Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
OKRs pair a qualitative Objective, what you want, with a small set of quantitative Key Results, how you'll know you got there, so ambition and measurement sit in the same sentence instead of two separate documents nobody reads together.
A circular arrow strings the five steps together, closing the loop when scores reset each quarter's objective.
Reach for this when…
- Your strategy document and your team's actual weekly work don't obviously connect.
- Everyone is 'busy' but nobody can say if the quarter was a success.
- Different teams are quietly working against each other's priorities.
How to run it
- Set one Objective per team: qualitative, ambitious, a real direction not a task list.
- Attach three to five Key Results: numbers that would prove the objective is true.
- Cascade and align, but don't force every team's OKRs to be identical copies.
- Check in weekly against the Key Results, not against activity.
- Score honestly at quarter end and let the score, not the excuse, set next quarter's objective.
A worked example
Situation. Mateo Vargas ran Cacao Andino, a farmer cooperative and processing business in La Convencion, Cusco, that had grown fast enough that its four teams were each chasing a different idea of 'success'.
Applied. He set one quarterly Objective, 'become the region's most trusted quality-grade cocoa supplier', with Key Results the field, processing, and sales teams could each see themselves in: farmer training sessions completed, percentage of beans meeting export grade, and repeat-buyer volume.
Result. By the second quarter the teams stopped duplicating effort on training material, because the shared Key Results made it obvious who owned what. Export-grade percentage rose from a shaky baseline to a level that unlocked a better buyer contract.
The catch
OKRs reward what's easy to count, so a team under pressure will quietly pick Key Results it can hit rather than ones that matter. Ambitious 'stretch' targets, if scored like a performance review, teach people to sandbag next quarter's numbers instead of aiming high. And a quarterly cycle can be too short for work that genuinely takes longer.
If every Key Result was hit at 100 percent, they weren't ambitious, they were a to-do list wearing a costume.
Origin: Andy Grove (Intel); popularised by John Doerr