Somewhere in the early days of learning about OKRs, almost everyone hears the same piece of folklore: a good score is around 0.7, and if you are consistently hitting 1.0 you are not being ambitious enough. People repeat this constantly. Very few of them have thought hard about what it actually means, and the result is a lot of teams who treat 0.7 as a target to aim for, which gets the entire idea backwards.
Where the 0.7 idea comes from
The 0.7 convention comes from the practice of setting deliberately ambitious objectives, sometimes called stretch goals or, in Google’s vocabulary, aspirational OKRs. The logic is that if you set targets you are confident of hitting, you will set them too low, because human beings sandbag when they know they will be judged on whether they hit the number. So you set targets high enough that you genuinely do not expect to fully reach them, and you treat landing around 70 percent of the way as a strong result.
This is a reasonable idea in its proper context. The problem is that the 0.7 norm got detached from that context and turned into a universal rule, and as a universal rule it is actively harmful.
Why aiming for 0.7 breaks the system
The moment 0.7 becomes the target, people start setting their key results so that 0.7 is comfortably achievable. The stretch disappears, because now there is a known safe landing zone, and the whole mechanism that the 0.7 norm was supposed to protect, genuine ambition, quietly inverts. You end up with sandbagged targets dressed up as stretch goals, scored at exactly the level that looks impressive while requiring no real reach.
There is also a deeper confusion at work. The 0.7 convention only makes sense for aspirational objectives, the ones you are deliberately setting beyond what you expect to reach. Plenty of real objectives are not aspirational at all. They are commitments, things that genuinely must happen, where the right expected score is 1.0 and anything less is a real problem. If you apply the 0.7 norm to a commitment, you are telling people it is fine to deliver 70 percent of something that actually had to be fully delivered. That is not ambition. That is a failure you have given yourself permission to ignore.
Commitments and aspirations need different scoring
The cleanest way out of the confusion is to stop treating all OKRs as one type. Some of your objectives are commitments. These are the things the business is relying on, and the expectation is that they reach 1.0. If a committed key result lands at 0.7, that is not a respectable stretch score, it is a missed commitment, and the conversation should treat it as one.
Other objectives are aspirational. These are the moonshots where you are deliberately reaching beyond what you know how to do, and where landing at 0.6 or 0.7 represents real progress on something genuinely hard. Here the 0.7 norm applies, and punishing a team for not hitting 1.0 on a true stretch goal would just teach them never to set ambitious targets again.
The mistake almost everyone makes is having one scoring expectation for both. When you label which objectives are commitments and which are aspirations before the quarter starts, the score at the end stops being ambiguous. A 0.7 on a commitment and a 0.7 on an aspiration are completely different events, and they should produce completely different conversations.
The score is an input to a conversation, not a verdict
The other thing the 0.7 folklore gets wrong is that it treats the score as the point. It is not. The score is just the opening line of the conversation that actually matters, which is why the number landed where it did.
A key result that scored 0.4 might mean the team underperformed, or it might mean the target was set badly, or it might mean the world changed in a way nobody could have predicted. Those are three completely different situations, and the number 0.4 does not distinguish between them. Only the conversation does. A team that scores honestly and then digs into the why is learning something every quarter. A team that fixates on hitting 0.7 is optimising for a number and learning nothing.
This is also why scoring discipline depends so heavily on having clean history to look at. The most useful question in a scoring session is often how this quarter compares to the last few, whether a key result that missed has been missing for a while, whether a target that always hits 1.0 has quietly become a formality. Holding that history in a way you can actually review is one of the practical reasons teams move scoring into proper OKR tracking software rather than rebuilding the picture from memory each quarter, because the pattern across quarters usually says more than any single score.
Stop chasing the number
If there is one thing to take from all of this, it is to stop treating 0.7 as a goal. Decide which of your objectives are commitments you intend to fully deliver and which are aspirations you are deliberately reaching for. Score both honestly against what they actually were. And then spend your energy on the conversation about why, because the why is where the learning lives, and the learning is the only thing that makes next quarter’s OKRs better than this one’s.