A goal you’re allowed to miss (OKR) · From Zero to Goals, lesson 5 of 17
A goal you’re allowed to miss (OKR)
Tell a commitment from a stretch goal, and know why scoring 0.7 can be a success.
A goal you’re allowed to miss
Not every goal should be hit. That sentence sounds wrong until you see the two kinds: commitments, where 100% is the only acceptable score, and stretch goals, where aiming high and landing at 70% beats aiming safe and landing at 100%.
Mixing them up is the most expensive quiet mistake in goal-setting: stretch a commitment and you break promises; commit a stretch and your team learns to sandbag every target. Brightside is about to make the call on four goals, and so are you.
Four goals, two kinds
Brightside’s Q2 board, all four goals already checkable:
1 · “Grow from 3 to 8 retainer clients by June”: the growth bet.
2 · “Invoice every client within 3 days of month-end”: operational hygiene.
3 · “Content engine: from 0 to 8 published pieces per month”: a muscle Brightside has never had.
4 · “Zero client churn through Q2”: the promise to the current book of business.
Dana wants two of these to be stretch goals, scored 0.0–1.0 at the close, where 0.7 counts as a win.
Which two should be the stretch goals?
Now set the stretch target
Content engine it is: a stretch, scored 0.0–1.0. But a stretch goal still needs its number, and the number is where stretch goals are won or quietly killed. Baseline: zero pieces per month, ever.
Around the table: Leo offers “3 a month, realistic, we’ve never done this”. Priya counters “8, that’s what an engine means”. Someone jokes “15, aim for the stars”. And Sam shrugs: “whatever Dana wants, it’s her company goal.”
Which target goes on the board?
Stretch the unknown, commit the promised
Where the ceiling is unknown and the upside is real: stretch. Where reliability IS the value: commit. One board can hold both kinds; it just has to say which is which out loud, because an unlabelled board gets read as all-commitments by whoever is most anxious.
One condition makes stretch goals possible at all: missing one must be SAFE. The first time somebody is punished for a 0.6, every future target in the company quietly gets sandbagged, and you will never be told that it happened.
This is also the honest answer to “SMART or OKR?”: commitments live happily as SMART sentences, stretch goals want OKR’s shape and its scoring. Pick per goal, not per company.
Label the goal you rebuilt in the last lesson
Take your goal from lesson 1.4 and label it: commitment or stretch? One sentence of why. If it is a stretch, write the score that would still count as a win, before the quarter starts, not after.
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More on frameworks and scoring
All optional, and none of it is needed for the certificate. Each opens in a new tab, so your place in the lesson is kept.
- OKR vs SMART goals: which when ↗The short comparison, for the moment you have to defend picking one per goal instead of one per company.3 min read
- What an OKR actually is ↗The definition before anyone sells you a tool for it, including what a key result is not.5 min read