OKRs in Practice: Focus, Stretch, and Collaboration
OKRs in Practice: Creating Strategic Focus, Stretch, and Collaboration
There’s a discipline that sits quietly between ambition and activity. It’s the discipline of focus - of agreeing what matters most, setting the bar high, and making performance visible in a way that invites contribution, not control.
That’s the powerful way OKRs can help build consensus, accountability, and visibility.
Why the Framework Matters
OKRs - Objectives and Key Results - offer a deceptively simple framework for connecting strategic goals with meaningful outcomes.
Originally popularised by Intel and later by Google, OKRs are now used across sectors as a way to align teams, create stretch, and measure progress with intent.
The framework works across two dimensions:
Objectives set a clear, qualitative direction - where we want to go.
Key Results define how we’ll know we’re getting there - specific, measurable outcomes.
At their best, OKRs do three things exceptionally well:
Clarify priorities without overloading teams;
Build alignment across interdependent teams and functions; and
Drive ambition through realistic stretch, not blind optimism.
They provide a rhythm for leadership.
Applying OKRs in Practice: Starting With the Leadership Team
Having researched the value that OKRs can bring, I introduced the framework within my leadership team to experiment.
The aim was not to overhaul how the whole organisation worked overnight, but to build confidence, clarity, and capability in a new approach before scaling it more broadly.
It began with a simple challenge:
How do we maintain momentum on our day-to-day delivery, while also driving the transformation outcomes that will shape the future?
Using OKRs would allow us to focus on both.
By setting quarterly OKRs across the leadership team, we created alignment on what success looked like across functions - Procurement & Supply Chain, Engineering, Contract Delivery - and built shared ownership of key outcomes.
For example:
Procurement understood how their performance contributed to contract delivery metrics;
Engineering saw how focused support for technical queries could directly enable better procurement outcomes; and
Each team could link their contribution not just to tasks, but to outcomes that mattered.
The result wasn’t just better co-ordination; it really helped to foster better collaboration.
What Makes OKRs Work (And Where They Don’t)
One of the most important lessons in applying OKRs is that not everything needs an OKR.
The focus should be on areas where:
Stretch is needed;
Alignment is essential; and
Measurable outcomes can genuinely drive progress
A few principles I’ve found critical, and which are echoed in best-practice guidance:
“Less is more” - Fewer, more focused OKRs have a greater impact.
Outcome over output - Key Results should measure progress, not activity.
Pilot before scale - Start small, iterate, and build credibility before wide adoption.
There’s a balance to be struck when setting the OKRs - avoiding over-engineering complex OKRs, or setting Key Results that are easily achieved. When they’re grounded in real ambition, shared context, and thoughtful design, they offer more structure than goals, and more freedom than performance KPIs.
The biggest challenge is often in identifying the right measures.
Stretch targets only work when people believe they’re achievable. That means KPIs need to be:
Understandable
Influenceable
Relevant to the strategic goal
Poorly chosen metrics can erode trust, but the right ones provide a clear signal, not just of what matters, but of what’s moving.
A Reflection for Leaders
OKRs offer a way to build rhythm into strategy and transition from vision to momentum in short, focused cycles.
They help you ask and answer:
What does success look like in this quarter, this team, this context?
What are we really trying to shift, and how will we know if it’s working?
Who do we need to collaborate with to get there?
The real benefit is that OKRs don’t need to be driven from the top down. Nor do they need to be adopted everywhere at once.
Where there’s interdependence, ambition, and the need for visibility, they can unlock both clarity and pace.
Sometimes, the best way to make progress… is to define what progress really looks like.
