Cascade hell is a real thing.

It happens when company-level OKRs get broken down into department OKRs, then into team OKRs, then into individual OKRs, until every person in the company has a set of targets that are three levels removed from anything the company actually cares about. The targets are logically derived — you can trace the chain back to the company level if you squint — but nobody reads them that way. They read them as tasks.

The cascade also has a quality degradation problem. Every level of translation introduces error. A company-level objective gets interpreted by a VP, who gives it meaning for their department, which gets interpreted by a manager, who turns it into individual KRs. By the time it reaches the front line, the original intent is often unrecognizable.

The alternative: contribution mapping

Contribution mapping inverts the cascade. Instead of breaking goals down, teams map their work up.

Each team answers two questions: What company objective does our work contribute to? What specific outcomes does our work enable that serve that objective?

This is harder than cascade. It requires judgment, not arithmetic. A team can't derive their contribution mechanically from the level above — they have to understand the strategy well enough to articulate how their capabilities serve it. That's a higher bar.

But it produces real alignment. When a team can articulate why their work matters to the company strategy in their own words — not in a formula derived from a cascade — the alignment is understood rather than assigned.

Four steps to contribution mapping

Step 1: Share the company objectives with full context. Not just the list. The trade-offs, the logic, the bets. Teams can only map to a strategy they understand.

Step 2: Ask each team to name their contribution. For each company objective: does your team contribute to this? If so, how? What outcomes does your work enable? Write it down. Be specific.

Step 3: Review the gaps and overlaps. Some objectives will have many teams claiming contribution. Some will have none. Both are useful signals — too many contributors often means nobody truly owns it; no contributors means the objective is underfunded.

Step 4: Make the contribution visible in the work. The contribution mapping isn't useful if it lives in a document that nobody opens. The connection needs to be embedded in where work actually happens — so that when a team member creates a task, they can see which company objective it serves.