My knuckles are white, pressed against the edge of the mahogany conference table, and the air in the room tastes like recycled ozone and stale coffee. I am currently winning an argument. I can feel the momentum shifting; my manager is nodding, and the engineers are looking down at their boots, unable to find a flaw in the logic I’ve just spun. I’m arguing that our ‘Platform Reliability’ metric shouldn’t include the downtime caused by the third-party API we integrated last month because, legally and technically, it’s ‘outside our locus of control.’ It is a brilliant, airtight, and fundamentally dishonest argument. I know I’m wrong. I know that from the user’s perspective, the app is broken regardless of whose fault it is. But in this moment, the victory feels sweet, even if it’s a victory for a lie. This is the exact state of mind that fuels the Great OKR Cargo Cult: the desire to be ‘right’ on paper while the reality on the ground is quietly catching fire.

The Cargo Cult Analogy

We spent the first 22 days of this quarter arguing about the specific phrasing of our Objectives and Key Results. It’s a ritual now. We gather in rooms with glass walls, write words like ‘synergistic’ and ‘velocity’ on post-it notes, and pretend that we are doing the hard work of strategy. We do this because Google did it. We do it because we read a book by John Doerr and decided that if we just copied the formatting of his spreadsheets, we would magically inherit the market cap of a trillion-dollar behemoth. It is the classic definition of a cargo cult.

During World War II, islanders in the Pacific saw planes land with crates of food and supplies. When the war ended and the planes stopped coming, they built runways out of dirt and planes out of straw. They wore wooden headphones and sat in control towers made of bamboo, waiting for the ‘cargo’ to return. They had the form, but they lacked the underlying physics. We are doing the same with our 12% engagement targets.

The Triumph of the Number

Consider the end of last quarter. The team’s primary Key Result was to ‘Increase user engagement by 12%.’ On the surface, it’s a standard, respectable goal. But about 42 days into the quarter, it became clear we were going to miss it. The panic set in. Instead of asking why users weren’t finding value in the product, we turned to the dark arts of psychological manipulation.

We added 2 pop-up notifications that triggered every time a user hovered over the exit button. We gamified the login process with meaningless streaks. By day 92, the data showed a 12% increase in ‘engagement.’ Everyone got their bonuses. The VP of Product sent a celebratory email with 22 exclamation points. But if you actually looked at the user feedback, people were furious. The user experience was now a cluttered, aggressive mess. We had hit the number, but we had destroyed the value. We built the straw plane, and we were genuinely surprised when it didn’t fly.

The Internal Observer

Kendall N.S., a mindfulness instructor who occasionally consults with our leadership team on ‘corporate presence,’ watched one of these sessions from the corner of the room last week. She has this way of looking at you that makes you feel like she’s seeing your internal organs. After the meeting, she pulled me aside. […] Kendall believes that most corporate frameworks are just a way to avoid the terrifying silence of not knowing what to do. We fill the silence with 102 rows in a spreadsheet because if we have a number to chase, we don’t have to admit that we’re lost in the woods.

The Performance Trap

I think back to that argument I won. Why did I fight so hard to exclude the API downtime? Because I wanted the spreadsheet to be green. I wanted the ‘Key Result’ to look successful because my performance review is tied to that specific cell in the document. This is where the cargo cult becomes toxic. When we turn a tool for alignment into a bureaucratic performance management system, we incentivize people to lie.

We create a system where the smartest people spend 32% of their time gaming the metrics rather than solving problems. We want the shortcut. We want the ‘set it and forget it’ solution to success. We forget that the OKR is supposed to be a compass, not a destination. If the compass says you’re heading north but you’re currently walking into a swamp, you don’t keep walking just to satisfy the compass. You change your path.

The Universal Ritual

This obsession with the ‘how’ over the ‘why’ isn’t limited to software companies. It’s a systemic rot. People buy expensive exercise equipment and place it in their living rooms like a shrine, hoping the mere presence of the Peloton will bestow fitness upon them. They adopt the ‘Morning Routine’ of a billionaire-the ice baths, the 4:02 AM wake-ups, the bulletproof coffee-without ever considering if those specific habits serve their specific life. They are building bamboo control towers. They are waiting for the cargo.

The ‘No Hiding’ Goal (12 Years Ago)

“The simplicity was frightening. There was nowhere to hide. That’s what’s missing from the modern OKR implementation-the vulnerability of having nowhere to hide.”

The Comfort of Structure

Yesterday, Kendall N.S. led us through a 22-minute meditation where we were told to ‘observe our attachments to outcomes.’ I spent the entire time thinking about a specific row in the Q3 roadmap. I realized that I’m attached to the OKR not because I believe in the goal, but because I’m afraid of the ambiguity that comes without it. If I don’t have a number to hit, how do I know if I’m good at my job? If the company doesn’t have a framework to follow, how do we know we’re not just a group of people flailing in the dark?

The cargo cult provides a sense of safety. It’s a religious experience. The rituals provide a rhythm to the quarter, a sense of progress even when we’re just running in place. We are terrified of the possibility that the ‘cargo’-the success, the growth, the innovation-isn’t something that can be summoned by building a dirt runway. It might actually require us to be creative, to take risks, and to be honest about our failures.

Learning to Fly

The irony of the cargo cult is that the islanders were right about one thing: the cargo was real. The planes existed. The mistake wasn’t believing in the possibility of the delivery; the mistake was believing the delivery was caused by the ritual. OKRs can work. Alignment is possible. But it doesn’t come from the spreadsheet. It comes from the 52 conversations you have in the hallway when you’re not looking at the spreadsheet. It comes from the moments of radical honesty when someone admits that a project is a waste of time.

It comes from the willingness to burn the straw plane and actually learn how to fly. My 22nd year in this industry has taught me that the most dangerous thing you can be is ‘successful’ at the wrong thing. We’ve become experts at hitting the wrong targets. It’s time to step out of the control tower, look at the dirt runway, and admit that no one is coming to save us just because we followed the manual. We have to build something real, or we have to stop pretending that we’re trying.