When OKRs and KPIs Become Corporate Fiction

Disconnected KPIs

There’s a special kind of theater happening in many organizations. It looks strategic. It uses numbers. It appears on dashboards and in monthly leadership reviews. But it’s fiction. Fiction dressed as performance management.

We’re talking about KPIs – Key Performance Indicators – that are defined in isolation from reality. KPIs set without understanding the actual capacity of your people, the systems they work within, the tools they use (or don’t), or the actual time it takes to do the work well. KPIs that sound ambitious but are operationally meaningless. That reference best practices from companies with ten times your headcount. That show up in slides as vision, but on the floor as anxiety.

These KPIs are not goals. They are signals. Signals that your leadership is disconnected. That your systems are performative. That the people setting the targets don’t understand the terrain they’re managing.

We see it all the time.

A team of five is told to double output based on a benchmark from a whitepaper pulled from LinkedIn. The product team is told to ship new features on a cadence built for an org with four times the engineering capacity. HR is told to “increase engagement by 20%” with no budget, no new tools, and a hiring freeze. A new KPI appears: “reduce time-to-hire by 50%.” But the same team still uses a six-step approval process and outdated ATS. No one asks: With what resources? In what timeframe? At what cost to quality?

It’s easy to slap KPIs on a wall. It’s harder to interrogate them. To ask:

What assumptions is this based on?
What capability does it require to execute well?
Do we have that capability? If not, are we building it?
What happens to the people if we chase this metric at all costs?

But instead, KPIs become symbolic. They are management aesthetics. They signal that “we’re measuring things,” even if what’s being measured is detached from how the work actually happens.

This is how performance becomes robotic.

Not because people are machines, but because management starts treating them like they are. We stop looking at context. We stop asking what’s needed to achieve the outcome. Instead, we chase the number. And the number, unmoored from systems thinking or human understanding, becomes hollow. It becomes a stressor. A blunt tool. A monthly reminder that you’re being asked to run harder on a treadmill with missing parts.

This approach doesn’t drive excellence. It drives exhaustion. It breeds cynicism. And worse it creates a disconnect between leaders and teams that erodes trust.

People stop believing in the process.
They stop raising red flags.
They start gaming the metrics.
And suddenly, you’re “on target” but off track.

KPIs Without Self-Awareness Are Delusions, Not Targets

The most dangerous performance goals aren’t the ones you miss. They’re the ones you set based on fantasy, on assumptions about: capacity, clarity, skill, and system readiness that simply don’t hold up. KPIs without organizational self-awareness are not strategy. They’re performance art. They’re corporate storytelling dressed up as accountability.

You can’t manage what you don’t understand. You can’t optimize what hasn’t been stabilized. You can’t hold people to numbers they never had the tools, time, or training to reach. And you can’t claim “ambition” while designing systems that quietly set your teams up to fail.

Let’s break down exactly where this disconnect happens and how to fix it…

Assumed Capacity Is Not Real Capacity

Setting a goal doesn’t create the people to fulfill it. Yet many organizations set KPIs as if capacity is unlimited or elastic, like saying “launch four new initiatives this quarter” when the same three people are already at 90% utilization. Headcount does not equal bandwidth. And team motivation doesn’t cancel out system limits.

If you haven’t audited your real working capacity, factoring in meetings, tech debt, knowledge gaps, and current load, you’re just assigning pressure, not planning for outcomes.

Clarity Must Come Before Velocity

A fast team with unclear goals is just an efficient engine driving into a fog. KPIs often assume that everyone understands the “why”, the “what”, and the success criteria. In reality, clarity is uneven and silence in meetings isn’t agreement.

When goals are handed down instead of co-designed, they often miss local constraints, contextual nuance, or conflicting priorities. What looks clear in a slide deck can feel like noise on the ground. Before you launch the KPI, ask if the problem and the path are truly understood by everyone involved.

Skill Gaps Aren’t Solved By Deadlines

You can’t timeline your way out of a capability deficit. If your KPI requires storytelling, data synthesis, systems thinking, or cross-functional influence, but the team’s current skillset hasn’t been assessed or developed, then the KPI is just a countdown to frustration.

Great KPIs are backed by capacity-building. That means audits, learning, mentorship, and recognition of growth over time. Skill scaffolding isn’t extra, it’s the foundation.

