Perdoo

OKR programs rarely fail because of the framework. They fail because the discipline runs out. The first quarter is easy. The fifth is where most companies quit. To keep OKRs alive, protect the cadence, hold leadership to the same standard as everyone else, and measure the program's health, not just goal progress. At your next quarterly OKR review, add one question: "Are we still doing this the way we said we would, and if not, why not?"

Your strategy probably isn't the problem. The problem is that the strategy never made it past the executive floor. Donald Sull's research at MIT Sloan, based on surveys of 7,600 managers across 262 companies, found that even when middle managers are given five chances to list their company's top five strategic priorities, only 55% can name even one of them. Kaplan and Norton's earlier research found similar gaps: at one major Mobil division, only 20% of employees understood the strategy before a Balanced Scorecard rollout. McKinsey's 2024-2025 strategy survey of executives shows the situation getting worse. If your OKR rollout has stalled at the leadership layer, your strategy has stalled with it. The cost isn't just that 80% of execution is missing. It’s also that the 20% of execution you do have is quietly being undermined by the rest of the org.

The mistake leaders keep making is setting goals on outputs (activities, things you do) instead of outcomes (results, things that happen as a consequence). Uber put 5,000 engineers on uncapped AI tooling, ranked teams by tokens burned, watched usage shoot from 32% to 84%, and then their COO had to admit he couldn't draw a line between any of that spend and a single consumer improvement. Token usage is an output. The product getting better is an outcome. When you make the output the goal, teams optimize the output. The number goes up. The thing you actually wanted barely moves. This isn't an AI problem. It's a goal-setting problem, and it happens every time leaders measure how busy the team is instead of what the team delivered.

OKR maturity moves through 5 stages: Exploring, Piloting, Mastering, Embedding, and Strategizing. Most companies never make it past Piloting, where they try OKRs but never become the boss of the framework. To move up, stop asking "did we update our OKRs this week?" and start asking "what did our last cycle teach us about how we run the company?" Do that at your next leadership meeting and the rest of the journey gets clearer fast.

Organizations spend almost all their time running operations and almost none improving them. That imbalance kills strategy execution. OKRs, KPIs, and a dedicated platform like Perdoo can fix it by making improvement visible, owned, and measurable.

OKRs require 5 distinct mindset shifts: output to outcome, individual to team, annual to continuous, perfect plans to learning loops, and "hit the number" to "what did we learn." Leaders drive the shift through behavior, not slides. Start this week by replacing the question "what did you do this week?" with "what changed on our Key Results this week, and why?"

Martin: So Perdoo is essentially a "stick to your veggies" platform? Henrik: In a way, yes. 😂

Key Takeaway: Setting specific, ambitious goals lifts an average team to the 80th percentile of performance. Add measurable metrics and regular feedback on progress, and that jumps to the 88th percentile. That's the top 12%! This is one of the most replicated findings in organizational psychology, with over 500 studies behind it.

KPIs monitor business as usual. They don't drive change, close strategic gaps, or turn ambition into action. Companies that rely only on KPIs end up optimizing the present while their future quietly slips away. To actually move forward, you need a second type of goal alongside your KPIs: change goals. Otherwise your organization is like a car without a steering wheel.