Stretch Goals Are a Scam: How Teams Game OKR Targets

Google made "achieving 70% of a stretch goal is success" famous. And that one sentence broke goal-setting for an entire generation of companies.

Now every team on the planet sets impossible targets on purpose.

They aim for the moon so they can miss by 30% and still call it a win. If your team sets "grow revenue 10x" and hits 7x, they celebrate.

If they set "grow revenue 3x" and hit 2.8x, they get questioned. Same business outcome. Different framing.

The stretch goal framework doesn't reward people who execute well. It rewards people who are better at sandbagging.

I named this the "fooling myself stretch goal strategy." Because that's exactly what it is.

The Two Types of Liars in Every Company

There are two types of people that game their goals. Doesn't matter if your company calls them OKRs, KPIs, key results, or just "goals." The gaming works the same way.

Type one sets goals they know they can't reach. They set something absurd, miss it by a mile, and then say "hey, we aimed for the moon and landed among the stars." Great.

Then why didn't you aim for the star in the first place?

Why couldn't you aim for something real and actually hit it?

Because hitting a realistic goal doesn't sound impressive in the quarterly review. Missing an impossible goal sounds ambitious.

Type two sets goals they know they will crush. They already know they can deliver 90 units this year, so they set a target of 100.

A 10% stretch that requires zero additional effort. They hit it, they look great, they get the promotion, they get the raise, they get the applause.

Meanwhile the actual business grew by nothing. But the dashboard is green and the manager is happy. That's the game.

Both types are lying. One to look ambitious. The other to look competent. And no OKR software on the market can tell the difference.

A Client Who Set a $20 Million Goal With Zero Infrastructure

Let me tell you about one of my clients. He set a fundraising goal of raising $20 million in a year. Impressive number. We spent three hours on December 31st discussing that goal. Great meeting. Everyone was energized. The vision was clear.

But here's what nobody talked about in that meeting.

He didn't have a full-time ads team to generate leads. He didn't have a full-time investor relations person. He didn't even have a dedicated follow-up team.

His virtual assistants making $10 an hour were trying to have conversations with investors who have a million dollars to deploy. That's the gap nobody addressed.

Our marketing team was bringing in 50 qualified investor appointments a month. And we were doing that at a great pace. But even when investors were ready to wire money, it took more than two weeks for the back office to send wiring instructions.

The wrong documents got sent to existing investors. People were on holidays at the wrong time. Basic operational stuff was broken at every step.

By the third quarter, he had forgotten he even set a $20 million goal. The total raised by year-end was about $1.5 million.

And most of that came from the appointments our team had brought in during the first half. The same investor pool that came through our pipeline ended up investing again in Q4.

Now here's the part that makes my blood boil. At the year-end review, the team that brought in almost all the money got criticized for not hitting $20 million. The team that actually performed was held responsible for a goal that was impossible from day one.

Who is wrong here? The team that delivered? Or the goal that had no infrastructure behind it?

No software showed whose mistake this was. No software flagged that the goal was unrealistic. No software checked if the workload matched the headcount. Everyone just set a number in a tool, and when it didn't happen, everyone blamed each other.

How My Own Team Games the Appointment Numbers

I'm going to be honest about something that happens inside my own agency. Because I'd be a hypocrite if I only pointed at other companies.

We have a client where our goal is to bring 50 qualified appointments a month. Qualified means investors who want to invest or high-ticket buyers who want to purchase something at $50K or above. That's the real goal.

But when we're short on qualified appointments, here's what actually happens. We find the same prospects and try to book them for a podcast with our client instead. Or we get them into a general conversation. Not an investment meeting.

Just an appointment. And then we report 48, 49 appointments to the client. Technically accurate. Practically misleading.

We tell ourselves 30% of those podcast bookings might convert into real interest anyway. And that's probably true. But the goal was 150 qualified investor meetings a quarter.

Not 150 conversations that include podcasts and casual chats. We're matching the number while shifting the definition. That's gaming the system.

