SMART OKRs — QUICK GLOSSARY

Companion material for SMART OKRs: From Strategic Formulation to Results-Driven Execution



Alignment: The process of negotiating contributions, dependencies, conflicts, and decision rights across teams and levels.

Baseline: The verified starting value and reference period used to interpret progress.

Committed OKR: An OKR whose achievement is treated as a planning commitment because capacity, authority, and evidence are sufficient.

Confidence: A forward-looking judgment about the likelihood of reaching a result, based on evidence and trajectory.

Decision right: The explicit authority to make a specific decision.

Dependency: An information, capacity, authority, technology, vendor, legal, operational, or behavioral condition required for progress.

Guardrail: A complementary metric or rule that prevents success in one dimension from causing unacceptable harm elsewhere.

Impact: A broader, longer-term strategic effect to which outcomes contribute.

Initiative: A project, action, experiment, or investment used as a hypothesis for influencing a result.

Key Result (KR): Verifiable evidence that indicates whether the change described by the Objective is occurring.

Lagging indicator: A measure that confirms a result after the relevant behavior or mechanism has occurred.

Leading indicator: An earlier signal that may predict a later outcome when the causal relationship is credible.

Metric owner: The person accountable for the operational definition, quality, availability, and interpretation of a metric.

Objective: A qualitative statement describing a strategically relevant change in state.

OKR: A management framework combining an Objective with Key Results to support focus, alignment, execution, and learning.

Outcome: An observable change in behavior, capability, experience, performance, or risk.

Output: A deliverable, feature, report, system, event, or completed activity.

Portfolio: The set of initiatives, products, projects, and investments competing for capacity.

Proxy metric: A measure used as an indirect representation of a phenomenon that is difficult to observe directly.

Readiness: The degree to which strategy, leadership, authority, capacity, data, incentives, and governance support an OKR adoption.

Retrospective: A structured review of hypotheses, decisions, evidence, results, and system changes after a cycle.

Scoring: A summary representation of result achievement; useful only when accompanied by evidence and interpretation.

Strategic choice: A decision to prioritize one direction while accepting explicit trade-offs and exclusions.

Vanity metric: A measure that looks positive but does not reliably support a meaningful decision or causal interpretation.