This Note is a two-part series. Don’t miss the next newsletter.
In brief:
- There are 10 reasons why OKRs can fail in your organization; the tools at MAKE PROGRESS are designed to avoid them.
- Ensure that leadership is visibly involved in the OKR process to motivate teams and ensure credibility for the system.
- Work on a strategic vision that is understandable and constantly updated, avoiding isolated and impractical approaches.
- Identify strategic priorities and follow a logical sequence of interventions to reduce chaos and optimize team effectiveness.
- Implements accessible and manipulable metrics to eliminate ambiguity and accelerate decision making.
- Plans the evolution of core competencies to support strategic execution and ensure quality results.
In this note I have put together all my notes from a year of implementing MAKE PROGRESS with OKRs in companies and teams of different sizes.
I also collected implementation feedback from coaches who are completing professional qualification paths and are independently implementing goal-based strategy management through our certified method.
Did you know that all practitioners meet every Thursday to share the state of the art, offer and get support, and evolve the method? It is an unparalleled opportunity to get first-hand information and actively participate in the future of business strategy. If you want to be part of it, you can join the waiting list for the first cohort in 2025.
With this information, I have devised an outline that will enable you, as early as the end of reading this strategy note, to understand why your OKR project may end badly, and how to take corrective action before it is too late.
Disclaimer
MAKE PROGRESS is the only publicly accessible certified OKR implementation system with documented techniques. It means that anyone can read our articles, buy our courses and manual, and adopt one of the most advanced enterprise operating systems on their own.
We believe in transparency and that everyone should have access to this information to create a better future for their team and themselves. The more the tools are used, the more feedback we receive, the more we can commit to making them safe and effective, for everyone. After all, we are always talking about business!
However, this great freedom we offer by-design exposes us to the risk of disrespectful use of our intellectual property. Should you come into possession of suspicious copies of our tools, or approaches whose provenance you recognize, please report them to us promptly.
Feel free to share only our original sources so that your colleagues and friends can access information that is always up-to-date and secure.
On behalf of the whole community, I thank you in advance for your cooperation.
Back to our note!
10 business dysfunctions that make every OKR program fail
MAKE PROGRESS is designed to work on 10 key elements to have a deep adoption of goal-based strategy management:
- Leadership Involvement
- Shared and adaptive strategy
- Clear strategic priorities
- Accessible metrics
- Alignment of key competencies
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Let’s look at them in detail, find out what happens when one or more is missing, and get the tools to get you back on-track.
1 – Leadership Involvement.
Leadership involvement is the foundation on which a successful OKR implementation is built. Leaders play a crucial role in setting the vision, aligning strategic priorities, and inspiring the team. Without their visible and consistent support, the entire system risks losing credibility. When leaders actively engage, they demonstrate by example that OKRs are not just a bureaucratic exercise, but a strategic tool for the improvement of the entire organization.
Leadership is needed to ensure that OKRs are perceived as a priority. This involves clearly communicating the “why” behind each goal, actively participating in review meetings, and offering constant feedback. When leaders become detached from the process, it creates a vacuum that slows adoption and leaves room for confusion and disengagement. In contrast, an involved leader motivates teams to consider OKRs as an integral part of their work routine.
Leadership engagement means more than approving a strategic plan: it requires daily attention, constructive dialogue and the ability to remove any obstacles that hold back progress. Moreover, this engagement fosters a climate of trust, showing that every goal, large or small, is part of a shared vision. Without this engagement, the risk is to fall into the category of “Unengaged,” where OKRs become a superficial exercise with no real impact.
Dysfunction: lack of commitment
When leadership involvement is lacking, OKRs turn into an exercise in style with no effectiveness. Teams perceive the absence of top-down support as a lack of prioritization, leading to poor adoption and superficial goals. Key decisions are not guided, processes stagnate, and the entire system loses credibility. In this situation, the organization becomes reactive rather than proactive, unable to set clear direction or motivate teams. Without active leadership, the risk is to be stuck in a state of uncertainty, where no one takes responsibility for progress.
From the toolkit of MAKE PROGRESS®
To get the committment you need, it is critical to manage the implementation with all the necessary planning rigor. To engage the right people and define roles with extreme clarity, we recommend downloading the Kickoff Toolkit from MAKE PROGRESS®, a tool designed to help you create a solid foundation through initial strategic planning, role definition and flawless communication.
2 – Shared and Adaptive Strategy
There can be no OKR without a strategy. Strategy is the algorithm that directs the organization’s efforts toward a clear and shared destination. It must be analways-on (always on) process, not an isolated event with post-its and buffets. It cannot be perceived as a theoretical exercise by large consulting firms: it must be concrete, understandable and accessible to all, a daily task for leaders.
The strategy should leave no room for ambiguity. It must be supported by numerical evidence showing why the choices made will lead to growth. An effective strategy must be distributed, understood, and updated frequently at the lowest possible cost to maintain the agility needed in an ever-changing environment.
