OKR’s are about outcomes. Scrum and Kanban are about getting things done. Both are important.

Phew, I cannot disagree more with Felipe Castro’s statement. Sure, OKR focuses on the outcome. And sure, Scrum and Kanban are also focusing on getting things done, but both approaches are ultimately about customer value — so to say the outcome. And that’s why, in my opinion, the ideas of lean-agile are highly compatible with the implementation of OKR.

For example, Scrum’s iterations—sprints — are short feedback loops to understand and deliver customer value, which means outcome, not output. For Kanban, take a look at the Kanban Maturity Model and the Fit-for-Purpose framework. Only focusing on getting things done means low maturity of a Kanban implementation. Scrum and Kanban aim at focusing and delivering on the right stuff. And sure, when focusing on the right stuff to do, you are getting the right stuff done in less time — because of less distraction. Again, the idea behind that is to deliver value to increase the outcome.

In this context, I recommend reading the article What is Agile? by Simon Powers. His illustration of the Agile Onion makes clear that culture and mindset are essential when it comes to the implementation of Scrum, Kanban, or whatever. If the mindset and culture of an organization are output-oriented but not outcome-oriented, the understanding of Scrum and Kanban goes into that direction as well. That means those organizations will stay on a low maturity level regarding the implementation of Scrum and Kanban. By the way, the same counts for OKR. If an organization has an incompatible culture in regards to OKR, the resulting OKRs, for example, are used to control people instead of driving change and increasing the outcome.

In short: (organizational) mindset and culture are the essential factors when it comes to the successful implementation of any method.