Learn how Balanced Scorecard and OKRs align strategy, clarify goals, and keep teams focused on what matters most across your organisation.
Senior Content Marketing Specialist
November 18, 2025
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5 Mins read
With every new hire, new team, or new product line, it becomes easier for employees to feel disconnected from a company’s vision. As organisations becomes more complex, strategic alignment gets harder and leaders have to ask:
Goal setting frameworks exist to solve this problem. A goal setting framework is a structured way of defining, organising, and tracking goals so that there is a clear line between the company’s strategy and people’s daily work. It gives you a common language for describing what success looks like, how it will be measured, and who is responsible for driving it.
In this article, we will explore two of the most widely used goal-setting frameworks globally:
The Balanced Scorecard is a framework for evaluating organisational performance through a mix of financial and operational measures.
These measures are grouped into four perspectives:
Financial measures tell you the results of actions already taken. Operational measures (Customer, Internal Processes, Innovation and Learning) show you the drivers of future financial performance.
Originally developed by Robert Kaplan and David Norton as a performance measurement tool, the Balanced Scorecard has evolved into a comprehensive framework for managing strategy. One of its key strengths is its ability to connect the dots across the organisation, linking individual and team activities, performance metrics (KPIs), strategic objectives, and the organisation’s mission and vision in a clear, integrated way.
To put the Balanced Scorecard to work, companies articulate their goals, then translate these goals into specific measures and KPIs.
Imagine a mid-sized FMCG business based in Ghana, supplying detergents and household cleaners across West Africa. Their Balanced Scorecard might look something like this:
This kind of scorecard helps leadership see the full picture. For example, if revenue is growing but defect rates and complaints are rising, they know the growth is not sustainable.
The Balanced Scorecard’s biggest strength is that it brings strategy and vision to the centre of performance. Instead of trying to control every action, it clarifies the outcomes that matter across financial, customer, internal process, and learning perspectives, then allows managers and teams to decide how best to achieve them. This creates a balanced view of performance, encourages ownership, and helps leaders avoid focusing only on short-term financial results while neglecting customer experience, process health, or capability building.
At the same time, this is also its main limitation. Because the Balanced Scorecard operates at a higher, managerial level, it does not always translate directly into day-to-day clarity for employees. Most people do not influence all four perspectives in the same way, so they still rely on their managers to break down scorecard measures into specific team targets, role expectations, and daily priorities. If that translation does not happen, the scorecard remains a useful leadership tool but does not fully guide behaviour on the ground.
OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. OKRs are a practical goal-setting methodology that helps organisations define and measure progress across different levels, from the company to teams to individual employees.
In simple terms:
Objectives are a clear statement of what the organisation, team, or individual wants to achieve. They are usually qualitative, directional and aligned with the broader business strategy.
Key Results on the other hand are the specific, measurable outcomes that show whether the objective has been achieved. They are quantitative and time-bound. They define how you will hit your goals and how you will measure progress.
Each Objective typically has between 2 and 5 Key Results, and together they form a clear picture of success for that period.
The OKR framework is widely attributed to Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, who wrote about it in High Output Management (1983). John Doerr, who worked at Intel and later became a venture capitalist, popularised OKRs globally in his book Measure What Matters (2017). Today, OKRs are used by organisations like Google, Microsoft, and many scaling companies across the world.
OKRs are most effective when they connect goals across the entire organisation. Many companies do this through a “cascading” approach, where overall company Objectives are translated into departmental Objectives, and those in turn are supported by team and individual Key Results. Not every goal has to sit neatly in a cascade, but there should always be a clear line of sight from top-level priorities to what teams and employees are working on day to day.
The goal is alignment, not bureaucracy. Teams and individuals should be able to see how their Key Results support the bigger picture, but they should also have enough flexibility to shape their own key results based on their expertise and reality on the ground.
Here’s a clearer picture of how this would play out in a Lagos-based fintech company that provides payment services to SMEs and wants to accelerate growth while improving service quality.
In this example, you can clearly see how:
A company’s objectives will likely change from time to time, especially in high-growth or volatile markets. To account for changing objectives, many companies opt for Quarterly OKR cycles, where they set and review OKRs every three months.
At the start of each quarter, you can:
The point here is, you do not need to wait until the end of the year to discover whether a goal was realistic or a project was off-track. The OKR cadence creates regular moments for conversation, learning, and adjustment.
OKRs’ biggest strength is that they sharpen focus and create a simple, shared language for priorities. By defining a small set of ambitious objectives and measurable key results, they help teams see what matters most right now and track progress in a clear, visible way. This short-cycle rhythm encourages alignment, faster decision-making, and honest conversations about what is working or not, rather than waiting for an annual review to realise that goals were off track.
However, because OKRs are usually set on a quarterly basis and tied to specific numbers, they can pull attention towards short-term targets at the expense of longer-term capability building or systemic improvements. In some organisations, OKRs are also used too rigidly as a control tool or performance rating mechanism, which makes people choose “safe” goals instead of stretching or experimenting. Without thoughtful coaching from managers, OKRs can become a reporting exercise that adds pressure but does not truly guide day-to-day decisions or support learning.
Talstack's “Goals” is a lightweight, extremely intuitive tool for leaders, managers and employees to set clear priorities, align teams, and track progress in real time.
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With Goals, everyone across an organisation can connect their work to the company’s strategy and business outcomes.
The platform makes it easier to:
If you would like to see Goals in action? book a product demo today.
