Process Goals: What Elite Athletes Teach Us About Business Goals
Ask a top athlete what they're focused on right before a big competition, and you'll rarely hear "winning." More often you'll hear something about their form, their breathing, their pacing, or their routine. This isn't modesty. It's a deliberate strategy. Winning depends on factors outside any one athlete's full control, an opponent's performance, a bad bounce, the weather. What they can control is their own process. That distinction between outcome goals and process goals has a direct, useful parallel in how teams write OKRs.
Outcome Goals vs. Process Goals
An outcome goal describes the result you want: win the race, close the deal, hit the revenue number. A process goal describes the specific, controllable actions that make that result more likely: maintain a certain pace, follow a specific training plan, run a defined number of sales calls per week. Outcome goals tell you where you're trying to go. Process goals tell you what you're actually going to do to get there. Both matter, but they play very different roles. A systematic review and meta-analysis of goal setting in sport found that process goals had a substantially larger effect on performance than pure outcome goals, which is exactly why elite athletes lean on them so heavily.
Why Pure Outcome Goals Can Backfire
A goal that's entirely about the outcome, with no attention to process, can leave people staring at a number they can't directly move. If a sales team's only goal is "close $500,000 in new revenue," and revenue is down midway through the quarter, what exactly should anyone do differently tomorrow? An outcome goal alone doesn't answer that question. It just tells you whether you're succeeding or failing, after the fact, without pointing to any specific lever to pull.
Why Pure Process Goals Can Also Backfire
The opposite problem happens when goals focus entirely on process with no outcome attached. A team can follow every step of a plan, make every call, run every campaign, and still not achieve anything meaningful if the plan itself was wrong. Process without an outcome to validate it can turn into busywork that feels productive but doesn't actually move the business forward. This is the same trap behind the well-known OKR mistake of writing activities instead of real Key Results.
OKRs Already Have a Structure for Both
This is where the athlete's mindset maps cleanly onto OKRs. The Objective and its outcome-based Key Results describe the destination, the thing you're ultimately trying to achieve. But it's often worth adding at least one Key Result that captures the controllable process behind that outcome, not as a replacement for the outcome Key Results, but alongside them. For a sales team chasing a revenue number, a process Key Result like "conduct 40 qualified discovery calls" gives the team something they can act on directly every single week, even in weeks when the revenue number itself doesn't move much.
Process Goals Make Check-Ins More Useful
One underrated benefit of including a process-oriented Key Result is what it does for weekly check-ins. An outcome metric like revenue might barely move week to week, which makes for a discouraging, repetitive check-in. A process metric, calls made, demos delivered, features shipped, tends to move more consistently, which gives the team something concrete to discuss and adjust in near real time, long before the outcome metric would have shown any signal at all.
Balance, Not Replacement
The point isn't to replace outcome-based Key Results with process-based ones. Outcomes are still what ultimately matters, and a Key Result that only measures activity without any connection to a real result risks becoming exactly the kind of disguised task list that OKRs are meant to avoid. The goal is balance: at least one outcome Key Result to define success, and, where it makes sense, a process Key Result that gives the team a lever they can pull directly, the same way an athlete's training routine gives them a lever they can pull directly, even on days the scoreboard doesn't cooperate.
How Easy OKR Supports This Balance
Easy OKR doesn't force every Key Result into a single format, which makes it easy to pair an outcome-based Key Result with a process-based one under the same Objective. Teams new to OKRs often find this combination easier to stay motivated by, since there's always at least one number in their control, even during weeks when the bigger outcome metric is stubbornly flat.