21 July 2026
When OKRs stall in mid-market shops
Between eighty and four hundred people, OKRs often arrive as a cultural project. They stall as a reporting project. The stall is predictable, and another reset rarely fixes it.
The pattern looks like this. A leadership offsite produces objectives that sound like strategy. Key results are written as activities because nobody trusts a weekly number. A shared sheet is created. By week six, updates are copied from last month. By week twelve, someone proposes a software tool. By week twenty, the tool is a second source of truth fighting finance.
Mid-market firms do not fail at OKRs because they lack ambition. They fail because they still need a Wednesday figure for operations, and OKRs were never designed to be that figure. Ambition and the weekly craft can coexist. They should not be asked to live in the same cell.
Our quieter alternative is unfashionable. Keep a short scoreline for the operating week. Keep a separate, smaller set of bets for the year, reviewed monthly, without pretending they are leading indicators of Thursday’s pick rate. If you want language for the weekly craft, that is what the intensive is for. If you want a slogan for the year, write it on a wall and stop asking supervisors to grade it every Friday.
We have sat with teams who kept OKRs after working with us. We asked only that they stop using the OKR sheet as a substitute for the disputed-number protocol. Most of the stall was not philosophy. It was two systems claiming to be the same conversation.