TLDR: Goal-setting stalls when scorecards count effort and shipped work. Grade goals by the change they create for real people, and rewrite each key result until it names an outcome you can observe in the business.
Most scorecards reward motion because motion is the easiest thing to count
Every quarter, teams write goals with real conviction and then measure the wrong thing. The pattern repeats itself in company after company. A leadership offsite sets bold ambitions, the ambitions cascade into objectives and key results (OKRs), and within weeks the scorecard fills with tasks shipped, meetings held, and features launched. Motion gets counted because motion is visible and simple to tally. The change that work was meant to create stays uncounted, because impact is harder to define and slower to arrive.
The cost of that shortcut compounds. Gallup reports that only about half of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work. When a goal describes activity, people optimize the activity and lose the thread back to why the work mattered in the first place. The research points somewhere better. Locke and Latham established that specific, difficult goals lift performance above vague or easy ones. Specificity is a gift only when it aims at the right variable. Aim it at effort, and you measure effort with great precision while the customer feels nothing.
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