For a few years, OKRs were treated as the strategy. Set the objectives, write the key results, and the rest would apparently take care of itself. That version of the story is quietly ending — not because OKRs stopped working, but because more leadership teams are realising OKRs were never meant to carry the whole load on their own.
Microsoft's decision to retire Viva Goals at the end of 2025 was the clearest public signal of this shift. It wasn't that OKRs had failed as a framework — it was that a standalone tool built purely around tracking objectives couldn't justify itself once teams realised tracking wasn't the hard part. Writing a good OKR was never the bottleneck. Making it survive contact with an ordinary week was.
The framing has changed, not the framework
The current thinking among people who've spent years running OKR programs — not just selling them — is that OKRs work best as one instrument inside a much wider strategy execution practice, not as a stand-alone initiative in their own right. That's a meaningful shift in framing. It means the question worth asking isn't "are we doing OKRs correctly," it's "what is the OKR actually plugged into?"
Most of the time, the honest answer is: not much. The objective was written well. The key results were measurable. And then the quarter started, the calendar filled up, and nobody revisited it until the next planning cycle, at which point everyone quietly agreed to write a new one and not mention that the last one never really moved.
Enter the Value Creation Plan
If you spend any time in the private equity world right now, you'll hear a different term doing a lot of the same work: the Value Creation Plan, or VCP. It's the operating blueprint a PE firm builds with a portfolio company's leadership to grow enterprise value over the hold period — financial targets, named initiatives, clear ownership, all tied to a timeline.
The reason VCPs matter more than ever right now isn't fashion, it's arithmetic. Bain's 2026 Global Private Equity Report puts it plainly: today's deals need roughly 12% annual EBITDA growth to hit the return benchmarks that used to require only 5%. Multiple expansion and cheap debt aren't reliable levers anymore. The only repeatable one left is actually running the business better — which means the plan has to be real, not a slide from the diligence deck that nobody opens again until exit.
A Value Creation Plan and a well-run OKR program are trying to solve the same underlying problem from two different doors: how do you make sure a leadership team's stated priorities actually change what happens day to day. Neither one succeeds by existing as a document. Both succeed, or fail, on the same three things — clear ownership, a way to measure real progress, and a rhythm that forces the team to look at it regularly.
What this means in practice
If you're running OKRs today, the fix usually isn't a better OKR-writing workshop. It's connecting what you've already written to the rest of the operating structure:
- Strategic priority — is the OKR actually derived from an agreed strategic map, or was it written in isolation by whoever owns that department?
- Contribution — does everyone in the room understand how their work actually affects the priority the OKR is meant to serve?
- Leadership rhythm — is there a standing, recurring review where this gets looked at with real decision-making authority in the room, or does it live on a dashboard nobody opens?
That's the same structure whether you call the output an OKR, a Value Creation Plan, or something else entirely. The label matters less than whether the four pieces are actually connected to each other. That connective structure — not the framework you pick — is the part that's genuinely hard to build, and the part most programs skip.
OKRs aren't on their way out. They're being put back in their proper place: a useful, well-understood way of expressing a priority as something measurable — one working part of a bigger system, not the whole strategy on its own.