OKR - Waterfall of the Agile Era

OKR ("Objectives and Key Results") were meant to bring transparency and focus to teams and organisations.

The way I see OKR being implemented often, has more in common with the denounced waterfall, than with agile methodologies. They start as top-down declarations of intent, polished into slides. Then they get handed down with the expectation to reach all those goals. Consequently, teams spend precious time retrofitting their actual work to match key results, rather than letting goals emerge from validated learning and iteration.

The irony: in trying to drive agility through metrics, the same command-and-control dynamics you were trying to escape are recreated: Fake alignment, shallow metrics, and a drift back into rigidity.

Maybe it's time to admit that if you're hunting down quarterly goals more than you're experimenting and listening to users, you're not being agile, you're just rebranding waterfall. Start treating goals as hypotheses, instead of contracts, to escape this insanity.