EN
Everyone agreed. And yet it didn't happen.
Board consensus is meaningless without the dialogue that led up to it.
Basics
The question is not OKR or OGSM. The question is what your organization currently lacks.
Introduction
Last week, I spoke with a director who, after a year and a half of OKRs, didn't know if the organization was any closer to its stated ambition than the year before. The key results had been achieved, and quarterly figures were largely positive. But no one could really answer why that mattered.
But that's not an OKR problem.
OKR is a good tool for organizations that know where they want to go in the short term. It accelerates progress. But it doesn't provide true direction. OKR doesn't incorporate the question of how to get there, the explicit strategic choice. It starts with an Objective and immediately moves to measurement and action. That's not strategy; that's merely ambition translated into logic.
The step that makes the difference
OGSM forces you to take the strategy step. The Strategies are explicit choices for an approach, a clear demarcation. This makes OGSM more suitable for organizations where the bottleneck isn't speed, but direction.
That's not to say OGSM is always the answer. It's not a tool for weekly sprint reviews; it's an annual anchor. For teams that need to adapt quickly at an operational level, that can feel too slow. In such cases, OKRs at the team level can function perfectly alongside an OGSM at the executive level. But that combination only works if the executive strategy is clear enough to give teams direction. Without that foundation, OKRs accelerate in the wrong direction.
Direction or Speed
Most mid-sized organizations I speak with don't have a speed problem. They have strategy documents, but no shared understanding of what those documents mean for daily decisions. Team leaders know the goal, but not which choices were made at the executive level to achieve it. And so, everyone fills in those choices themselves.
What's missing in your organization right now? If the answer is: we're moving too slowly, look into OKRs. If the answer is: we're not sure if we're moving in the right direction, then start with OGSM.
The question I then ask is: is the connection between your executive strategy and team goals explicit, or is it assumed? That distinction determines more than which framework you choose.
The framework isn't the problem. The question you ask yourself before choosing one, that's the starting point.
