profile

Rebelutionary Leadership & Career Fulfillment for Thinkydoers

Happy Birthday, Red Currant Collective (and thank YOU).

Published almost 2 years ago • 6 min read

Where we started and where we are now

Thank YOU for being a part of the first year of Red Currant Collective.

It’s been a busy (and blessed) first year in business, and I’m so grateful to take a moment to reflect and catch you – our most important early supporters – up on how things have evolved since we sent our launch announcement one year ago this month.

Where we started

Red Currant Collective was a hopeful idea: that my background and track record working with the Objective and Key Result (OKR) goal-alignment methodology was rare and valuable enough to build a solopreneur business around. The business plan when I opened was me plus a part-time-bookkeeper, with a theory that by year three I’d find “my best client,” then be able to expand into the work I’m most passionate about: Working with CEOs and strategic implementors to put more of their organization’s effort toward what’s most important. Helping changemakers and status-quo challengers create more impact while burning less "fuel." In short, helping leaders and their teams do less, better.


How did we do?

Have you participated in an experience with Red Currant Collective?
If so, we'd value your feedback:


Where we are

We’re two years ahead of schedule on the business plan and are now a growing team of three plus bookkeeper, opening our first full-time role for an Executive Assistant / Project Manager in the next few weeks. (Your referrals for that role are very welcome).

Photo by Sung Park of Sara, taken pre-launch.

We're gearing up to train and add additional coaches to the team before 2022 is out (including some of you reading this message). And based only on word of mouth and referrals from clients, we’ve exceeded every metric I’ve set and reset for the business, and are now expanding from a solopreneur-based business to a small agency. I hear frequently: “More people need access to this,” from my team, my clients, and the people who come through my facilitation and workshop experience. We're doing our part to answer that call by growing and scaling responsibly.

From OKRs to the Connected Strategic™ Organization

Our work still relies heavily on the OKR methodology, but we now incorporate OKRs into planning and goal alignment work as one piece of a Connected Strategic™ Stack, our framework for achieving coherent shared understanding about how organizations connect implementation to strategy.

Over and over, we saw clients adopt OKRs as “the answer” to all their organizational problems, and then wind up discouraged and disappointed when the results didn’t meet their silver-bullet expectations. In response, we now work with clients to help craft OKRs to optimize what they’re really good at: helping people and teams set exciting and motivating stretch goals. And, we help clients fill in the other pieces of their “expectation clarity” model by identifying and clarifying commits, KPIs – the measures they’re watching but not actively invested in improving at the moment – and getting smarter and more strategic about how they plan toward and objectively quantify progress (or blockers) on their most important goals.

The work our clients do with us today reduces noise and dramatically increases signal. It reduces reliance on subjective evaluation of progress in favor of getting curious about objectively measurable progress indicators. We celebrate accomplishments and see setbacks as valuable learning opportunities. Our clients are either winning or learning, which can dramatically improve employee engagement and performance, as well as psychological safety, all of which are more important than ever in the era of the Great Resignation.

When we launched, my goal was to hear from clients that their organizations were increasingly achieving their most important measures of success with fewer surprises along the way. I could never have imagined what else we’d hear from clients during our first year of operation.

What clients have to say

Over the last twelve months, we’ve heard from clients who chose RCCO over big-ten management consulting firms for strategic operations consulting engagements. (We’ve also had consultants from four of them come through my class to learn how to coach OKRs.)

During one of the most challenging parts of a client’s OKR engagement, the full alignment review, a client spontaneously shared: “Working with you is effortless.”

We also hear the words “excellent,” “productive,” and “painless,” a lot. We’ve been surprised to hear variations on the phrase “You’re the best _______ consultant we work with,” where the surprise has come from how different clients fill in that blank. As a generalist strategic consultancy, we don’t specialize in specific areas of business, but our clients experience us as experts in theirs. That blank is often filled in with the specialty area of the team we’re working with — “human resources,” “innovation,” "compliance," “business operations,” etc. — but we are not discipline specialists. What clients are experiencing when they say that, I think, is that our work helps them do stronger specialty work. And remaining generalists, focused intently on strategic operation, has let us build tools and practices that work across all disciplines and industries, better than some of the earlier approaches to OKRs that favor easier-to-measure parts of the business and underserve harder-to-measure parts of the business.

I’ve noticed the consistent challenges that operational, creative, strategy, and product/engineering teams often experience with OKRs: they exist in spaces where objective measurement may require both creativity and courage. We’ve developed approaches to helping teams write meaningful OKRs in these harder-to-measure parts of the business. We’ve created new models for increasing shared meaning in organizational goal setting and alignment – including recognizing that not every team is in a position to set healthy stretch goals – so we’ve introduced the idea to clients of ambitiously pursuing readiness to stretch instead of forcing every team into a model of setting stretch goals via OKRs.

We’ve also experimented and learned a ton about how to facilitate collaboration, foster cooperation, and create room for individual thinking as part of organizational goal setting and alignment. Facilitated workshops and group trainings will always be one piece of the puzzle. And increasingly, clients are flocking to our Supported Self-Service Goal Alignment Model, which helps organizations shift the responsibility for writing and finalizing goals to where that responsibility belongs: leaders and their teams. Our supported self-service model makes more impactful use of limited coaching expertise and availability and increases the scale at which organizations can set and achieve aligned goals and deliver better on their strategic priorities, for every person, role and team who chooses to participate.

