based on their unique charter;
• The opportunity for everybody in the organization to see other teams goals, learn who’s on the teams, the goals they’re working on and the status of those goals; and
• Define goal leads who take responsibility and then assign individual contributors to support that goal.
  

2. Reflections create engagement

Weekly Updates (called Reflections in Koan) not only keep things moving, but (1) build good habits, (2) set a consistent cadence across the organization, and (3) provide visibility and transparency across everyone’s work and priorities, and at every level of the organization. In doing these things, your organization creates a business process/rhythm and habit around reporting on OKRs, including what’s been done and what the priorities are. The elements of Koan’s platform that help you accomplish all of this include:

• Automatic prompts and reminders to complete Reflections;
• A standardized format that is designed to make the process efficient, taking no more than 10-15 minutes per week;
• All contributors regularly providing an assessment/confidence rating on how the key results are progressing; and
  

Additionally, and in regards to transparency, our platform also ensures that you can always see when people submit their Reflections and when people comment on particular OKRs.

3. Insights provide clarity

Insightful qualitative and quantitative data provide clarity, which allows you to work smarter and make better decisions. Visibility into this data keeps teams moving in the right direction together. And the integration of qualitative and quantitative insights inform good decision making. In terms of how Koan’s platform supports these efforts:

• Every key result is measurable and has a metric associated with it;
• Metrics are critical, but they are trailing indicators.  Confidence ratings provide a glimpse into the future; 
• Alignment is quantified.  By showing the entire team’s confidence ratings you can clearly see which teams are aligned, and which ones aren’t.

Further, the rating and associated comments from the team members responsible for delivering on key results gives you deeper information, clarity, and insights, while informing future decision making.

Final Thoughts

We’re different at Koan. And this post is a statement on how we’re different, as well as the values that support our beliefs and the development of our platform.‍

Koan’s platform is for organizations that are open to the idea of everybody contributing. It’s not top-down or autocratic. And it filters out people who don’t agree with transparency. We believe in the pursuit of operational rhythm and building good habits, and as an organization, we support your efforts to provide a vehicle that enables people to share their honest, candid feedback. When you have better transparency, you have better alignment and better accountability.

Partnering with Koan will help build the best version of yourselves and ultimately lead to being more successful. Working with the Koan platform is a journey that leads you to consistently exceed your expectations and achieving goals, without the chaos and uncertainty. And when you exceed your expectations, you achieve your mission. But none of this means anything if it doesn’t translate to business value.

And when you’re ready to talk about business value, as well as Teams, Reflections, Insights, and what Koan can do to help you enhance all of this, give us a shout, because we’re happy to help.

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