Why OKR Monitoring Fails and How to Fix It Starting from Day One of Your Strategy Session

Start from the End: A Different Way to Design Your Strategy Session

There is a well-known rule in strategy session design: start from the end. Begin with the final stage of the session, then work your way backward to the opening. But what if you ran the session itself in the same way?

I recently tried it.

The Real Problem with OKR Is Not Goal Setting — It Is Monitoring

What is the most important thing in OKR? No, it is not just the ability to set objectives and key results. Time and again I have seen that the main bottleneck is monitoring. Teams simply do not do it. And so all those ambitious goals end up in the trash.

The trouble is that by the time a training or strategy session reaches the monitoring topic, there is no time or energy left to work through it properly.

How We Rebuilt an Entire Strategy Session Around OKR Monitoring from Hour One

That is why my colleague and I decided to try something different at a recent OKR strategy session: start warming the team up to the idea of monitoring from the very beginning — from the first hour of the session. We rebuilt the entire program around monitoring as the central axis.

The result? We delivered the monitoring content in a game format — and pushed participants well outside their comfort zone. We put them in a scenario where nearly all of their key results had failed to be achieved.