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Aspire, then calibrate
Goal setting is an annual ritual disconnected from daily work. Teams create elaborate plans that sit in rarely referenced and quickly outdated PowerPoint presentations. Long cycles, fixed targets, and hierarchical cascading of goals assume a level of stability and predictability that simply doesn’t exist in today’s environment.
Teams lose sight of larger purpose amid daily tasks, leading to misaligned efforts and wasted resources. Goals become either so vague they provide no direction (“Improve customer satisfaction”) or so specific they constrain innovation (“Increase NPS by 2.3 points”). And then there’s sandbagging, where teams set easily achievable targets to ensure success rather than pushing for breakthrough performance.
Therefore…
Use Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) to provide a lightweight framework for setting, tracking, and adjusting goals that maintains both ambition and accountability. OKRs were pioneered at Intel in the 1970s when Andy Grove sought to solve the problem of goal alignment at scale. He developed a system that combined aspirational objectives with concrete measures of success. The approach gained wider adoption when John Doerr introduced it to Google in 1999, where it became fundamental to their management system and helped drive their exceptional growth while maintaining focus. The system has the following two core components.