Bias Thrives In Ambiguity—OKRs Can Change That

Forbes

24-04-2025

Image of Sara Lobkovich on a sofa
Sara Lobkovich
In most organizations, the road to 'equity' is paved with good intentions—but littered with unclear goals, vague expectations, and shifting accountability. These conditions don't just lead to missed deliverables; they fuel invisible bias, gaslighting, and burnout—especially for historically marginalized employees who are already navigating structural inequity at work.
OKR (objectives and key results) expert Sara Lobkovich, offers a powerful thesis: if we want to care for underserved employees and drive real progress at a time when our civil rights and free speech are under attack, we need to stop using vibes and start using data. This way of working can shift power into the hands of neurodivergent professionals, women of color, introverts, and folks who don't conform to dominant norms.
In a landscape where DEI efforts often get reduced to checklists—heritage month events, implicit bias trainings—a modernized approach to OKRs offer a much-needed shift: from activities to outcomes. That means defining success as progress toward justice, not just activity on a calendar.
This isn't just semantics. It's a systems-level intervention.
When equity efforts are tied to strategic goals—and when those goals are tracked, reviewed, and adjusted with the same rigor as revenue targets—we stop treating inclusion as charity and start treating it as leadership.
Her approach doesn't just improve organizational performance—it fundamentally redistributes power.
Bias in the workplace isn't always overt. It often lives in the cracks: a performance review based on 'gut feelings,' a DEI plan with no clear outcomes, or goals that shift mid-quarter without explanation.
Lobkovich experienced this first hand leading diverse teams in corporate America. 'We had hard data. We had expectations we thought were agreed on. But when it came time for evaluation, leadership had moved the goalposts on the objective success criteria. That disconnect cost good people their jobs,' she shared during a recent conversation.
What makes her approach different isn't just that it helps organizations meet goals—it's that it reframes OKRs as an anti-gaslighting tool. Traditional OKR systems often focus on alignment and ambition but rarely yield clarity, changed behavior, or appetite for the hard work of practical application. Lobkovich's fill in those gaps with a structure explicitly designed to protect workers from bias, power hoarding, and subjective evaluation.
Traditional OKR systems are often implemented top-down with most of the benefits accruing to senior leaders (pretty dashboards, more control over the organization's activities). Lobkovich's approach applies the same standards and rules to every person in the organization—from the CEO to the summer intern.
'In my earlier career it was routine to have goals change mid-cycle or even arbitrarily at the time of evaluation: suddenly, a completed goal was not exceeded by enough, and there were patterns to who was harmed by those moving goal posts and arbitrary evaluations. When the entire organization follows the same rules, behavior like that is out in the open, where it can be questioned or corrected.'
Her approach was developed through years of hands-on experience working with thousands of leaders and practitioners across 300+ organizations globally. Her work builds on the foundation laid by Christina Wodkte's Radical Focus, Paul Niven and Ben LaMorte's Objectives and Key Results, and fills in the gap between the potential and the practical reality of OKRs left by the best-known book on OKRs, John Doerr's Measure What Matters, evolving the practice of OKRs from a silicon valley mainstay to a universal framework accessible to organizations of all sizes and types.
Here's how this new approach to OKRs disrupts the status quo:
And perhaps most powerfully, the framework treats failure as a feature, not a bug. Missing a key result isn't a sign of personal failure—it's an opportunity for learning, iteration, and honest reflection. That mindset shift alone can change the emotional texture of an entire organization.
While many orgs relegate OKRs to project managers or HR, this approach positions them as core to leadership. It's not just about hitting quarterly numbers—it's about how power is distributed, decisions are made, and truth is surfaced.
According to Lobkovich, here's what that means in practice:
Sara shares the experience of working with a leader with a monumental modernization and innovation mission in a large, legacy organizational culture. While discussing the organization's resistance to calculated and thoughtful risk-taking, the leader asked:
'What if we set a goal to fail more often?'
And that's exactly what they did. For a leader to get up in front of the organization and hear a goal that: 'We're going to achieve a 50% success rate on our innovation projects this year (½ succeed, and ½ fail)' is certainly unconventional: and it required the leader to both model comfort with failure and learning through failure; and, to create the actual psychological safety in how the organization operated to back it up.
Lobkovich sums it up: 'The responsibility for setting and achieving OKRs ultimately lies with leaders. They're in the big chair. The buck stops there.'
As authoritarianism creeps into politics and public institutions crumble, some leaders are realizing that workplaces might be one of the last semi-stable institutions where people can experience fairness, clarity, and care. That's a heavy lift. But it's not out of reach.
Lobkovich sees this shift in her clients. 'They're asking: How do we make our workplace one of the few places where people can function—especially those most impacted by chaos outside?'
And that's what You Are A Strategist offers: not just a playbook for hitting KPIs, but a pathway to design workplaces that work—for everyone.
Ultimately, this isn't just about OKRs. It's about power, clarity, and accountability.
It's a challenge to leaders: If you say you care about equity, your systems need to show it. Your goals need to be clear. Your accountability needs to be real. And your leadership needs to create conditions where everyone—not just the well-resourced or well-spoken—can thrive.
Because equity isn't a side hustle. It's the job.
📘 Sara Lobkovich's book, You Are A Strategist, is available now as an eBook via all major eBook platforms. The print edition launches June 6, 2025. For more information and to purchase, visit https://saralobkovich.com.