OKR Scoring Explained: Why a 0.7 Is a Win, Not a Failure

A leadership team sets an ambitious Key Result for the quarter, part of its wider Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework. They land at 70 per cent, and under traditional Key Performance Indicator (KPI) thinking, that reads as a miss. Under proper OKR scoring, though, it isn’t a miss at all: it’s the system working exactly as it was designed to.

This is the part of the framework that trips up almost every leader who has spent their career managing KPIs. Any number below 100 feels like underperformance. Unlearning that instinct is where the real value of OKR scoring begins.

The Bar That’s Meant to Be Knocked Off

In high jump and pole vault, officials do something that looks strange if you’ve never watched closely: they keep raising the bar until the athlete fails.

A competitor clears a height, so the bar goes up again. This continues until they miss the same height three times in a row, at which point they’re out. Their result isn’t remembered as the day they failed. It’s remembered as the highest bar they cleared, immediately before the misses started.

Now picture a meet where every athlete cleared every height, all afternoon, without a single miss. Nobody would call that a triumph. Officials would conclude they’d set the bar far too low and had learned nothing about anyone’s real capability.

Failure, in this format, is the data. It’s the only thing that tells organisers where the true ceiling actually sits. Without it, they are only measuring how easy the bar was.

From the Athletics Track to the Boardroom

Andy Grove built the same logic into Intel’s management system in the 1970s, later writing it up in his 1983 book, High Output Management. John Doerr learned the method directly from Grove at Intel, then carried it into a thirty-person Google in 1999, where it became the backbone of how the company still sets goals today.

Google’s own publicly available guidance on the practice is candid about the intent. A Key Result, the measurable target attached to a broader Objective, is deliberately built so that reaching 70 per cent of it counts as success, and fully completing it is meant to be the exception rather than the norm. The same guidance warns that a team consistently posting perfect scores usually means their goals weren’t ambitious enough to begin with.

That’s a genuinely uncomfortable instruction for most leadership teams. It asks people to set goals they aren’t confident they’ll hit, then calls close a win. It’s also precisely what separates a Key Result from a KPI, a distinction covered in full in a companion piece on OKRs versus KPIs.

A Quick Example

Say the Objective is “become the go-to provider in the region,” and one Key Result is “sign 10 new enterprise clients.” Landing 7 gives a score of 0.7: a strong quarter, not a 30 per cent shortfall.

That’s why the grading bands look almost inverted next to KPI thinking:

Once the scoring logic clicks, it changes what a leadership team should actually watch for each quarter. A few practical shifts follow directly from it.

The Takeaway

Andy Grove didn’t design this scale to soften bad news. He designed it so ambition could be measured honestly, without the fear of admitting a stretch goal wasn’t fully met.

Applied properly, OKR scoring gives leadership an early, honest read on where the organisation’s real ceiling actually sits, long before a safer, KPI-style target would have told them anything at all. That’s a rare kind of visibility, and it compounds every quarter it keeps being used.