Your OKRs Were Dead Before You Wrote Them

Strategy formulation errors kill OKRs before the first quarterly planning session even starts. The fix isn't better goal-setting workshops. It's anchoring your strategy in real world numbers.

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I kept seeing the same Strategy autopsy. Company buys the tool, adopts OKRs, gets the CMS package of consultants on implementation, does the training, runs the workshops. Six months later they’re hitting 90% of their key results and the business is somehow getting worse. Leadership calls it an “execution problem.” It’s not.

The OKRs were accelerating a strategy that was broken from the start.

Here’s what actually happened: someone in a strategy offsite looked at a whiteboard and said “we should improve customer experience.” Everyone nodded. Sounds good. Strategic. Forward-thinking. Then they translated it into an objective, added some key results about NPS and support tickets, and sent teams off to execute. Three months later, engineering optimised for speed, product optimised for features, and customer satisfaction stayed exactly where it was.

The problem wasn’t the OKRs. It was that “improve customer experience” wasn’t a strategy. It was a wish list item with no diagnosis of what was actually broken.

OKRs are strategy agnostic. They’ll accelerate a terrible strategy just as efficiently as a brilliant one.

The Formulation Failure That Is Rarely Talked About

Most companies don’t fail at execution. They fail at the bit that happens before anyone opens Jira or writes an objective. The strategy formulation stage, where you’re supposed to figure out what problem you’re solving and why your approach might work.

Richard Rumelt calls this the “Blue Sky” mistake. Confusing aspiration with strategy. “Be the market leader” sounds strategic until you realise it’s just a desire with no explanation of how you’ll get there or what’s stopping you now. Then you turn that into OKRs and wonder why “increase market share by 15%” doesn’t manifest through sheer willpower.

I watched a B2B SaaS company do this last year. Their strategy was “become the enterprise choice.” Clear enough, right? So they set OKRs: ship enterprise features, close five Fortune 500 deals, get SOC 2 certified. Hit all three. Revenue stayed flat. Turns out enterprises weren’t avoiding them because of missing features. They were avoiding them because their brand screamed “startup that might not exist in two years.” The strategy diagnosed the wrong obstacle, so the OKRs solved the wrong problem.

The data backs this up. McKinsey’s research shows 70% of strategic initiatives fail, and it’s rarely because the goals were impossible. It’s because tiny formulation errors at the strategy stage snowball into execution failures. Your OKRs show green on the dashboard, whilst the actual strategic needle hasn’t moved an inch.

Four Ways Strategy Kills OKRs Before They Start

The Moonshot with No Rocket. You set a delusional objective like “grow 300%” without any committed plan for how. Google can do moonshots because they’ve got the committed OKRs underneath, the actual tactical plan. Most companies just have the moonshot. Then they’re surprised when teams burn out chasing an impossible number.

Task Lists Pretending to Be Outcomes. Roger Martin nails this one. You treat strategy like a project plan rather than a set of choices. So your key results measure activity instead of value. “Launch Project X” becomes a KR, you launch it, claim success, and nobody stops to ask whether Project X created any value at all.

The Everything Strategy. Michael Porter’s nightmare. Trying to compete on price and quality and speed and innovation simultaneously. You end up with fifteen top-level OKRs because you refused to choose. Teams burn out moving fifteen metrics by 1% instead of three metrics by 20%. I’ve seen companies do this. The quarterly review deck has seventeen objectives. Nobody can remember what half of them mean.

When your strategy refuses to choose, your OKRs become a to-do list where everything’s important and nothing actually matters.

Boardroom Fantasy Syndrome. Strategy gets formulated in a vacuum by people who haven’t talked to a customer in eighteen months. Marketing sets an OKR for leads, product sets one for enterprise features. Both succeed. The business fails because the leads marketing generated weren’t enterprise qualified and the features product shipped weren’t what those enterprises needed.

