Cascading vs. aligning OKRs: why cascading OKRs might be harmful to your org culture

There are 3 main reasons why a cascading model doesn’t work in agile markets:

• It assumes your strategy is perfect.
• It’s expensive and slow to move.
• It leaves many teams on the sideline.

Cascading OKRs means that teams at a level N can only write their OKRs if OKRs at the level N-1 are written. That means a lot of waiting around.

And, once again, it means having to rebuild the entire OKRs tree if one of the top-level Key Results is changed (this will happen, trust me).