The cost of versatility is scale
Introduction:
A food chopper that can chop, dice, julienne and mince is great, but can never replace a chef’s knife.
Versatility often comes at the cost of scale. A spreadsheet is one of the most versatile things I have come across. Although originally an accountant’s tool, you can force a spreadsheet to be a CRM, a database, a project management tool, a dashboard to name a few. However, is it worth it?
Spreadsheets are easy. Many years ago, I was in a team that ran transformation projects. All our charters, analyses and other project artefacts were all in spreadsheets. I was indeed proud of all the things we could do with it. After a point, it became more about showing off tricks than actually serving a purpose. It was a matter of time before we had too many spreadsheets floating around with multiple copies of everything with no easy way to know which one is the latest. Every spreadsheet over-user will arrive at this point. The truth is people don’t choose spreadsheets for the love of them, but rather because that’s the tool they can get readily and is very easy to use. But, try addressing collaboration heavy use cases with it and you will see it fall apart and become a time suck, much like Oliver does in this episode.
Pick a tool for the job and not a job for the tool. The solution begins with fighting the urge to use a spreadsheet for everything. Let’s take the specific use case of OKRs. If you are serious about adopting OKRs and want to go from a handful of users trying OKRs to making it an organization wide practice, spreadsheets just don’t cut it. You need purpose built software like Tesoract that does it way better and way better at scale.
How Tesoract helps? Tesoract does OKRs like none other. With the ability to build OKRs under a strategy, Tesoract offers the best alignment with strategy. Having OKRs without strategy is like sailing a ship without a compass. Christina Woedtke, world renowned OKR thought leader lays this out in the 2nd edition of her book, Radical Focus. I highly recommend the book for anyone looking to develop a better understanding of OKRs.
So, if this interests you, go sign up for updates on our website. Also, we’re looking for beta users and if you’re interested, please sign up on our website or write to me at viswesh.krishnamurthy@tesoract.com.
