By Michael Nagorski, Founding Partner, Double Loop Performance
A rollout goes sideways for a specific, boring reason: two people in the room were solving different problems, and nobody caught it before the goal went up on the whiteboard. By the time anyone notices, the target has already been set, the key results have already been assigned, and the disagreement gets mistaken for an execution issue.
This is the gap sitting underneath almost every goal-setting framework on the market — OKRs, EOS Rocks, Scaling Up’s Four Decisions, even the old MBO model. Each is built to take an agreed-upon problem and turn it into a target, a metric, and a deadline. What none of them do is force that agreement into existence. The whole machinery starts at the goal and works backward, on the assumption that everyone in the room already sees the same problem. Usually, they don’t.
Three frameworks, one shared assumption
The three most common goal-setting systems in use today differ in mechanics but share a blind spot: each is a strong container for a goal, built on the premise that the goal has already been validated.
| Framework | What it’s built to do | What it assumes going in |
| OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) | Cascade a qualitative objective into measurable key results | The objective reflects the real problem, not just a target leadership liked |
| EOS Rocks | Convert quarterly priorities into 90-day committed outcomes | The Rock addresses the actual constraint, not just what’s loudest in the room |
| Scaling Up’s Four Decisions (People, Strategy, Execution, Cash) | Structure strategic priorities into a repeatable operating rhythm | Strategy discussions have already surfaced the right problem to solve |
That assumption fails more often than most leadership teams would guess. One large survey of C-suite executives across dozens of companies and countries found that the overwhelming majority believed their organizations were bad at diagnosing problems in the first place, and nearly nine in ten said the flaw came with a real cost. Fewer than one in ten said their company was unaffected. That’s not a story about weak execution. It’s a story about a definitional failure happening one level above where OKRs, Rocks, and strategic priorities get written.
A separate body of research on structured problem-solving, built from years of teaching executives how to diagnose issues before acting on them, found something related: the most common mistake teams make isn’t a poorly worded goal. It’s skipping problem formulation entirely, on the assumption that everyone already agrees. That same research catalogued three more recurring failures — stating a problem as a diagnosis or a solution already in disguise (“the problem is we lack the right IT capabilities”), failing to name a measurable gap between where things stand and where they need to be, and scoping the problem so broadly that whatever gets built to fix it becomes slow, expensive, and hard to finish.
There’s a term for the underlying habit: the plunging-in bias, or the tendency to start solving a problem before taking the time to understand it, let alone plan how to approach it. What makes the research uncomfortable is where the habit gets reinforced — case-based strategy education often rewards fast answers over careful framing, training the exact instinct that later breaks goal-setting inside real organizations.
None of this contradicts goal-setting theory. Decades of research still hold up: specific, difficult goals outperform vague ones, and that finding has replicated consistently. What the theory has never claimed to settle is whether the goal was aimed at the right problem. A precisely worded, appropriately difficult OKR pointed at the wrong target still does exactly what it was designed to do — it just does it in the wrong direction.
How the gap shows up inside each framework
OKRs draw the most criticism because they’re the most visible framework in circulation, and recent scholarship suggests the criticism is warranted. A recent review of target-setting theory found OKRs increasingly common in practice while remaining comparatively under-researched — companies have outpaced the evidence base that would tell them when the framework works and when it doesn’t. Separate research on OKR adoption inside software organizations found that middle managers act as the critical translation layer between a stated objective and the work that follows from it, and that translation gets harder, not easier, when nobody stress-tested the objective before assigning it.
EOS builds its Rocks out of quarterly leadership conversations, and the discipline around execution is real. The trouble is that disciplined execution on an undiagnosed priority just gets an organization to the wrong place with more confidence than it had before.
Scaling Up comes closest to solving this on its own. Its Strategy quadrant asks teams to define a core customer, a core focus, and a brand promise before setting targets, which edges toward problem formulation in a way OKRs and EOS don’t by default. But it’s still a strategy conversation, not a diagnostic one. It answers what the team believes about the market, not what specific gap the team is trying to close or whether that gap has been tested.
None of this is a case against these tools. It’s a case for what must happen before any of them get used.
The missing phase, not a missing framework
All three systems optimize the back half of a sequence — Goal, then Plan, then Execute — and treat the front half, Problem, then Agreement, as already settled. DLP’s PRESSURE Methodology puts a name on that front half: Problem comes first, Reflect comes second, and nothing gets treated as a target until both have happened. The sequencing isn’t a stylistic preference. It’s the argument.
Here’s a way to test it before the next planning cycle: ask everyone in the room to write down, independently, the specific gap the upcoming goal is meant to close. If the answers don’t match, the room doesn’t have a goal-setting problem yet. It has a problem-agreement problem, and no framework — OKRs, Rocks, or anything else — is built to catch that on its own.
That distinction deserves more room than a single post can give it. The next one goes further into why goal-setting tends to fail before the goal ever gets written: mental contrasting, the specific ways problem statements go wrong, and a way to make the gap visible before anyone commits to a number.
About The Author
Michael Nagorski is the Founding Partner of Double Loop Performance, where he helps organizations unlock sustainable revenue growth through sales strategy, organizational transformation, and workshop facilitation. A three-time University of Delaware graduate with an MS in Organizational Development & Change, Michael brings 15+ years of experience across Fortune 500 sales organizations and consulting engagements. He writes about leadership, coaching, and the human side of performance at doubleloopperformance.com.
Contact Double Loop Performance or contact Mike directly through LinkedIn.