Dysfunction: lack of direction
When there is a lack of a shared strategy, teams do not know where to focus, OKRs become disconnected, and efforts are dispersed into irrelevant activities. Strategy, if not updated and distributed properly, is reduced to a static document ignored by everyone. This dysfunction often stems from the perception that strategy is an isolated event for which only top management is responsible. The result is that the organization navigates “by sight,” reacting to events rather than anticipating them, with no clear vision for growth and no numerical evidence to support decisions.
From the toolkit of MAKE PROGRESS®
To represent your strategy clearly and effectively, we recommend the Strategy Focus Onepager, the most advanced single-page strategy representation canvas. This tool brings together MAKE PROGRESS®’s most advanced concepts, such as the Three T’s of Strategy (Growth Theory, Time and Target), and allows you to synthesize and communicate your strategy in a simple yet powerful way. Learn how to use it today by watching our video training, designed to guide you step by step in applying this tool.
3 – Clear strategic priorities
To build lasting change, it is essential to clearly define strategic priorities. Change cannot be sudden: it must follow a logical sequence of interventions, considering their impact on daily work. When changes are demanded of teams without clear direction, the risk is that efforts will be dispersed, creating chaos and increasing organizational entropy. In contrast, setting clear priorities helps sustain cooperation and guide the evolution of work, maintaining a balance between innovation and stability.
Dysfunction: dissipation of energy
The absence of clear strategic priorities leads to wasted energy and resources. Teams, unsure of what is most important, try to change everything at once, generating chaos and slowing progress. This confusion fuels internal conflicts, reduces effectiveness and undermines cooperation. Without a logical sequence of interventions, change turns into a cycle of fragmented activities, with little positive long-term impact. Organizational entropy grows, and strategic vision loses concreteness.
From the toolkit of MAKE PROGRESS®
The tool to address this challenge is the Now&Next, an advanced method that helps identify priority organizational behaviors and establish metrics called Strategic Gaps. These numerical indicators provide a clear and scientific view of the organization’s evolving priorities. While the Now&Next is one of the most challenging tools in the MAKE PROGRESS® toolkit, it is also the most transformative.
4 – Accessible metrics
Although everyone claims to have the numbers at their fingertips, leaders often struggle when they need to measure a specific business phenomenon. Despite the abundance of dashboards in our software, the reality shows a “bulimia” of disorganized numbers: too many metrics collected without criteria, alongside whole areas of business never measured and left in the dark. Numbers are critical because they remove ambiguity from conversations and provide a solid foundation for decision-making.
It is surprising to see how many teams become familiar with writing OKRs, perhaps with the support of artificial intelligence, but then fail to measure a single concrete value, thwarting all efforts.
It is not enough for numbers to be accessible and accurate-they must also be manipulable. Teams must be able to freely navigate data and measure novel phenomena without having to initiate an expensive IT project. This agility enables experimentation, increasing the speed and impact of experiments, thus accelerating the pace of growth of the organization.
Dysfunction: blind areas
Without adequate numbers, teams navigate an environment without clear benchmarks. The absence of measurements or the presence of inconsistent metrics leads to ambiguous conversations, uninformed decisions, and an inability to adapt quickly. When numbers are not manipulable or easily accessible, teams cannot experience or evaluate the impact of their actions, stunting the pace of growth and reducing the ability to innovate.
From the toolkit of MAKE PROGRESS®
To bring “hygiene” to numbers management, the ideal tool is the KPI Book. It allows each team to adopt consistent nomenclature and measure trends, performance and progress in a clear, standardized way. The KPI Book helps eliminate ambiguity, making numbers a strategic ally in the evolution of the organization. You can download it for free by clicking on this link and start today to get your numbers in order and drive effective experiments.
5 – Alignment of Key Competencies.
Many strategies fail not because of a lack of ideas, but because of the absence of the skills needed to execute them. Each new strategy inevitably introduces the need to tackle things never done before, requiring new skills and knowledge. This is why HR functions have a crucial role to play: they must view talent as a real “budget” to be managed and invested, ensuring that the organization always has the right skills at the right time. This means anticipating future needs, training staff and creating development paths that support the strategy.
Effective skill alignment is the key to making the strategy executable. It means understanding not only the existing competencies, but also those that are lacking and will be critical to support the evolution of the organization. Without this planning, teams will find themselves stuck, unable to meet the new challenges posed by the strategy, thus slowing down the entire transformation process.
Dysfunction: poor performance
When key skills are lacking, strategies run aground. Teams strive to accomplish goals for which they are not adequately prepared, which leads to poor results, stress, and frustration. The absence of specific expertise creates dependencies on expensive external resources and slows the implementation of strategies, turning innovation into a battle against time.
From the toolkit of MAKE PROGRESS®
One of the key roles in MAKE PROGRESS® implementation programs is that of theHR Lead, who oversees the strategy and ensures that people are properly trained to deal with the changes. The HR Lead uses the Now&Next to identify missing skills and drive organizational transformation, ensuring that teams are equipped to execute the strategy successfully. The role within the program is defined in the Kickoff Toolkit.
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