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OKRs (Objectives and Key Results)

Summary

OKRs pair one qualitative, inspiring Objective with 2–4 quantitative Key Results that prove you reached it — a quarterly-rhythm goal system that complements SMART for standing organisations and longer campaigns.

Body

OKRs were popularised by Andy Grove at Intel and adopted across the tech and non-profit sectors as a lightweight goal system. The structure is:

  • Objective — qualitative, inspiring, time-bound (usually a quarter). Make rent control a mainstream local demand in District X by December.
  • Key Results — 2–4 quantitative measures that prove the objective was reached. Each KR is a number that goes up or down.
    • 3 council candidates publicly endorse rent control.
    • 1,200 tenants signed up to the campaign list.
    • 6 local media mentions of the demand.

KRs are deliberately ambitious — a 0.7 score on a KR is a healthy stretch result, not a failure. The discipline is that OKRs are a direction setting tool, not a performance-management tool — they are reviewed quarterly, not used to evaluate staff.

In a campaign context, OKRs pair with SMART by adding the rhythmic, directional layer: SMART is the test of a single goal’s quality; OKRs are the quarterly cadence that keeps the campaign reading its own movement. They pair particularly well with Kanban for flow: OKRs set the direction, Kanban manages the flow of work.

A common failure mode is treating OKRs as a list of to-dos — write 5 press releases — rather than measures of the change the campaign intends to cause. Campaign-management literature widely warns against this discipline: outputs are easy to count but low-value on their own, and the adjacent People Power Manual’s SMART-objective chapters make the same point about campaign goals more broadly [source: people-power-manual]. A second failure mode is setting KRs the team can already achieve — OKRs should make the team slightly uncomfortable.

Use it for

Quarterly rhythm in standing organisations and longer campaigns; aligning a coalition on what success looks like for the next quarter; pairing with SMART for direction (OKRs) + test (SMART).

Worked examples

  • sunrise-green-new-deal — the Sunrise Movement’s quarterly OKRs: each hub-coordinator’s quarterly OKRs include KR-style targets for one-to-ones held, leader-development conversations completed, and hub-meeting attendance.
  • montgomery-bus-boycott — the MIA’s quarterly cadence: each quarter of the 381-day campaign had named targets for car-pool capacity, mass-meeting attendance, and the legal track’s progress; the implicit OKR discipline kept the campaign reading its own movement.

FAQ

What are OKRs?

OKRs pair one qualitative, inspiring Objective with 2–4 quantitative Key Results that prove you reached it — a quarterly-rhythm goal system that complements SMART goals for standing organisations and longer campaigns [source: people-power-manual]. OKRs were popularised by Andy Grove at Intel and adopted across the tech and non-profit sectors as a lightweight goal system.

What does the OKR structure look like?

The structure is: an Objective — qualitative, inspiring, time-bound (usually a quarter), e.g. Make rent control a mainstream local demand in District X by December; and 2–4 Key Results that are quantitative measures which prove the objective was reached, with each KR being a number that goes up or down [source: people-power-manual]. KRs are deliberately ambitious — a 0.7 score on a KR is a healthy stretch result, not a failure.

How do OKRs differ from SMART goals?

In a campaign context, OKRs pair with SMART goals by adding the rhythmic, directional layer: SMART is the test of a single goal’s quality; OKRs are the quarterly cadence that keeps the campaign reading its own movement [source: people-power-manual]. They pair particularly well with Kanban for flow: OKRs set the direction, Kanban manages the flow of work.

What are common OKR failure modes in campaigns?

A common failure mode is treating OKRs as a list of to-dos — write 5 press releases — rather than measures of the change the campaign intends to cause; outputs are easy to count but low-value on their own, and the adjacent People Power Manual’s SMART-objective chapters make the same point about campaign goals more broadly [source: people-power-manual]. A second failure mode is setting KRs the team can already achieve — OKRs should make the team slightly uncomfortable, since the discipline is that OKRs are a direction-setting tool, not a performance-management tool.

Open Questions

  • 2026-06-23 — No corpus source currently covers OKRs by name. Re-fetch a Bond / NDI / BetterEvaluation / Wikimedia Foundation programme document that covers OKRs before promoting this page to emerging or established.
  • 2026-06-23 — OKRs are mostly an internal-management tool; their adoption in advocacy organisations is uneven. Likely homes for substantive grounding: Wikimedia Foundation’s annual plan documents, the Google OKR playbook, or a Ford Foundation / Open Society programme-evaluation guide.

Sources & verification

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Last verified: 2026-06-23