OKR Framework

A marketing team is planning next quarter and drafts an objective ("become the go-to brand in our category") followed by twelve key results underneath it, most of which read like a task list: "publish six blog posts", "attend two trade shows", "redesign the newsletter". It looks thorough. It is also, on both counts, doing the OKR framework wrong.

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results, a goal-setting approach used at Intel and later popularised at Google. An Objective is qualitative and ambitious: a direction worth pursuing, not a metric. Key Results are quantitative and measurable: they describe an outcome that would prove the objective is being achieved, not a task completed along the way. A well-formed Key Result answers how you would know this happened, not what you did. Andy Grove developed the approach at Intel in the 1970s, building on earlier management-by-objectives thinking, and John Doerr later carried it to Google, where the practice of setting a small number of ambitious objectives each quarter became closely associated with the company's growth.

• Use it at the start of a quarter or planning cycle, to align a team around a small number of outcomes rather than a long list of activities.
• Use it when a team's plans have drifted into a task list dressed up as goals, and need re-anchoring to actual outcomes.
• Use it to make trade-offs visible: a small number of Key Results forces a team to say what it is not prioritising this quarter.
• Do not use it for routine, ongoing operational work that does not need a stretch goal: the OKR framework is for focus, not for tracking business-as-usual.
• Do not use it if the organisation is not prepared to say no to some tasks; OKRs only work when they actually limit what a team commits to.

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The most common mistake is the "twelve key results" trap: teams treat Key Results as a checklist of everything they plan to do, rather than a small, deliberately short set of outcomes that would prove success. Twelve key results under one objective is not focus, it is the team's entire task list relabelled, and it defeats the purpose of choosing objectives in the first place.

The second mistake is writing Key Results as tasks rather than outcomes. "Publish six blog posts" is an activity: it says nothing about whether those posts achieved anything. "Increase organic traffic to the blog by a defined amount" is an outcome: publishing posts might be how the team gets there, but the Key Result measures the result, not the activity.

Both mistakes reinforce each other. A long list of tasks feels safer to write than a short list of outcomes, because a task is entirely within the team's control, while an outcome depends on factors outside anyone's direct control too. Twelve tasks are also easier to report "done" against at the end of the quarter, even if none of them actually moved the objective forward.

Illustrative example: a fictional company, not a customer case.

For the marketing team, cutting the objective back to something genuinely qualitative ("make our brand the obvious first choice in our category this quarter") and rewriting the twelve tasks as outcomes leaves a much shorter list. "Publish six blog posts" becomes part of the plan for achieving a Key Result such as an increase in branded search volume, rather than being the Key Result itself.

Worth testing before finalising the list: whether each remaining Key Result would still count as a genuine win if achieved through a completely different set of activities than the ones currently planned. If the answer is no (if the Key Result only makes sense alongside one specific task) it is probably still a task wearing an outcome's language.

Cutting from twelve items down to three or four genuine outcomes is uncomfortable, because it means explicitly deciding which activities do not make the cut this quarter. The card takes you through the remaining steps to a decision.

• Front: what the OKR framework is for and the difference between an outcome and a task.
• Back: the numbered steps to apply the model, plus a short worked example of its own. The company in this guide is a separate illustration, not the example printed on the card.
• Digital: a Google Sheets template for tracking objectives and key results through a quarter, with a video tutorial.

• Balanced Scorecard offers a broader, multi-perspective alternative for organisations tracking goals beyond a single quarter.
• McKinsey 7S Framework is useful when OKRs keep being missed for organisational reasons that have nothing to do with the goals themselves.
• Kotter's Eight-Step Change Model pairs well when an OKR cycle is actually part of a larger organisational change.

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