All I know about OKRs comes from when the last company I worked for (a YC saas company) got all excited to implement them. They said teams would be empowered to meet the objectives they were given by leadership. The goals were audacious, but we were supposed to get excited by the challenge and freedom of working toward them as a team, doing whatever we felt was right to get the job done. Each team then got together and figured out a plan to do that: what to build, how to build it. Then leadership decided they didn’t like our plans, so they just told us what we were going to build instead. In the end, it ended up being completely top down and, ultimately, ineffective.

I don’t believe that’s how you’re supposed to run OKRs: My point is that these tools are as easy to mess up as any others, and will fail if there are deeper, unaddressed problems in the org that aren’t solved first.