Where are our plans?
It's June already, and someone just asked: "𝘞𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦'𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘤 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘴𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘪𝘯 𝘋𝘦𝘤𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳?". Sound familiar?
Here's the uncomfortable truth: Most planning fails not because we create bad plans, but because we don't plan to use our plans. Account time to check on plans.
Any planning tool, whether it's OKRs, SMART Goals, Roadmaps, or Score Card - will fail if you don't build the discipline to actually use it.
For successful OKR implementation, I recommend establishing four essential meeting rhythms upfront
OKR Planning session
Regular Check-ins
Quarterly Review
Retro
Valuable Organizational time
OKRs cost time, your valuable organizational time. Consider that it takes:
- 4-8h to set them
- 30-60 min weekly to check in on them
- 1-2h to summarise and review them
- 1h to do a retrospective on this process
This translates to ~1-2h of your organization time per week during a quarter. Yet that’s the space where you can actually align on the important work.
Yes, it's painful. Yes it’s going to take time. Yet It forces teams to confront the reality that we often default to "Business as Usual" because it feels safer and more engaging.
But if you want real change, you need to keep pushing through the discomfort.
