Key Result narratives
A Key Result narrative is the short written case beneath the number: why this measure, why this target, what we believe will move it, and what would show us we were wrong.
This is chapter 7 of From Trading to Scaling, “The Goals”. The book is free and takes about an hour.
The obvious bit
A number on its own carries no reasoning, so nobody can disagree with it usefully and nobody can learn from it afterwards.
Three months later the goal missed. Was the belief wrong, the target wrong, or the execution? Without the narrative, that argument is settled by whoever remembers it most confidently, which isn't the same as correctly.
What goes in it
Three or four sentences. Not a business case, and the brevity is deliberate: a narrative that takes a page won't get written and won't get read.
Why this measure. Where it sits on the metric tree, and what it's a proxy for if it's one.
Why this target. The baseline, the stretch, and the argument for the gap.
What we believe will move it. The causal claim, stated plainly enough that someone could disagree.
What would show us we were wrong. The most valuable line and the one most often missing. It converts the goal from an assertion into something testable.
Why it's worth the ten minutes
It catches bad goals before the cycle starts. A measure whose narrative can't be written is usually a measure chosen because it was available. That discovery in planning is cheap; in week ten it's not.
It makes the retrospective possible. The first question in any honest retro is what did we believe. If that was never written, the session becomes a discussion of feelings.
It survives people leaving. The reasoning existed once, in somebody's head, and then that person moved on. The narrative is the cheapest defence against organisational amnesia there is.
It makes alignment real. Two teams can have compatible numbers and incompatible beliefs. Only the narrative shows that.
The failure modes
The narrative written after approval. Retro-fitted justification, which teaches nothing because the reasoning didn't shape the choice.
The narrative that restates the number. “We will increase retention because retention is important.” No claim, nothing to be wrong about.
The narrative with no falsifier. Comfortable, and useless in the retro.
The narrative nobody reads. Usually a length problem. Four sentences get read. A page does not.
Our opinion
This is the highest-value ten minutes in goal setting, and the first thing dropped when planning runs late.
The tell is simple. If your team can't write four sentences explaining why a Key Result is the right one, the problem isn't the writing. It's that nobody is sure, and the number was going to hide that for a quarter.
One line to keep: a Key Result without its narrative is a number you can't argue with, which means it's a number you can't learn from.
How long should a narrative be? +
Three or four sentences. Long enough to carry the belief and the falsifier, short enough that people actually read it in the review.
Who writes it? +
The team that owns the Key Result, at the time they propose it. Written afterwards it becomes justification, and justification teaches nobody anything.
What is the most important line? +
What would show us we were wrong. It's the line most often left out, and it's the one that makes the goal testable rather than merely asserted.
From the ZOKRI OKR Handbook, the methodology we install and maintain. Written by Matt Roberts.
Matt leads enterprise OKR implementations at ZOKRI with Peter Kerr. Across the team that's 100+ implementations in 15+ enterprise organisations, from banks to car makers, in several countries and rather more time zones. Before ZOKRI he co-founded Linkdex, an enterprise SaaS platform, and sold it. He writes the method behind these notes, most of it learned the hard way in other people's leadership meetings.
We coach the narrative habit in the first planning cycle. It adds ten minutes per Key Result and removes most of the arguments you would otherwise have in week ten.
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