4DX vs OKRs

By 2021 I had read both books. I’d set up quarterly OKRs with key results and owners. I’d also worked through 4DX — the Wildly Important Goal, the lead measures, the scoreboard, the cadence of accountability.

One of them changed what I did on a Monday morning. The other produced some excellent documents I never looked at again.

What OKRs actually are in practice

OKRs work well for alignment, early on. If you have a team, a set of OKRs tells everyone what matters this quarter, in what direction, and how you’ll know you’ve got there. The format — an objective supported by three to five measurable key results — is clean and sensible.

The problem is that OKRs don’t scale, and they corrupt over time. As the team grows and each person or team defines their own key results, the list expands. Pet projects get added. Things that were never strategic priorities end up with key results and owners and status updates, because the system has no natural constraint on what counts as important. Everyone is technically working on their OKRs. Nobody is working on the same thing.

The second problem is the overhead. A well-maintained OKR system at any reasonable scale requires planning sessions, alignment meetings, mid-quarter check-ins, and end-of-quarter scoring. At some point you’re spending more time doing OKR than doing work.

And underneath all of this, the original problem: OKRs describe outcomes, not behaviour. A key result that says “increase monthly recurring revenue by 20%” tells you where you’re trying to get. It says nothing about what you should do at 9am on Tuesday. The gap between the OKR and the action is where most goal-setting falls apart.

What 4DX forces you to do differently

4DX starts from a different place. The Wildly Important Goal is one thing — not five, not a tree of objectives, one thing. The constraint is the point. If everything is important, nothing is, and 4DX won’t let you pretend otherwise.

The lead measures are defined specifically as actions you control and can complete this week. “Make five outreach calls this week” is a lead measure. “Grow revenue by 20%” is not. The distinction sounds obvious until you’re writing your own goals and everything comes out as lag measures dressed up as lead measures.

The scoreboard is where it gets real. It’s supposed to be visible and updated by the team — not maintained in a spreadsheet that one person owns and no one else opens. The physical (or permanently visible digital) presence of the score creates a different kind of accountability than a quarterly review document that gets dusted off six weeks after the quarter ends.

Which one I’d recommend

OKRs can work for alignment at the start, when the team is small and the list is genuinely short. If you’re trying to get a group of people pointing in the same direction, the format forces a useful conversation.

But I wouldn’t use them past that. The corruption problem isn’t a failure of discipline — it’s structural. The system has no mechanism for keeping the list short once everyone has learned that adding things to it is how you protect your team’s work from being deprioritised.

4DX is harder to sell because “one goal” sounds reductive. It isn’t. It’s just honest about how much a team can actually move at once. The lead measure plus scoreboard combination is the most practical thing I’ve found for closing the gap between intention and action — and it’s almost impossible to game in the way that OKRs routinely get gamed.

If you’re using OKRs and they’re working, keep going. If you’re spending more time on OKR than on the work it’s supposed to be tracking, that’s the system telling you something.