Don’t forget the O in OKR

January 8, 2026

I’m a fan of the OKR goal setting framework (nerd alert). However, like any framework, it needs to be applied properly and is often misused. In this brief post I want to highlight a particular pattern that can limit the effectiveness of OKRs that I’ve repeatedly witnessed and how to mitigate it.

First, let’s talk about OKRs themselves. In my view, one of the most important things to remember when setting OKRs is that your objectives should be intentionally hard to quantify. Yes, there will always be exceptions, but they should be few and far between. They should describe a state of being, more like a vision statement. The Key Results, on the other hand, define how you can tell if you’ve reached your objective. That’s where the numbers come in. For more on this, check out Tability’s awesome OKR guides.

So let’s assume you’ve set your team’s OKRs in this manner. Way to go! But you’re not done yet: one thing I have noticed over the years is that, once the OKRs are set, the KRs take center stage. The KR becomes the thing we are trying to achieve, the thing we talk about in meetings. Klipfolio calls this “surrogation.”

This is a dangerous situation. When we overindex on the KR itself, it’s easy to lose sight of what we are really trying to achieve. After all KR isn’t what we’re trying to achieve, the Objective is. If all you focus on is the KR, then you may feel pressure to just to artificially move the number — Goodhart’s Law in action. (Guardrail metrics help with this.)

This can lead to a situation where you hit the KR, but you fail to meet the Objective. Or it turns out that the chosen KR was misguided in such a way that we missed the KR but ended up meeting the Objective by some other standard.

Therefore, every time you present progress on your OKRs or you talk with your team about the projects you want to do to further your OKRs, always include a reference to the Objective. Print it out, put it in your team’s Slack channel topic, etc.

Do not speak solely in terms of the KR; emphasize the future you are trying to get to!