Every OKR tool ships with the same model: cascade. Company goals at the top, team goals below them, individual goals below those. Neat tree, clean lines. Looks great in a deck. Doesn't survive contact with how value actually moves through a company.
Why the tree breaks
Value rarely flows down a single branch. A go-to-market objective requires Product, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Finance to do specific things, in sequence, with dependencies between them. None of those teams is under the others. The goal lives across the org chart, not down it.
When you force this into a cascade, two things happen. The originating team owns the parent goal nominally, but can't move it without the others. The other teams either copy the parent goal into their own tree (duplication) or refuse to (orphaning). Either way, the cascade lies about who is doing what.
What a graph looks like
A goal graph treats objectives as nodes and dependencies as edges. A single objective can be parented by multiple strategic bets, and a single bet can be supported by objectives across many teams. The shape is a directed acyclic graph, not a tree.
The practical consequences:
- A team can see which of their objectives are required by other teams' work — and treat them accordingly.
- Leadership can see, for any strategic bet, the full set of cross-functional objectives required to move it.
- A goal that fails has traceable upstream consequences: which bets does this put at risk, and which other teams need to know now.
Why no one ships this
Because graphs are harder to draw than trees. The slide for a cascade is one tidy pyramid. The slide for a graph looks like a subway map. Tool vendors pick the prettier one and ship.
But the company doesn't operate on slides. It operates on the actual relationships between goals — and those relationships are graph-shaped whether your tool admits it or not.
The Vindaris view
Model what's real, not what's drawable. The graph is harder to render and easier to operate. The cascade is the opposite. Pick the one that matches the work.