2025 – The Year We Fired OKRs — Radhika Dutt Brings the Matches

Episode notes

Send us Fan Mail What if the problem isn’t how you set goals… but the fact you’re using goals at all? In this episode of The Elephant in the Org , we declare 2025 the year we fire OKRs — and we’ve brought exactly the right arsonist. Author, entrepreneur, and product leader Radhika Dutt joins Danny, Marion, and Cacha to explain why traditional goal-setting, targets, and OKRs were built for 1940s assembly lines, not modern, messy, knowledge work. Radhika, author of Radical Product Thinking and advisor to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, has seen it all: pivotitis, obsessive sales disorder, hypermetrisemia, and leaders who cling to targets while flying blind. Her verdict? Goals don’t simply “need better implementation” — they structurally push people to hide bad news, optimise vanity metrics, and suffocate innovation. So what’s the alternative? Puzzle-setting. Radhika walks us through OHLA — Objectives, Hypotheses, Learnings, Adaptations — a practical, psychologically safe, reality-based way to shift from “Did you hit the number?” to “What did we learn and how do we adapt?” OHLA is built for complex, creative work — not the spreadsheet theatre most orgs mistake for strategy.