Signal: Credibility vs Intent

Every goal-setting system has the same fundamental problem: the people closest to the work are the ones reporting on it. And nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news.

This creates a gap — between what people say they'll do and what's actually happening, between intent and reality, between the story told in meetings and the truth on the ground. Most companies don't even realize this gap exists until quarter-end, when the numbers tell a different story than the weekly updates.

The credibility problem

Traditional OKR systems are built on self-reported progress. Someone says they're 70% complete, and you write 70% in the spreadsheet. But what does 70% actually mean? Is it 70% of the work done, or 70% of the time elapsed? Is it based on reality, or optimism?

• Intent isn't progress. A plan to do something isn't the same as having done it. Yet most tools treat them the same.
• Confidence isn't accuracy. People can be highly confident and completely wrong. Confidence scores without grounding are just feelings.
• Status isn't signal. Green/yellow/red is often based on gut feel, not data. The same objective can be green to one person and red to another.

What makes signal credible

Credible signal is grounded in something external — something that can't be easily spun or reinterpreted. It's the difference between “we're making good progress on the feature” and “we shipped 14 commits this week and the feature is in staging.”

1. Connect to delivery systems. When progress is linked to commits, deploys, or closed tickets, there's no room for ambiguity.
2. Connect to metrics. Revenue, usage, conversion rates — these are facts, not interpretations. A key result tied to real data is either on track or not.
3. Make check-ins low-friction. If updating status is painful, people procrastinate. Then you get stale data, which is worse than no data.
4. Surface risk, not just status. The most valuable signal isn't whether something is green or red—it's whether the trajectory is changing. Early warning beats end-of-quarter surprise.

Why this matters for leadership

As a founder or CEO, your job is to allocate attention. You need to know where to focus, what to ignore, and when to intervene. But if your signal is unreliable, you're flying blind.

The gap between reported status and reality is where companies waste their scarcest resource: time. When a key result has been “on track” for eight weeks and then suddenly isn't, the problem didn't start in week eight. It was there all along — just hidden by optimistic updates.

From intent to truth

The shift from intent-based tracking to credibility-based tracking changes everything. Meetings get shorter because there's less to debate. Problems surface earlier because there's no incentive to hide them. Trust increases because the numbers speak for themselves.

The articles below explore different facets of this problem: why self-reported OKRs fail, how to spot a goal that's about to slip, and what it means to actually ground your goals in reality. Whether you're struggling with dashboards that don't match reality or just tired of quarterly surprises, you'll find ideas here.

How Runsheet helps

Runsheet was built around this idea: that goals should be grounded in credibility, not intent. We connect key results to real data sources — your deployment pipeline, your revenue metrics, your customer data — so progress is calculated from truth, not reported. When someone says a key result is 60% complete, you know what that means because you can see the work behind it.