Goal setting is one of the most powerful drivers of organizational performance and personal growth. Done well, it provides clarity, direction, and motivation. Done poorly, it can lead to stagnation, sandbagging, or overwhelming frustration. John Doerr’s Measure What Matters1 popularized Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) as a framework that balances ambition with execution, helping individuals and organizations achieve extraordinary outcomes.
Central to the OKR framework is the art of setting the right kind of goals; stretching enough to inspire, but not so daunting as to paralyze. To succeed, leaders must understand aspirational OKRs, stretch goals, and the OKR scoring methodology that evaluates progress.
Aspirational OKRs: Reaching for the Extraordinary
Aspirational OKRs are bold, big-picture ambitions that make us think beyond the ordinary. In Doerr’s words, these are “moonshots” or goals that communicate vision and inspire people to think about more than just business as usual.
For example, Google’s early aspirational goal was to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” No single project could accomplish that, but it served as a guiding star. Aspirational OKRs create meaning: they answer the “why” behind the work and invite teams to see themselves as part of something larger.
The challenge, however, is ensuring these lofty ambitions don’t drift into vague slogans.
Properly set objectives should be ambitious, and also clear & tangible. They challenge individuals and teams to go further than they believe possible. Doerr points out that the best OKRs are deliberately set at a level where success is not guaranteed, ideally, around a 60–70% achievement rate. What happens if the goals are set too low, or too high?
The Sandbagging Effect: The Danger of Playing It Too Safe
One of the most insidious traps in goal setting is sandbagging, which is the tendency to set goals so modest that success is virtually guaranteed. While this can provide a short-term dopamine hit (“we met our goals!”), it undermines long-term performance.
Sandbagging reduces innovation because teams don’t need to experiment or take risks. It can also erode trust, as leaders begin to suspect teams are playing it safe to secure favorable scores. Doerr warns that if OKRs are consistently met at 100%, it’s a red flag: the organization is underreaching.
In practice, sandbagging creates a ceiling rather than a floor for performance. Instead of aiming for what is possible, teams aim for what is certain—leading to incrementalism at best, stagnation at worst.
The Other Extreme: Overwhelming and Unachievable Goals
If sandbagging represents one end of the spectrum, the other is setting goals so ambitious they feel impossible. While aspirational OKRs are meant to stretch, goals that are entirely unachievable can lead to frustration, disengagement, and even cynicism.
Psychological research2 shows that when individuals perceive a goal as out of reach, motivation plummets. Instead of inspiring innovation, the goal becomes a demoralizing reminder of inadequacy. Teams may disengage, rationalize failure, or burn out from overexertion.
This highlights the importance of calibrating OKRs to fall into the “sweet spot”: hard enough to demand new thinking, but not so hard they trigger paralysis. How do you know when you’ve got it right? A good stretch goal should feel “uncomfortably exciting”. It will inspire us to try but make us wonder if it can really be done.
Psychological Safety is the Key to Ambitious Goal Setting
For OKR stretch goals to work well, teams must feel safe to fail. OKR psychological safety, the intersection of OKRs with a culture of trust, is the belief that one can take risks, make mistakes, and voice ideas without fear of ridicule or punishment.3
OKRs thrive in company cultures where failure is treated as data, not disaster. If missing a goal leads to blame or punishment, people will naturally revert to sandbagging. But when leaders frame shortfalls as learning opportunities, teams feel empowered to push outside their comfort zones.
Psychological safety turns ambitious goals into laboratories of growth. It allows individuals to embrace the unknown, experiment with new approaches, and learn from setbacks, transforming failure into progress. Making these expectations clearly known to everyone at the beginning will avoid the anxiety that comes from trying hit 100% of the goal.
OKRs Help Us to Stretch Without Breaking
In the right environment, OKRs bring structure to this tension between aspiration and feasibility. Objectives capture the “what” while Key Results define the “how” in measurable terms. The objective aims high, the key results keep us grounded in reality. OKRs are inspiring AND trackable. They help us to stretch and understand by how much.
The optimal progress amount is around 70% of the objective. This signals that teams are aiming high but still making tangible progress. If a team hits 100% consistently, the goals were likely too easy. If they only hit 30%, the goals may have been unrealistic. 70% is your ideal “stretch zone”. How do you know if you’ve set the right level for your objectives and your OKR has helped your team stretch sufficiently? This is were an OKR review comes into play.
The OKR Reflect and Score Meeting
An important part of a healthy OKR practice is adherence to the OKR Cycle. At a regular and consistent time (usually at the end of a quarter), the team should get together and evaluate their OKR effectiveness at the Reflect and Score Meeting. The iterative cycle of OKR review and scoring helps organizations fine-tune their balance of ambition and execution. Two things should be considered at this meeting:
- How close did we come to meeting the goal? (the amount of progress)
- How effective was the OKR itself? (the quality of the goal)
Although they are related, it is important to consider these two ideas separately. Most teams just measure the progress toward the Key Result and don’t consider the rest. This is where OKR scoring methodology plays an important role. By applying a consistent scoring scale (Google used a 0.0 to 1.0 scale4, however a 0–10 scale is popular too) organizations can evaluate how far they have progressed, even when goals are not fully achieved. When grading the effectiveness of the OKR, ask these questions:
- how much impact did we have?
- was it a stretch for us?
- how much did we learn?
A score of 0.7 signals strong performance on an ambitious objective, while a 1.0 often signals the goal was set too low.
| Objective: Grow business in the western division | |||
| Key Result | Progress | Score | Self Assessment |
| Bring in 10 new customers | 70% | 0.9 | This OKR was significantly tougher to achieve than we thought. Seven new customers is awesome. We really had to stretch for this. |
| Increase units sold from 100 to 150 | 100% | .7 | We easily reached the goal by the second month. This key result was set too low. We can do much more! |
| Make 10 cold calls per day | 90% | 0.5 | We made lots of calls but this did not have the effect on sales that we were hoping for. |
*sample OKR scorecard
The regular reflect and score meeting allows leaders to determine whether goals are consistently too easy, too hard, or just right. OKR scoring is about more than checking boxes, more than just completion rates – it’s about impact. Did the OKRs drive innovation? Did they stretch capabilities? Did they contribute to the aspirational vision? Leaders must look beyond the scoreboard to evaluate whether OKRs are serving their true purpose: inspiring extraordinary outcomes.
Conclusion: The Goldilocks Zone of Goal Setting
Aspirational OKRs, stretch goals, and psychological safety together create a powerful system for driving progress. But the effectiveness of this system depends on striking the right balance:
- Too easy, and goals breed complacency.
- Too hard, and they provoke discouragement.
- Just right, and they unlock creativity, growth, and achievement.
In the end, achieving 100% of goals is not the ultimate sign of success—it may actually be a warning signal. True success lies in how effectively OKRs inspire progress toward the extraordinary.
Footnotes
- Doerr, J. Measure What Matters. Penguin, 2018.
- Höpfner, J. Keith, N. Goal missed, self hit: Goal-setting, goal-failure, and their affective, motivational, and behavioral consequences. Frontiers, (2021, September 16)
- Edmondson, A. Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Jun., 1999), pp. 350-383
- Google re: Work, Set Goals with OKRs