What you practice: Increase comfort with uncertainty; futures thinking; making falsifiable hypotheses; identifying measurable outcomes of complex situations
When to use: Long range planning, early in a project, before quarterly/annual planning, before developing OKRs
Materials: Give each participant a large piece of paper and a marker.
Define a topic you want the team to be thinking about - this exercise is best oriented around mid-to-large scope topics, like the broader industry your team works in. Examples: "How will AI adoption change UX research in large American companies?", "What will the market for home internet look like in 1 year?", etc. Give a concrete time frame - about a year usually works, although this exercise can be done with smaller time frames for smaller topics. Very long time frames - eg. 10 years - will lose the ability for participants to learn from the results.
Individually, each participant must write one prediction they think has a 50% chance of happening in the X time frame.
50% means "equally likely to happen as to not happen". Do not write predictions you are virtually sure will happen.
Predictions must be concrete and measurable. At the end of the time frame, there should be no remaining uncertainty about whether your prediction happened, or didn't happen. This means you'll need to avoid qualitative assessments ("...will increase in importance", "...will continue to grow"), and instead commit to a single quantifiable measure ("20% of households will own...", "3+ companies will IPO with market valuations >1bn").
Give participants 5 minutes - 10 if you find you need to help individuals 1:1.
Break into groups of ~5. Each participant shares their prediction and the rest of the team must take either the "Over" (more than 50% chance of happening) or "Under" (less than 50% chance of happening). Record the over/under votes on the same sheet with tally marks or stickers.
Variant: You can also have the group hang their predictions on the wall, and give the group time to walk around and vote individually. This is good for reducing group-think; but reduces the opportunity for the facilitator to course-correct in real time if people present predictions that are too vague to be evaluated.
Debrief: Overall, how does the distribution of Over/Under votes look? Because the goal is 50% predictions, most predictions should have a fairly even split. If not, why not? In general, does your team trend more towards high likelihoods, or lower ones? As a group, how would you adjust them to be closer to 50%?
Consider keeping the predictions and returning to them in a year. As a group, how did you do? Remember the goal was 50% - if all or most of your team's predictions actually happened, consider it a failure.
You might notice that two of the core skills required for this exercise - defining a concrete thing to measure in an uncertain future; and identifying probabilities other than 0%/100% - are also common struggles for teams trying to adopt OKRs. This game is an excellent warm-up prior to writing OKRs, or an intro to begin a conversation about how these tendencies impact your team's ability to write OKRs.
If your OKRs are too conservative
Quarter after quarter, your team meets 100% of their OKRs. The team only commits to goals they are 100% sure they can meet. In this exercise, you'll likely see your team struggle most with the "50/50" rule - they'll want to suggest predictions that are nearly certain to happen. Some variants that can be particularly helpful for this kind of team:
Have each participant present a 1-sentence argument-for (why is their prediction likely to happen) and argument-against (why is their prediction unlikely to happen). Ask them to reflect on which was easier to generate - if the argument-against was harder to formulate; ask them to revise their prediction until both arguments are reasonably likely.
Instead of small group discussions, have a large group vote over/under on every prediction (to keep the timing reasonable, eliminate discussion of the predictions - they'll have to stand on their own as written). Identify the predictions that came closest to 50/50, and discuss as examples - what made them equally likely as unlikely to occur? As a team, how would you modify some of the overly-likely predictions (garnered significantly more "over" votes than "under") to be more balanced?
Try a challenge round aimed at 30% predictions.
If your OKRs are too vague
Your OKRs might be ambitious - but they're so vague the team never agrees on whether you're meeting them or not. You might see phrases like "be a best-in-class offering" or "delight customers" (great things to aim for! but terrible OKRs!). Your team needs practice translating those broad picture goals into concrete items to measure - how specifically will you know if that overall goal is coming true? Try any of these variants:
Pretend it's the end of the time frame. You need to evaluate whether the prediction happened. What are you going to do? There should be almost no room for debate about how to proceed. (Got time for the long game? Actually keep the predictions and evaluate them at the end - don't worry about whether the predictions did/didn't happen; only whether it's straight forward to evaluate).
Eliminate the time frame - write statements that you think have a 50/50 chance of being true right now (no googling yet). Evaluate in real time (googling now!) - is the team quickly able to come to a consensus about whether that statement is true, or are you bogged down in debates over definitions (what does "best in class" even mean?!?)
Prediction: "Customers will prioritize speed and reliability in an increasingly complex mobile provider market"
✖️ - This is too likely to happen - do you really think there's a 50% chance customers STOP caring about whether their cell phone service is fast or reliable?
✖️ - Not measurable enough - imagine having a debate about whether this prediction has been true over the *past* year. Reasonable people could cite different facts in support of both yes & no. You want a prediction where the outcome is uncertain now; but won't be at all at the end of the time frame.
Better Revisions
✅ "More than 50% of Americans will own a 5G capable smart phone."
✅ "A new entrant in the US mobile market will capture >10% of market share in the next year."
✅ "Average monthly cell phone bill in the US will exceed $100 by Dec 2025."