Staring at the ‘Aspirational’ column of the spreadsheet until the gridlines begin to vibrate is a specific kind of modern torture. It is 10:12 PM, and the blue light from the monitor is doing something unkind to my retinas. Around me, the office is a graveyard of half-empty LaCroix cans and discarded sticky notes. We are in the thick of Q4 planning, a ritual that is ostensibly about ‘alignment’ and ‘velocity’ but is actually a high-stakes exercise in creative fiction. I find myself clicking my pen rhythmically, a habit I picked up after realizing I have spent 42 percent of my adult life in rooms where we pretend that numbers are feelings and feelings are metrics.
We are currently ‘reverse-engineering’ our goals. This is the corporate equivalent of deciding you want to win a marathon by first checking if you can run to the mailbox without collapsing, and then writing a manifesto about the ‘Strategic Importance of Aerobic Superiority.’ We know exactly what we can achieve. But we can’t just put those down. That wouldn’t be ‘ambitious.’ So, we dress them up.
The Herd Safety Mechanism
“When you tell a group of people that they must aim for the moon but will be judged on whether they land on a specific crater, they don’t aim for the moon. They build a very convincing simulation of a moon landing in their backyard and hope the telescope is blurry.”
Fatima T.-M., Crowd Behavior Researcher
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The Data of Deception
Value Claimed
Employees Sandbagging
The Exhaustion of Math
This is the systemic failure of the OKR. It was designed to foster a culture of ‘failing fast,’ but when you tie those stars to a performance review, the stars suddenly look a lot like low-hanging fruit. I’ve done it myself. Last year, I claimed my team would increase user engagement by 42 percent. I knew, with a certainty that bordered on the religious, that we would likely hit 22 percent.
I spent the next three months managing expectations, massaging the data, and eventually ‘pivoting’ the metric so that our 22 percent increase looked like a 102 percent achievement of a ‘sub-goal.’ It was exhausting. It was also, technically, a lie. I’m not proud of it, but I like being able to afford my mortgage, and my manager likes having a team that ‘meets expectations’ on paper.
The tragedy of the modern office is that we have replaced the joy of building something real with the anxiety of reporting something impressive.
Honesty vs. Growth Mindset
We have lost the ability to be honest about our limitations because honesty is seen as a lack of ‘growth mindset.’ If I tell you I can only do five things this quarter, I’m a pessimist. If I tell you I’ll do twelve things and I only do six, I’m an ‘ambitious leader who learned from a miss.’ The math doesn’t work, yet we keep doing it.
But in the digital, white-collar ether, everything is negotiable. We live in the 70 percent. We have been taught that hitting 70 percent of a goal is the ‘sweet spot’ of OKRs. But what happens to the other 32 percent? It becomes the ‘debt’ of the organization. We are building a world of 70 percent-ers, and we wonder why everything feels slightly broken.
Organizational Debt Accumulation
30% Unmet Potential
The Safety of the Middle
Fatima T.-M. calls this ‘The Safety of the Middle.’ In her research, she found that the most productive teams weren’t the ones with the highest OKR scores, but the ones with the highest levels of ‘psychological safety’-the ability to say, ‘This is impossible,’ or ‘I failed,’ without being punished.
Psychological Safety
Saying “I failed” without penalty.
Unrealistic Stretch
Ties stars to performance reviews.
Theater of Success
Nodding when the emperor is naked.
Most OKR implementations do the exact opposite. They create a theater of success where everyone is terrified to admit that the emperor is naked. I remember a meeting where a director spent 32 minutes explaining why a 12 percent drop in retention was actually a ‘strategic re-segmenting’ of the user base. We all nodded. We had to.
What If We Just Stopped?
So, we continue. I will finish this spreadsheet. I will ensure that Objective 3: ‘Synergize Cross-Functional Workflow Efficiency’ has three Key Results that look difficult but are actually 92 percent within our control. We will all feel a temporary sense of relief that the theater has been successfully staged for another quarter. We will talk about ‘owning our failures,’ while secretly checking our 401ks and wondering if we can make it another 12 years before the whole house of cards collapses.
The Survival Strategy
I think about Fatima T.-M.’s wildebeests. They run in a pack because the odds of being eaten are lower when you’re surrounded by 1222 other animals. In the corporate world, the ‘stretch goal’ is the predator. If you stand too far out in front, you get noticed. If you fall too far behind, you get cut. So you stay in the middle. You aim for the 70 percent. You keep your head down and your spreadsheet up.
(The lie takes a long time to perfect)
Sometimes, in the quiet moments between meetings, I imagine a different kind of workplace. One where we set goals because we actually want to achieve them, not because we need to justify our existence. In that world, we might actually build something as clear and honest as a glass wall. But until then, I have 12 more cells to fill in this spreadsheet, and the font needs to be exactly 10.2 point for the VP to take it seriously. I’ll probably stay until midnight. Not because the work is hard, but because the lie takes a long time to perfect.
