Thank you for a thorough answer to my ongoing question. I learn and have learned from you regularly over the years.

I see OKRs as a gateway to agility. Here's why: if done well, they don't contain any features which forces a team to figure out the best way to achieve certain behavior changes in their target audiences. Sometimes those target audiences will be customers or users, sometimes they'll be 3rd party vendors and yet other times they may be internal staff.

Setting team goals (regardless of who the team is) this way ensures everybody in the organization is always enthusiastically skeptical of the work they're doing. Is this the best HR policy? Do the customer service scripts I rewrote make CS reps more efficient? Is the new 3-step shopping flow really the best checkout user experience?

If the behavior changes we set as key results are achieved or at least we trend towards them, teams (of any kind) have an objective barometer of the accuracy of the work they've chosen to build and the way they've implemented it. If not, they have an obligation to change course. Changing course based on evidence is agility. In this way I see OKRs as the precursor for agility.

I'll admit there are teams in the company for whom taking their work and creating a human behavior goal (Key result) for can be difficult and at times unclear. However, when applied broadly OKRs force everyone on the team to think about their "customer" and whether or not they're meting their needs which is a second huge benefit of this approach.

Does that then "over salt" the system? It could if every single team has a unique set of KR's to hit and is doing so in their own bubble. This is a real risk, I'll admit but there are ways around that too (https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/okrs-at-scale/).

...and I continue to noodle on this. Thanks again for sharing your expertise.