When Mathias first introduced OKRs at his company, he wanted clearer priorities, more visibility, and a stronger sense of progress. Working with his coach helped him see something underneath that desire: his own impatience and discomfort with losing sight of everyone's work as the company grew. A new framework couldn't do the work of leadership for him.
In this episode of The Intentional Organization Podcast, Mathias Meyer and Sara Hicks revisit their experiences with objectives and key results, from goals handed down by executives to metrics that made little sense for the teams expected to deliver them. They explore why OKRs struggle when strategy is unclear or trust is low, and how making work visible can slip into monitoring and control.
The conversation covers Goodhart's Law, the cobra effect, and the unintended consequences of incentives, with examples from sales targets, customer churn, and quarterly discounts. Sara and Mathias discuss the difficulty of measuring culture, relationships, and learning; the friction of competing goals across teams; and why involving people in setting goals matters. They also look back at management by objectives, Andy Grove's approach to planning, and the temptation to copy a successful company's framework without understanding its context.
Their practical starting point is simple: clarify the direction of the business, pick a few shared priorities, and agree on how to assess progress. Start small, review honestly, and use what you learn to adjust. They close with personal updates on yoga, handstand practice, Obsidian, and a red lentil coconut curry soup, plus a hint of a future conversation about OKRs
Keywords
OKRs, objectives and key results, goal setting, strategy, leadership, trust, workplace culture, incentives, Goodhart's Law, cobra effect, metrics, cross-team collaboration
Takeaways
- Before introducing a framework, ask what problem you're trying to solve and whether your own need for visibility or urgency is driving the decision.
- OKRs can't substitute for a clear strategy, a shared mission, or trust within a team.
- Making work visible can help people coordinate, but using metrics as a means of control can turn planning into a compliance exercise.
- Targets and financial incentives can encourage people to optimize a number at the expense of the outcome you actually want.
- Set goals with the people who will work toward them, including a conversation about the support and resources they need.
- Lagging indicators such as churn and revenue don't always tell a team what it can directly influence or what to change next.
- Discuss dependencies across teams before committing to goals. Separate departmental targets can create competing priorities and leave essential work unsupported.
- Culture, relationships, and learning matter even when they don't fit neatly into a measurable key result.
- Using OKRs to judge individual performance can encourage sandbagging and obscure the conditions affecting someone's work.
- Start with two or three priorities, agree on a review period, and learn from what happens. You don't have to call them OKRs to make them useful.
