The real problem is setting "hard but not so hard as to be impossible" goals at any level is really more of an art than a science. If leadership has a strong vision and their finger on the pulse - OKRs will work great, as will any other framework (eg. simply sending an email to everyone stating that the goal is X by Y date). If nobody has any clue what they're trying to accomplish and no shared vision - following the OKR method won't save you.
Making goals hard is a case of sloppy thinking. There is no reason to believe hard work is a money maker in software, or that teams working harder leads to more money. Software is mostly a communication and coordination problem; there are lots of dysfunctional software companies and it is rare that the cause is people choosing easy problems. Usually it seems to be key managers believing things that are not true.
OKRs should be achievable and valuable. It is acceptable if they are hard, but that is an unfortunate source of risk and it is better if they are easy to achieve for everyone. You don't want to be in a position where success relies on hard work, great strategy is about achieving an embarrassing amount of success with ordinary everyday efforts that were always going to work out well.
I actually quite like the article because it doesn't seem to be promoting that sort of "goals should be hard" thinking for OKRs.
Achievable and valuable definitely more valuable than hard. I do suggest it's healthy not to 100% know how you might achieve the goal over the period - its good to be open to options and look for evidence you are making progress. I think this is different than trying for a moonshot every quarter :)
>"hard but not so hard as to be impossible" goals at any level is really more of an art than a science
back then a woman in USSR army, a low level commander, when I asked about how she manages to maintain her authority in those conditions explained to me that you do have to run your soldiers hard, yet giving impossible to complete order is the fastest and surest way to lose respect of your soldiers and as result to lose real authority over them, and to walk that fine line the key thing is to truely know your stuff (they were some very technical radar service department).
I do live by her words - the fist thing I determine about my superiors is whether they know the stuff, and thus how much respect, if any, I should give to them and to their orders :)