I talked to a product leader who called this “the paradox of success.” Their teams were hitting 100% of their OKRs whilst revenue dropped 12%. When they dug in, they found the strategy had been built on assumptions nobody had validated. The OKRs were just executing those assumptions really efficiently.

Why This Keeps Happening

We’ve got this backwards belief that OKRs will fix strategy problems through sheer operational discipline. Set clear goals, measure progress, iterate. Except you can’t iterate your way out of a flawed starting premise.

It’s like debugging code when the architecture’s wrong. You can optimise that function all day. Still doesn’t fix the fundamental design mistake.

The other thing that happens, and this is where it gets properly frustrating, is that leadership treats strategy formulation as a creative exercise. Blue sky thinking. What could we become? Who could we serve? Then someone has to turn that poetry into OKRs and suddenly you’re trying to measure “delight” or “transform the industry.” Good luck with that.

The Anchor Nobody Uses

Here’s what actually works, and I’ve watched maybe three companies do this properly: anchor your strategy in real-world numbers before you write a single OKR.

Not your internal metrics. Not what you hope will happen. The numbers that already exist outside your building. Market growth rates. Category trends. Competitor movement. Customer behaviour patterns. Economic indicators. The stuff that’s happening whether you participate or not.

A fintech I know did this. Before they wrote any objectives, they spent two weeks just mapping external KPIs. SMB failure rates in their target market. Payment processing volumes across the category. Regulatory change timelines. Competitor funding rounds. They found the market was growing at 12% annually, but their segment was only growing at 4%. That single number reframed everything.

Their strategy stopped being “grow faster” and became “figure out why we’re growing slower than the market, then fix that specific thing.”

Suddenly, the OKRs wrote themselves. Not because they had better facilitation or a clearer process. Because the strategy was anchored in external reality rather than internal aspiration.

The key results became testable hypotheses: “If we’re losing to competitors on speed, reducing onboarding time by 40% should close the growth gap.” You can measure that. More importantly, you can tell whether your diagnosis was right.

Another company I know tracks ten external KPIs religiously. Market penetration rates, category search volumes, net revenue retention benchmarks, competitive win rates from Gartner. Every quarter, before they touch their OKRs, they look at those numbers. Has the market shifted? Are the trends still valid? Is our relative position changing?

What This Actually Requires

You can’t do this in a strategy offsite. Well, you can, but you’ll be guessing. It requires someone to actually go find the numbers. Industry reports. Customer interviews. Market research. Competitive intelligence. The boring work of understanding what’s happening outside whilst everyone else is having opinions inside.

It also requires admitting you might be wrong. If you anchor strategy in external KPIs and those KPIs say your brilliant insight is contradicted by market reality, you’ve got to change the strategy. Most leadership teams would rather keep the fantasy and blame execution.

But here’s the thing: once you anchor in external numbers, the OKRs stop being aspirational and start being diagnostic. You’re not setting goals. You’re testing whether your understanding of the market is correct. If your OKRs say you’ll close the gap with competitors and you don’t, either your execution failed or your strategy was based on wrong assumptions.

That’s uncomfortable. It means admitting when the strategy’s broken, not just when the execution stumbled.

The Bit That Won’t Change

Most companies will keep doing it backwards. Strategy first, reality later. Set ambitious OKRs, hope something happens, call it “agile” when they pivot three times in one quarter.

The organisations that figure this out, that anchor strategy in external truth before they write objectives, they’re the ones where OKRs actually work. Not because they’re better at goal-setting. Because their goals are tethered to something real.

Your OKRs can’t save a strategy that was doomed at formulation. But if you start with the numbers that already exist in the world, the strategy writes itself. And the OKRs stop being wishful thinking and start being actual experiments with actual learning.

Most people don’t want that level of honesty. They want the comfort of clear objectives even if those objectives are built on fantasy.

Which explains why 70% of strategic initiatives fail whilst everyone’s hitting their key results.