Of five reasons objectives fall over, only one is a reason not to start at all

When we started digging, it turned out the problem didn't lie in the objectives. The board and some of the directors needed control at the level of the individual task: who had arranged to meet whom, why now and not later. Working with objectives takes that control away, because it moves the conversation to results and assumes that the team itself decides how to get there. On top of that came transparency, meaning saying openly what isn't going well and asking for support, and in that culture showing weakness was not welcome. After one quarter we ended the implementation and the company stayed with its indicators. This is not a story about a company that failed to understand something. It is thriving and making money, it is simply managed differently, and a conscious answer that we don't want to hand autonomy to teams is a perfectly legitimate answer.

The second pattern is our own, and of the whole list the most embarrassing. For the first few years we worked to a model: we come in, run an audit, hold workshops, help write annual goals and quarterly objectives, and leave. The first quarter looked promising, and then people lost interest in the objectives, the objectives stopped being needed and the organisation went back to its old way of working. By the third or fourth implementation we had changed the model to one in which we stay with the change week in, week out. Implementing objectives is building a habit, and a habit needs repetition for at least two quarters. Without it, old habits win at the first difficult moment. The research we cite in the episode speaks of 66 days, with a range from 18 to 254 days, but it concerns individual people, not teams and not organisations.

The remaining three patterns add up to the same sentence: the method reveals a problem it didn't create. When the company already has another way of working, implementing a whole framework alongside it turns the objectives into an add-on, and the rest of reality crushes them; usually it is enough to add the missing building block, for example just the way of writing objectives or synchronising the metrics. When management skills are low, objectives won't fix anything, they will only show how big the problem is, and that is when people say OKRs don't work. And when the board agrees on paper but doesn't come back to the objectives in day-to-day decisions, in planning and in meetings, the organisation hears one thing and sees another. That is worse than a lack of agreement, because it eats away at the company from within.