There is a ritual that plays out in every company that has read a business book published after 2015. It happens in January, with the same annual certainty as taxes and the realization that the gym membership was a mistake. It is the OKR setting session, and it is the most elaborate piece of organizational theater since the annual strategy offsite that produces the same strategy as the previous year.
OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — were invented at Intel, popularized by Google, and are now practiced by companies that could not tell you what either Intel or Google’s actual OKRs were, which is the first sign that something has gone wrong in the transmission.
The framework is genuinely good. The practice is something else entirely.
Q1: The Season of Ambition
January is when OKRs have their brief, beautiful moment of sincerity. The leadership team has returned from the holiday break with notebooks full of intentions. Someone has re-read Measure What Matters on the plane. There is energy in the room that smells faintly of resolution and fresh marker pens.
The objectives are set. They are, without exception, bold. They are “moonshots” — a word that entered the corporate vocabulary approximately ten minutes after it entered Google’s, stripped of all the engineering and most of the meaning. They involve becoming “the leading” something, “transforming” something else, and “achieving X% growth” in a metric that has never been defined with sufficient precision to actually measure.
The key results are more interesting, because this is where the political negotiations happen. Every team wants key results that are stretching but achievable. Every leader wants key results that are aspirational but defensible. The result is a set of numbers that everyone in the room knows are theoretically possible if every quarter goes perfectly and the market cooperates and the three people who actually do the work don’t leave.
It goes into the spreadsheet. Or the OKR software. Or, in the most advanced organizations, both — because the company paid for the software but nobody trusted it, so Karen in Finance still maintains the master spreadsheet, which is version 14 and uses a color-coding system that Karen is the only person who understands.
By the end of January, the OKRs are set. Everyone has seen them. Most people have forgotten them already, but they saw them, and that counts for something.
Q2: The Season of Forgetting
The OKR check-in meeting is scheduled for April. It was in the calendar since February, blocked off with the same optimism that causes people to book dentist appointments six months in advance. By the time April arrives, three of the key results have become irrelevant because of a strategic pivot in March, the software platform that was going to measure one of them turned out not to have the API integration anyone thought it had, and the person who was DRI — Directly Responsible Individual, another word that sounds more robust than it performs — for the most important objective has been pulled onto a different project.
The check-in happens anyway, because it’s in the calendar. Someone updates the spreadsheet (version 17 now, Karen added conditional formatting). The numbers are yellow. Yellow is the color organizations use when they don’t want to say red but cannot bring themselves to say green. Yellow means “we are aware that this is not going well and we would like you to not look too closely at it.”
Like the content strategy that looked great in the deck and lives forever in the deck, OKRs in Q2 exist primarily as documentation that planning occurred. The planning occurred. The execution is a different department’s problem.
Q3: The Season of Quiet Revision
By Q3, something interesting happens. The OKRs begin to quietly change shape. Not officially — nobody calls a meeting to revise the objectives, because calling that meeting would require acknowledging that the original objectives were wrong, which is a form of institutional honesty that most organizations prefer to avoid.
Instead, the revision happens in language. “Achieve 40% growth in qualified leads” becomes, in conversation, “meaningfully expand our pipeline.” The number disappears. The sentiment survives. This is not lying, exactly. It is the corporate equivalent of retroactively deciding that what you meant by “run a marathon” was “get more comfortable with physical activity as a concept.”
The ego KPIs that your boss loves and your business ignores have their best season in Q3, because the actual key results are now quietly understood to be aspirational targets rather than success criteria. Nobody has said this out loud. It has simply become true through collective agreement and the natural erosion of accountability that happens when a deadline is four months away and then two months away and then somehow next week.
The OKR software sends automated check-in reminders. They are dismissed with the same efficiency as marketing emails from services nobody remembers subscribing to.
Q4: The Season of Creative Accounting
December is when the OKRs are completed. Not in the sense that the objectives were achieved — in the sense that someone must write something in the fields that say “Q4 Result” before the year-end review, and that something must be parseable as success or at least as “progress toward success” by someone who is reading quickly and has five more documents to get through before the all-hands.
This is not fraud. It is a distinctly human form of institutional optimism, the same force that causes progress reports to consistently describe the present as slightly better than it actually is. The key results that were measurable are measured, and the results are noted. The key results that weren’t measurable — which, if we’re honest, is most of them, because “become a thought leader in our space” is not a measurable key result no matter how confidently it was written in January — are assessed qualitatively by the team responsible for them, which is not an arrangement likely to produce rigorous self-criticism.
And then the presentation goes to leadership. The numbers that were hit are highlighted in green. The numbers that weren’t are explained with narrative — market conditions, a strategic pivot, a competitor move that nobody could have anticipated (even though someone in the room did anticipate it and was told it wasn’t relevant). The overall assessment is “solid progress with learnings going into next year.”
The learnings are not formally documented. They will be rediscovered next January.
The Actual Problem (Which Is Not OKRs)
Here is the uncomfortable truth about the annual OKR comedy: the framework isn’t the problem. The problem is that most organizations use OKRs as a planning ritual without understanding that planning rituals require three things they consistently underinvest in: time to do the measurement, authority to change course based on what you measure, and genuine tolerance for reporting bad news without political consequence.
Remove any one of those three and you get what most companies have: a system for generating documents that describe what success would look like, rather than a system for pursuing it. The annual strategy deck that changes absolutely nothing is the OKR’s close cousin — both are artifacts of organizations that confuse describing intention with having one.
The teams that actually benefit from OKRs share one characteristic: someone in the organization has genuine power to say “this isn’t working, we need to stop” — and does. Not in February, not in December. In real time. That person is rare, and they are usually made to feel uncomfortable about it until they either leave or stop saying it.
If your team is tired of tracking numbers that don’t connect to anything real, KPI Shark is the NoBriefs product for people who want to measure things that actually matter — not because it will fix your Q3 update, but because at some point someone in your organization has to say that the emperor’s new metrics aren’t covering anything either.
January is coming. The spreadsheet will be opened. The ambitious objectives will be written with the full sincerity that only the beginning of a year can generate.
And they will be yellow by April. They are always yellow by April.
The question is whether this year, finally, you do something about it before December.
