The OKR TRAP Most Companies Fall Into

Are your OKRs actually driving performance or quietly rewarding mediocrity? Daniel Terhorst-North unpacks what’s gone wrong with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in modern organisations. Inspired by Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives and Andy Grove’s evolution of that thinking at Intel, OKRs were designed to be aspirational, exciting, and a little bit scary. So why are so many teams using them like glorified KPIs? Daniel explores: • The real difference between KPI vs OKR • Why most OKRs are defined incorrectly • How to write objectives that inspire rather than manage • What a key result really is (“Who does what by how much”) • Why tracking activity instead of behaviour change is a trap • How misusing OKRs leads to sandbagging and “lowballing” • Why comparing actuals vs planned drags you back to 1970s management thinking For leaders in software engineering, software development, and modern tech organisations, this conversation goes deep into goal setting, motivation, and busines