Systems That “Kind of Work” Don’t Scale

Maybe your team is still moving. Maybe the dashboard loads (eventually). Maybe the approvals eventually flow. But KPIs assume seamlessness. And most organizations aren’t seamless, they’re held together by duct tape, clever hacks, Slack messages, and someone named Priya who remembers how things actually work. You can’t set high-stakes performance metrics on top of broken or brittle infrastructure.

Co-Creation Is Not Optional

The era of top-down metric enforcement is over. High-performing organizations build KPIs in partnership with the people doing the work. That means defining what matters, how it’s measured, and what’s truly within reach, together. When goals are co-created, they carry more trust. More nuance. More commitment. And they generate less resistance because they reflect reality, not just aspiration.

Ambition Without Infrastructure Is Just Pressure

Ambition is healthy. Necessary. But ambition alone doesn’t drive outcomes but infrastructure does. If your KPIs stretch people without supporting them, they don’t grow-they crack. When you treat missed metrics as personal failures instead of systemic signals, you drive shame into the system. And shame doesn’t scale. It just hides problems until they become crises.

Real-World Pearls of Delusion

If you’ve worked in corporate for more than five minutes, chances are you’ve witnessed at least one KPI that felt more like a dare than a strategy. Below are some very real, very anonymized gems, because nothing captures the gap between ambition and absurdity like the metrics that make no sense, but still end up in quarterly reviews.

The Logistics Loop That Ate Itself

A regional supply chain team was given a quarterly KPI to “reduce warehouse delivery delays by 40%.” Sounds smart. Except… they didn’t own the delivery trucks, the third-party provider had a locked-in contract for another year, and no one had informed procurement about the new expectation.

What did they do?
They stopped recording the delays.

Target achieved.

The Engagement Survey Echo Chamber

One company set a target to “increase employee engagement score by 15%.” How?
By asking managers to remind their teams that engagement is being measured and their scores are visible to leadership.
Also: adding pizza during survey week. Engagement scores jumped. Three weeks later, two teams quit.

The AI That Was a Spreadsheet

An HR analytics team was told to “launch a pilot of AI-driven talent forecasting by Q2.”
They didn’t have an AI model. Or a data science team.
What they had was an intern with Excel, a template, and a ChatGPT tab open on the side.

The “AI dashboard” was built. It used formulas, no automation, and produced beautiful graphs, none of which anyone used. The KPI was marked complete. Everyone clapped.

The Productivity Paradox

In a tech startup, a support team was asked to “increase customer ticket resolution speed by 20%” while also “improving personalization and empathy in responses.”

They used ChatGPT to generate responses and started replying with copy-paste:
“We’re so sorry to hear this, really!”
Response time? Down to 30 seconds.
Speed? ✅
Empathy? 🤷
Customer satisfaction? Down 40%.
KPI? Completed ahead of schedule.

💬 As The Stupidity Paradox would put it -> this is intelligence suppression in action. A goal that requires contradictory outcomes leads to surface-level fixes. The organization favors “being seen to do” over “doing what works.” No one asked whether empathy can be automated. No one wanted to know.

The Risk Team That Eliminated Risk (Sort of)

A financial compliance team was given a goal to “reduce the number of internal incidents by 50%.”
They realized most incidents were reported voluntarily by teams trying to improve.

Their fix?
Discourage self-reporting.

Incident numbers dropped.
Performance review: glowing.
Reality? One unreported error turned into a six-figure regulatory fine the next quarter.

💬 In the world of The Stupidity Paradox, this is classic “functional ignorance”, avoiding inconvenient truths to preserve the illusion of progress. When reducing numbers becomes more important than reducing risk, performance becomes performance theater.

🍕 The KPI Pizza Party Loophole

A people team was told to “increase participation in voluntary training sessions by 30%.” BUT = No one had time. No one wanted to go.

Their solution?
Move the training into the lunch hour. Offer pizza. Require RSVPs via Slack.

RSVPs = counted as participation.
Half the attendees just showed up for the pepperoni.
The head of L&D got praised for “innovative learning culture.”

