OKR Cycle & Meetings

Created

Jun 11, 2025 9:25 AM

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.