Every strategy map I've built with a leadership team holds up remarkably well over time. Not perfectly — there's always one objective someone squints at six months later — but the core of it stays intuitive, because it's describing something that already exists. The financial outcomes, the customer perception, the internal capability, the enabling investment: these are large, slow-moving, real things. The map is a description of the business as it actually is. That's why it's grounded.
The OKRs that come out of the same workshop are a different kind of object entirely. I've watched for this since my first sessions and coach against it in every workshop now — it happens less than it used to, but it hasn't gone away entirely, and it's worth naming properly rather than treating it as a minor writing-quality issue.
A strategy map describes reality. An OKR is a claim about the future — specifically, a claim about where someone is going to spend their time and attention for the next quarter. And nothing in the writing process forces that claim to be true.
The "it would be great" version of yourself
Ask someone to write down what they're going to focus on next quarter, in a room, with their manager and peers watching, right after a strategy conversation that's put everyone in an aspirational mood — and you get the OKR equivalent of a New Year's resolution. Not a lie exactly. More like the answer from the version of themselves who has already fixed their calendar problem, already gotten the tool built, already has the data pulled. "It would be great if I could work on this" quietly becomes "I will work on this," and nobody in the room is positioned to catch the substitution, because everyone's doing it a little.
This shows up in three specific, recognisable ways:
- The data doesn't exist yet. The key result assumes a report, a dashboard, or a number that nobody currently tracks. The OKR is really "build the ability to measure this" wearing the costume of "improve this."
- The thing has to be built before the OKR can start. A prerequisite — a system, a hire, a process — sits invisibly underneath the objective, un-scoped and unscheduled, and the OKR clock is running as if it doesn't exist.
- It isn't where the person's time actually goes. The OKR describes the strategic, visible, resume-friendly 20% of the job. The 80% — the meetings, the firefighting, the work that keeps the lights on — isn't in the document at all, which means the document was never actually going to predict behaviour.
Any one of these would be a minor issue. Together, across most of the OKRs in most sessions, they add up to a document that was compromised before the quarter even started — and then everyone is surprised when the quarterly review shows almost no progress against it.
Why cadence is the correction, not the cure
I've written before about OKRs failing because the review cadence gets aimed at the wrong altitude — quarterly reviews that are too infrequent to have actually been part of the decisions they're reporting on, instead of a real weekly rhythm. That's still true. But it's worth being precise about what a good cadence actually fixes here, because it isn't nothing.
A real weekly rhythm is exactly what surfaces this problem in time to do something about it. An OKR that sits there update after update with nothing to report — not because nobody got around to it, but because the number literally can't be pulled, or the underlying system it depends on still doesn't exist — is a signal, not a failure to log. That's the moment to change the key result to reflect what's actually being worked on, or to retire it outright. I've coached clients on this from the start: the silence itself is the data.
So cadence does real work here — it's the mechanism that catches the dishonest OKR before the whole quarter is wasted on it. What it can't do is replace honesty at the point of writing. A team that's disciplined about killing or rewriting stalled OKRs every week will still burn a lot of that discipline on OKRs that never should have been written that way in the first place. Better to write fewer of them dishonestly to begin with, and use the rhythm to catch what still slips through.
What this means for the workshop itself
This is where I think the contribution matrix earns its place in the process, and it's one of the main reasons I lean on it as hard as I do. It's the tool that lets me catch the aspirational OKR in the room, before it ever gets written down.
The matrix exists to ground OKRs in where someone's highest-impact time already goes, not where they'd like it to go. Done properly, it's the thing that stops the aspirational self from writing the OKR unchecked — because the person has just spent an hour scoring their actual contribution against actual objectives, in front of colleagues who will notice if the OKR that follows doesn't match. Done as a box-ticking exercise — rushed, performed, answered the way people think they're supposed to answer rather than how it actually is — it doesn't catch anything, and the OKR inherits whatever fiction was already forming.
The practical implication is uncomfortable but simple: when an OKR requires a prerequisite that doesn't exist, the honest move is to write the prerequisite as the OKR — "stand up the reporting capability" instead of "improve the metric the reporting capability would have measured." When someone's real week is dominated by work that isn't strategic, the honest OKR might be smaller and less exciting than the room wants it to be, and that's a better outcome than a document nobody was ever going to hit.
The strategy map survives because it never asked anyone to promise anything — it just described what was true. OKRs ask for a promise, and the ones that survive contact with a real quarter are the ones that were honest about what was actually being promised in the first place.