Now, this is a small business and the margin of gaming is small. Ten appointments here or there. But think about companies spending billions on ads, billions on technology infrastructure, billions on branding.

What happens when their OKRs are being gamed at that scale?

Who is held accountable?

Do they have someone monitoring whether the key results are real or manipulated?

They don't. Nobody does.

The 2-Out-of-5 Problem

We have a five-person team working on this account. Only two of them actually care whether the sale transaction happens. The other three care about hitting their appointment number, collecting their salary and their small incentive, and going home.

That's not an exaggeration. I see it every month.

The two people who care about actual outcomes are the ones who bring in genuinely qualified leads. They follow up properly. They make sure the investor has the right information. They care about the client making money because they understand that if the client makes money, we keep the retainer.

The other three?

They will bring in a COO from a 50-person company even though our target audience is COOs from 200-plus employee companies. They know that person is not qualified. They know that meeting will waste everyone's time.

But it counts as an appointment. And an appointment means they hit their number. And hitting their number means their job is safe for another month.

The high-performers on my team come to me and complain. They say everyone is gaming the system. Everyone is bringing bodies into meetings instead of bringing real opportunities.

And they're right.

But the dashboard doesn't show this. The OKR tool sees 50 appointments and shows green. It doesn't know that 15 of those appointments were trash from the start.

Why Honest People Hate Stretch Goals

The best employees in any company are the ones who set honest targets and hit them. They don't inflate numbers. They don't manipulate definitions. They say "I will deliver 40 qualified meetings" and they deliver 40 qualified meetings.

What do they get? "Meets expectations."

Meanwhile the person next to them sets a stretch goal of 80 meetings, brings in 55, half of which are unqualified garbage and gets praised for their ambition. "65% of an extremely aggressive target! Great effort!"

You just punished honesty and rewarded performance theater.

The people who speak the most in review meetings are usually the ones who delivered the least. They come in with presentations about why they fell short, what they learned, and how next quarter they're going to achieve the moon and the stars and the galaxy.

Every quarter, same speech. Every quarter, they underdeliver. But they set stretch goals, so they always have an excuse built into the target itself.

People who speak a lot rarely do a lot. That's true in meetings. That's true in goal-setting. And that's especially true in quarterly reviews where stretch goals give underperformers a permanent escape hatch.

Nobody Gets Fired for Missing a Stretch Goal

That's the whole design. If the goal was designed to be missed, you can't hold anyone accountable for missing it. Stretch goals are accountability insurance.

"We set aggressive targets and fell short" is the corporate version of "the dog ate my homework."

Now try saying "we set realistic targets and still missed." That gets you fired. So everyone sets stretch goals. Not because they're ambitious. Because it's safer.

The OKR Tool Is Complicit

Every OKR tool shows you a dashboard with color-coded progress bars. Green at 70%. Yellow at 40-70%. Red below 40%.

But who decided 70% is green?

The tool did.

The tool is telling your entire company that missing 30% of your target is acceptable.

Imagine if your bank account showed green when you had 70% of your rent money. You'd be homeless but your dashboard would look great.

No other system in business treats 70% completion as success. Your P&L doesn't. Your bank doesn't. Your clients don't. Only OKRs. And only because Google said so in a blog post that everyone read and nobody questioned.

What Happens When the Software Actually Checks

This is why ShiftFocus doesn't have a "stretch goal" setting. Every goal has one question: will you deliver this by the deadline, yes or no.

If you say yes and you don't, the system wants to know why. Not to punish. To learn.

Was it a resource problem?

A dependency?

A wrong assumption?

Did the team have the bandwidth?

Was the workload above 100% capacity for one person while someone else was sitting at 30%?

If a team is overloaded, the software shows the department head.

Reallocate or hire. If the goal doesn't match the infrastructure, our system flags it before the quarter starts, not after.

If someone sets "$100 million ARR this year" with a team of 10, we're going to have a conversation about that before it goes live.

That's not a stretch goal discussion. That's a reality check. And it's the one conversation that every OKR tool in the market is afraid to have.