The Fast Diagnostic Your OKR Programme Needs
Most OKR programmes drift into dysfunction slowly. The objectives get vaguer each quarter. The key results become vanity metrics. The mid-cycle reviews turn into status updates rather than learning conversations. By the time leadership acknowledges there is a problem, an entire year of strategic momentum has been lost.
This health check is designed to surface the warning signs early — before they cost you a quarter of delivery. It takes 10 minutes and requires nothing more than access to your current OKRs and honest answers to ten questions.
The 10-Point OKR Health Check
1. Are your objectives genuinely inspiring?
An objective should make people want to contribute to it. If your objectives read like project milestones ("Complete the data migration", "Launch product v2.0"), they are not objectives — they are tasks. A good objective describes a meaningful change in state: "Become the most trusted provider of AI-powered OKR tools in the UK mid-market."
Green: Objectives describe outcomes that matter and inspire action.
Red: Objectives are reworded tasks or activity lists.
2. Are your key results actually measurable?
Every key result should have a number attached — a baseline, a target, and a unit of measurement. "Improve customer satisfaction" is not a key result. "Increase NPS from 34 to 50 by end of Q1" is a key result.
Green: Every KR has a specific numeric target and a defined measurement method.
Red: Any KR contains the word "improve", "increase", "ensure", or "deliver" without a number.
3. Do your teams set their own OKRs?
OKRs that are handed down from leadership are goals. OKRs that teams write themselves — in response to company objectives — are OKRs. The distinction matters because ownership drives execution. A team that wrote its own key results will fight harder to achieve them than a team that was assigned them.
Green: Teams write their own OKRs and connect them to company objectives voluntarily.
Red: OKRs are cascaded down unchanged from leadership or set by managers on behalf of teams.
4. Is progress being tracked in real time?
If progress on key results is updated weekly or less frequently, you do not have real-time visibility. You have a lagging indicator system that surfaces problems after it is too late to address them.
Green: Key results are connected to live data sources and update automatically.
Red: Progress is updated manually in monthly or quarterly reviews.
5. Are OKRs reviewed more than quarterly?
Quarterly OKR reviews are the minimum viable cadence — not the optimum. Teams that only review progress quarterly typically discover they are off-track in month three, when there is no time left to course-correct. Weekly or fortnightly check-ins (even brief ones) dramatically improve achievement rates.
Green: Teams have a weekly or fortnightly OKR check-in, separate from the quarterly review.
Red: The only OKR conversations happen in quarterly review meetings.
6. Are blockers surfaced and escalated quickly?
An OKR that is blocked for three weeks without escalation is a dead OKR. Healthy programmes have a clear mechanism for surfacing blockers — something beyond "mention it in the quarterly review."
Green: Blocked OKRs are flagged within one week and escalated to leadership within two.
Red: Blocked OKRs sit unaddressed until the quarterly review reveals they are off track.
7. Do OKRs change team behaviour?
This is the hardest question to answer honestly. The purpose of an OKR is to direct attention and resources toward the most important outcomes. If teams are not making different decisions because of their OKRs — if they would do the same work regardless of what the OKRs say — the programme is not working.
Green: Teams regularly refer to OKRs when prioritising work and making decisions.
Red: Teams do their normal work and update OKR platforms to reflect what they did.
8. Is there meaningful retrospection at the end of each cycle?
End-of-cycle OKR retrospectives should produce learning, not just scores. What did we achieve? What did we not achieve and why? What will we do differently next quarter? If these questions are answered with generic commentary rather than specific insight, the retrospective is not producing value.
Green: Each OKR cycle ends with a retrospective that produces specific, documented learning.
Red: End-of-cycle consists of scoring OKRs and moving to Q+1 planning.
9. Is there alignment between company, team, and individual OKRs?
In a healthy OKR programme, a team member can draw a clear line from their key results to their team's objectives to the company's objectives. If that line does not exist — if team OKRs are disconnected from company priorities — you have parallel planning rather than aligned execution.
Green: Clear vertical alignment from company to team to individual level.
Red: Teams set OKRs independently with no clear connection to company objectives.
10. Is OKR management taking more than two hours per week per team?
OKR administration — updating platforms, preparing review slides, writing status updates — should be minimal. If teams are spending significant time managing the OKR system rather than executing against it, the system is working against you.
Green: OKR administration takes under an hour per team per week, much of it automated.
Red: Teams spend two or more hours per week on OKR reporting and platform management.
Interpreting Your Results
8–10 green: Your OKR programme is healthy. Focus on incremental improvements to measurement quality and retrospective depth.
5–7 green: Your programme has a solid foundation with specific gaps. Prioritise the red areas above — each one is a known failure mode with a known fix.
Under 5 green: Your OKR programme is at risk of producing a compliance exercise rather than genuine strategic execution. A structured reset — starting with objective quality and measurement infrastructure — will produce better results than incremental fixes.