What we could also never have dreamt of is the feedback we receive from people in client organizations who spontaneously share the positive impacts of our work together on their energy and well-being in their careers. Our clients spontaneously share message with us about their increased self-esteem; increased confidence; psychological safety; and increased efficacy in their work, and these messages are the absolute best reward. A few statements pulled from actual client feedback:

  • “This is what I needed after a really challenging year in my career.”
  • “[This work] was very compelling, and was actually very emotional for me, which means I think this is an important thing for me to do.”
  • “I am thrilled to have learned in such a safe space.”
  • “Completing the OKR training made me grow in my confidence to support coaches.”

And from our CEOs and senior leaders, what we hear most is that the work we do together brings an increased sense of “calm” to their operations: less noise, more signal. More and better time to think and focus on what’s most important.

What's coming next

I am so excited for what’s coming in the next few months.

  1. We're getting into a regular production schedule for this newsletter and the Thinkydoers podcast (find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen), with a spicy new episode dropping next week;
  2. We’re working to expand access to our Supported Self-Service Goal Alignment Model, and
  3. We're launching a brand new cohort-based learning experience called Coaching the Connected Strategic™ Organization

In that new, competency-based learning environment, we'll train small cohorts of leaders, strategic operators, and coaches on how to lead self-managing organizations and teams with coherence and consistency. My book on the same topic is well under way, and we’ll share early chapters with our beta reader community in the next few months.

Based on requests from our clients, we’re also exploring community models, to bring together and better support strategic operators around the opportunities and challenges of being innovators, changemakers, status-quo-challengers, and sometimes important “square pegs” in organizations that need what we have to offer (and don’t always want it).

And personally, I’m so grateful to be doing exactly what I’m doing, exactly how I’m now doing it.

Now it's your turn

I look forward to continuing this journey with you.

A question: What in this update is most exciting (or surprising) to YOU? Drop me an email at sara@redcurrantco.com (or reply to this message), and we’ll make sure to keep you posted with upcoming opportunities to test and/or try our new experiences and services.

And last, if you’ve worked with us in the last year, I’d love to hear your feedback.

The survey is designed to be completed in about three minutes, and we appreciate you taking the time to let us know how we’re doing (and how we can improve).


Thank you for reading this far. I'll keep it shorter and sweeter in future mailings, but some of you have been waiting quite some time for a full update, and now you have it.

And most importantly of all:

Thank you for playing a role in our first year in operation, and for your belief in the revolutionary idea that our work lives can be impactful, equitable, coherent, and free from harm. ❤️

We are not alone, and I look forward to making that vision a reality, together.

Rebelutionary Leadership & Career Fulfillment for Thinkydoers

Hosted by Sara Lobkovich

I help changemaker leaders, teams, and other Thinkydoers understand their strengths, increase their quantifiable impact, and become fulfilled in their careers (without masking or mind-reading). My "how?" Accessible, efficient approaches to strategy creation, alignment, and operationalizing for goal achievement, with a special focus on Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). The approaches I coach and teach today build on well-honed expertise leading adult learning, instructional design, marketing, creative strategy and strategic operations at some of the world’s largest enterprises, and in public sector and political roles. In my individual coaching work via Thinkydoers, I help people who are "wired differently" (or otherwise "not from Leadership Central Casting") build authentic, rewarding careers as the leaders of change our world needs today. When not working with Red Currant Collective, my "other life" is in professional motorcycle racing. 🏍️

Read more from Rebelutionary Leadership & Career Fulfillment for Thinkydoers

Hey Reader, I'm working hard to drum up an awesome cohort for the No-BS OKRs session that's now open, and things are off to a good start! I have heard from more folks than usual this time around about barriers to participation in this cohort, and the last thing I want is for barriers to stop you -- the whole point of moving No-BS OKRs to my own platform is to reduce barriers. So let's cut to the chase: 🏃 If you'd like to participate but can't join live, this cohort is able to be completed...

14 days ago • 2 min read

Hey Reader, Feedback on the original No-BS OKRs workshop has yielded an unexpected recurring theme: "People who know nothing about OKRs need to hear about this." It got me to thinking about the questions friends and family ask, curiously, as they've watched my career evolve. The two most frequent are some variation of: "WTF are OKRs?" and "Why the *bleep* are you so far down this rabbithole?" If you're reading this, you're probably already down the rabbithole with me 😂 ... But I decided this...

21 days ago • 1 min read

Hey Reader, We have a huge month here at RCCO: 🎯 We're officially into Q2 reset season (with some coaching and training time still available if you need help); ✨ My newly updated No-BS OKRs Workshop is launching next week in a hybrid format -- with asynchronous self-paced content to guide you through your OKR reset (or OKR creation) in one week or less, AND live sessions for support and practice during one of the key Reset weeks for many organizations: the week of March 18th;🎉 And, I'm doing...

24 days ago • 1 min read
Share this post