💬 As Alvesson and Spicer point out, this is “unquestioning compliance” at its finest. The box is checked. The metric moves. And no one asks whether learning happened, or whether it was replaced by cheese and a sense of mutual resignation.

🧩🧩🧩🧩

Functional stupidity thrives where critical thinking is discouraged, inconvenient questions are avoided, and visibility replaces actual understanding.

If your KPIs are making things look good while reality gets worse, you’re not leading.
You’re curating a spreadsheet fantasy.

The way out?
Stop setting goals designed to signal success.
Start setting goals that demand better systems, not just better optics.

Functional stupidity loves an OKR board.
Just enough structure to avoid chaos.
Just enough vagueness to avoid accountability.

📌 Stupidity Paradox OKR Field Guide

“Objective: Look like we’re transforming. Key Result: Nobody asks too many questions.”

Welcome to the slightly more fashionable cousin of KPIs: OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Originally meant to align teams, drive clarity, and focus effort, they’ve now become a beautifully vague performance ritual where ambition meets plausible deniability.

As The Stupidity Paradox reminds us: the more complex the organization, the easier it is to perform competence while avoiding inconvenient thinking. OKRs often offer just enough structure to seem strategic, but without ever touching reality.

Let’s explore some classics.

🧠 Objective: “Drive a Culture of Innovation”

Key Result 1: Host 3 innovation workshops
Key Result 2: Launch an internal idea board
Key Result 3: Create an #innovators Slack channel

💬 Functional Stupidity Insight:
Workshops aren’t outcomes. Idea boards collect dust. But these OKRs are visible, harmless, and hard to challenge. We’re being “innovative,” but also very, very safe.

📉 What actually happened:
No ideas shipped. No budget allocated. Everyone posted one idea and ghosted the channel. ✅ OKR completed.

🧍‍♀️ Objective: “Strengthen Leadership Across Teams”

Key Result 1: 80% of managers complete “resilient leadership” course
Key Result 2: Introduce new leadership behaviors into handbook
Key Result 3: Launch “Leader of the Month” recognition

💬 Functional Stupidity Insight:
Compliance over development. Completion = success, regardless of impact. Leadership is now something you consume, not demonstrate.

📉 What actually happened:
Managers watched videos at 1.5x speed. No behavior changed. The most extroverted manager won Leader of the Month. ✅ OKR crushed.

📊 Objective: “Improve Data-Driven Decision Making”

Key Result 1: Create 5 new dashboards
Key Result 2: Train 50% of staff on data tools
Key Result 3: Launch monthly data newsletter

💬 Functional Stupidity Insight:
Dashboards ≠ insights. Training ≠ fluency. But numbers were created, so now decisions feel informed, even if no one uses the tools.

📉 What actually happened:
Everyone bookmarked the dashboards. Nobody opened them. Newsletter gets 13% open rate.

🔄 Objective: “Increase Organizational Agility”

Key Result 1: Reduce meeting times by 15%
Key Result 2: Implement “agile rituals” in all teams
Key Result 3: Conduct a pulse survey on team adaptability

💬 Functional Stupidity Insight:
Agility is now measured by calendar math and word choices. We said “stand-up” instead of “status meeting”, we must be nimble.

📉 What actually happened:
Meetings were shorter, but doubled in frequency. Agile rituals were copied from another team. Survey showed everyone is tired. Agile = done.

🌍 Objective: “Deepen Our Commitment to Inclusion”

Key Result 1: Run unconscious bias training
Key Result 2: Celebrate 4 cultural heritage months
Key Result 3: Post DEI statement on LinkedIn

💬 Functional Stupidity Insight:
Performative inclusion over structural change. Activities over accountability. Optics win.

📉 What actually happened:
People attended training, changed nothing, and clapped at the Pride campaign. Underrepresented employees still can’t get promoted. ✅ Mission accomplished.

🚀 Objective: “Deliver Strategic Growth”

Key Result 1: Expand into two new markets
Key Result 2: Launch new product concept
Key Result 3: Hit Q3 revenue milestone

💬 Functional Stupidity Insight:
Buzzwords over clarity. Nobody agrees what “strategic” means, but everyone nods. Growth is now a vibes-based OKR.

📉 What actually happened:
One market launch = outsourced pilot. Product concept = one slide deck. Revenue = from existing customers.