The Weaponization of OKRs: Is Your Org Guilty of It?

Ah, the beloved OKR. From Intel in the 70s and Google in the 90’s, to just about everywhere in late 2022. Are they worth the hype? And are they even being used well in your organization?

This might be a bit of a hot take because I know people love OKRs, but I tend to roll my eyes when they come up in conversation with clients. Why? Well, most companies don’t actually understand how they’re supposed to be created. The correct use: as a way to articulate how teams are going to take big swings at company goals and outcomes. Instead, they’re being used somewhere between cascading goals or a recapitulation of a task list, and are about as far from their intended purpose as you can get. 

OKRs are intended to be created as stretch goals, and to push the company – and teams – past business as usual. But when they’re treated like cascading goals with everyone claiming their “piece,” folks start to use them as weapons against anyone who might challenge whether the team is pushing itself to really deliver above and beyond. “Hey! I’m Innovative! I’m creating value! See, I’ve got the OKRs to prove it!”  But…. do they really?  

So, what are companies getting wrong when it comes to OKRs?

First, adopting OKRs will never be impactful if leaders aren’t clear about the organization’s strategy first and foremost. And please, don’t get confused: OKRs aren’t strategy.

Rather than obsess over adoption of OKRs, leaders should be focused on articulating those strategic priorities so that teams can outline how they’re going to go after those priorities from their particular vantage point (in OKR form or otherwise). 

The trick here is that the strategies have to be articulated in such a way that it will be clear to teams how to set those stretch goals, and in the right direction. 

Example: Let’s say your organization’s aim is to increase margins on a particular service line. If you issue that direction to 10 teams, you’ll probably end up with 10 different ways to increase revenue or decrease expenses, and some of those will be in direct conflict with one another. It doesn’t matter, then, that each team has their OKR-swords at the ready because they aren’t sure what the attack plan is, or where leadership wants them to swing. 

Reframed, what if the strategic priority was articulated as seeking to increase margins by creating a simple but improved customer experience with less operational overhead? Now we have 10 teams working toward a very specific outcome oriented around balancing simplicity, experience and operational efficiencies, which then helps them craft OKRs that support those very clear outcomes.

Oh, and one more thing: did you know that OKRs, in their original intent, were meant to be written for a target of a 70% success rate? This means that about a third of the time your teams should report back that the results they were targeting, in support of the strategy, were too ambitious. 

I’ll be brutally honest here: I don’t know any teams that are doing this, mostly because leadership hasn’t set the expectation that OKRs are meant to be ambitious and audacious, not a safe recapitulation of metrics the team is confident they can hit. And leaders also haven’t demonstrated that teams – and individuals – are safe if they swing for the fences and whiff the ball every now and then. 

When the players seated at the top of an organization get specific about the work that will help them win in the marketplace and can outline what “good” looks like, only then have you got the support system you need to make the most of OKRs. This is what’s necessary to create the space for teams to shoot for the moon, work towards those objectives, and learn from what’s standing in the way of achievement. Only in this context can OKRs be used as an expression of an aligned organization, rather than as a weapon to ward off an inspection of whether or not they’re working on the right things.