# A Watchable Pilot Earns Buy-In Faster Than ROI Proof ## Claim When leadership is apprehensive about adopting a new process, a small, visible pilot earns commitment faster than hunting for external ROI evidence, because the pilot produces the organization's own proof instead of asking executives to trust someone else's numbers. <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ## Scope & conditions - Holds when a pilot can produce observable results within a short window (a quarter or less) and leadership can actually watch it run. - Breaks when the process only pays off at full scale (some infrastructure or platform migrations) or when results aren't visible to the decision-makers whose buy-in is needed. - Does not claim external adopter case studies are worthless — only that they're correlational, not causal, and a poor substitute for an internal pilot's evidence. ## Evidence The "Dear Andy" column responds to a reader asking for hard-dollar ROI data to justify rolling OKRs out to 3,500 employees. The columnist's answer sidesteps the ROI-data request entirely: start with three or four high-level, company-wide OKRs piloted at the top, run the check-in and grading cadence that makes OKRs different from a static goals document, and let that visible result carry the case — while explicitly flagging that citing other companies' OKR adoption is correlation, not proof. ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/A Contribution Pipeline Needs a Defined Next Step After Training]] — applies-in: both notes treat a defined, observable next step (a pilot, a routed task) as what actually moves people past initial skepticism or dropout, not general encouragement or appeals to authority. - [[3. Resources/MOCs/DevRel MOC]] — applies-in: pitching a new process, framework, or measurement system to a skeptical team is a recurring DevRel and community-program problem. ## Tests / falsifiers - Compare adoption outcomes where leadership was shown only external case studies/ROI data versus where leadership ran or watched a small internal pilot; if buy-in rates don't differ, the claim is false. - Find a case where a visible pilot succeeded but leadership still withheld buy-in for unrelated reasons (budget, politics) — this would bound the claim to cases where the pilot itself is the actual blocker. ## Maintenance - Last tended: 2026-08-16 - Next review: 2026-11-16 ## Source - [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/Dear Andy Getting Executive Buy in for OKRs]] — What Matters advice column on getting executive buy-in for a 3,500-person OKR rollout.