Grade, Don't Score
Grade a quarter on evidence, from Excellent to Bad. Do not compute it from 0.0 to 1.0 and call 0.7 a success. Grades decide; percentages inform.
The most popular scoring convention in goal-setting is a laundering operation. It says: score each Key Result from 0.0 to 1.0, treat 0.7 as success, and nobody gets punished for reaching. On paper it protects ambition. In practice, teams learn the real game within two quarters: when a number carries consequences, people do not get braver, they get better at arithmetic. You write a target you privately expect to miss by about thirty percent, land where you always knew you would, and collect the label "ambitious" on the way through.
The tell you can check this afternoon
Pull last quarter's scores. If they cluster between 0.6 and 0.8, you are not looking at performance. You are looking at negotiation, laundered clean.
What we run instead
Two instruments, because one number was never enough. Targets are calibrated to be hit: one hundred percent means what it says, and where a target deliberately stretches it wears a label, aspirational, so nobody pays for the reach. Then the quarter is graded, Excellent to Bad, by judgement with the evidence on the table. Fifty percent progress can grade Excellent if the learning was worth the quarter; one hundred percent can grade Poor if the target was a sandbag all along.
The receipt
When we let a fresh AI rebuild our methodology from our public website, it threw away our grading system and installed 0.7 in its place, in our own voice, confidently. The convention is so deep in the industry average that even a clone defaulted to it. The full mechanism is in That Worked, issue three.
Wiring grades to money, carefully
Team OKRs never touch bonuses; cash on a team's goals kills the candour the whole system runs on. The only grades that reach money belong to the senior team's few strategic OKRs, read together as a gate, moderated by named humans with the rationale written down. The gate reads judgement, not arithmetic, and it only reads the top.
One line to keep: grade, don't score. A team judged on reasoning tells you the truth; a team scored on a percentage learns to manage the percentage.
Scored: "KR hit 0.7, success." Nobody asks whether 0.7 was ever in doubt. Graded: "We reached 55% of a genuine stretch, learned the channel was wrong, changed the bet, Excellent." The number informs; the grade, with evidence, decides.
Isn't 0.7 meant to encourage ambition? +
That is the intent; the effect is the opposite. Because the score carries consequences, teams pre-negotiate targets they can beat, so 0.7 becomes a ceiling dressed as a stretch. Labelled stretch plus evidence-based grading protects ambition without the gaming.
How do you grade fairly without a formula? +
With moderation and written rationale: named humans review the quarter's evidence together, so grades are comparable and defensible. A formula feels fair and quietly rewards sandbagging.
From the ZOKRI OKR Handbook, the methodology we install and maintain. Written by Matt Roberts.
A UK-based strategy and OKR consultant and two-time SaaS founder with a venture-backed exit, Matt turns strategy into execution for teams scaling from tens to thousands. He co-founded ZOKRI in 2018, having previously co-founded Linkdex, a venture-backed enterprise SaaS platform he led to a trade sale. He writes the methodology behind these notes.
Grading on evidence is a discipline leaders have to hold when the numbers get uncomfortable. We install it, coach the retrospective, and design the bonus gate so honesty never costs anyone.