What cascading gets wrong
Rigid cascades assume strategy decomposes neatly along the org chart. It does not. Strategic objectives are mostly cross-functional, so forcing them down reporting lines creates OKRs that describe each function\u2019s fragment of the work rather than the outcome anyone actually cares about. Teams end up owning arithmetic slices of a number, autonomy disappears, and OKRs become the performance-management paperwork everyone warned you about.
Alignment through articulation
- Keep hierarchies shallow: company objectives, then team OKRs that explicitly connect to them.
- Teams draft their own OKRs against the strategic bets, then alignment is negotiated, not imposed.
- Cross-team dependencies get surfaced and committed before the quarter starts.
- Every team can articulate how their OKR advances a strategic choice; if they cannot, it is not an OKR.
Alignment is a conversation the framework forces you to have, not a spreadsheet operation. That is why it works.