OKR Transformation: From Ambiguity to Excellence

Project Background

Our client is a mid-size US-based nonprofit public charity operating at the intersection of financial services and philanthropy. As one of the country's leading donor-advised fund providers, the organisation manages significant charitable assets on behalf of thousands of donors and is driven by a clear mission to grow the culture of giving.

Despite a compelling strategy and a high-performing senior management team (SMT), the organisation faced a challenge familiar to many mission-led institutions: translating strategy into consistent, measurable execution — particularly across cross-functional teams working toward shared goals. There was enthusiasm at the top, but the language of strategy wasn't yet embedded throughout the organisation.

McKenna Agile Consultants was engaged to design and deliver a full-cycle OKR transformation programme — from initial diagnostic through to capability building, structural roll-out, and sustained coaching.

The Challenge

When McKenna Agile Consultants first engaged with the organisation, the senior team had a strategy — but it existed largely at the leadership level. Several core challenges were identified:

• No shared language for strategy execution. Leaders across departments interpreted strategic priorities differently, making cross-functional alignment difficult and creating duplication of effort.
• OKRs were written, not lived. The organisation had made early attempts at OKR adoption, but objectives and key results were treated as a compliance exercise rather than a dynamic management tool. They were rarely reviewed or used to drive decisions.
• Cross-functional collaboration happened in silos. Teams working on shared outcomes lacked a structural model for joint ownership. There was no squad-level framework to connect strategy to the teams closest to delivery.
• Limited measurement culture. Without consistent tracking and review rhythms, it was difficult to know whether the organisation was making progress against its strategic priorities — or to course-correct when it wasn't.
• Varying levels of OKR maturity. The SMT had some exposure to OKR concepts, but capability was uneven. Frontline teams and cross-functional squads had little to no framework for aligning their day-to-day work to the enterprise strategy.

McKenna Agile Consultants' AI-powered OKR & Strategy Assessment confirmed these challenges quantitatively. The initial diagnostic, completed by the full Executive Leadership Team, returned an overall score of 56% — with Strategy Execution (61%) and OKR Health (47%) as the two areas most in need of intervention.

“We always had a strategy but we never had these conversations. It's a 250-degree shift. It's made leading easier for me.”

ELT Member

The Solution and Delivery

McKenna Agile Consultants designed a phased transformation programme that moved the organisation from diagnostic insight through capability building, structural roll-out, and embedded coaching. Each phase was sequenced deliberately — ensuring leadership alignment before enterprise definition, enterprise definition before squad roll-out, and skill-building before independent execution.

Phase 1: AI-Powered Strategy & OKR Assessment

The engagement began with McKenna Agile Consultants' proprietary AI-powered assessment tool, administered across the full Executive Leadership Team. The 20-question diagnostic evaluated four critical dimensions of strategy execution maturity: Strategy Communication, Strategy Execution, Measurement of Outcomes, and OKR Health.

The assessment surfaced a clear and honest picture of where the organisation stood — both against its own ambitions and against a global benchmark of 500+ organisations. With an overall score of 56% and OKR Health at just 47%, the data gave the leadership team a shared, objective starting point. Crucially, it also gave McKenna Agile Consultants the insight needed to tailor the programme to what this organisation actually needed — not an off-the-shelf approach.

Phase 2: SMT OKR Training

Before the organisation could write better OKRs, the senior team needed a shared understanding of what good looked like. McKenna Agile Consultants delivered targeted OKR training for the full SMT, covering the principles of outcome-focused thinking, the distinction between outputs and results, and what it means to write OKRs that are genuinely ambitious yet achievable.

Sessions were facilitated to be practical and grounded in the organisation's own context — using real strategic priorities, not hypothetical examples. By the end of this phase, the SMT had a unified language and the confidence to champion OKRs across the organisation.

Phase 3: Enterprise OKR Definition Workshops

With a capable and aligned senior team in place, McKenna Agile Consultants facilitated a series of enterprise OKR definition workshops. These sessions brought together SMT members to define the organisation's top-level OKRs — the objectives and key results that would govern strategic focus for the year ahead.

The workshops were structured to move through divergent thinking (surfacing the most important priorities) into convergent alignment (agreeing on what the organisation would commit to). The result was a coherent set of enterprise OKRs that the entire SMT understood, owned, and could communicate confidently to their teams.

Phase 4: Cross-Functional Squad OKR Framework Roll-out

One of the most significant structural interventions was the introduction of the squad model for cross-functional OKR execution. Rather than having OKRs live only within departmental hierarchies, McKenna Agile Consultants designed and implemented a squad-based framework that brought together individuals from different functions around shared outcomes directly connected to the enterprise OKRs.

This was a deliberate structural fix for the silo problem. Squads were given clear ownership, defined OKRs of their own, and a governance rhythm that kept them connected to the enterprise strategy without being constrained by functional boundaries. The framework was tailored specifically to the organisation's operating model — not borrowed wholesale from a technology company playbook.

Phase 5: OKR Training for Squads

Squad members required their own training to operate effectively within the new framework. McKenna Agile Consultants delivered targeted OKR training sessions for squad participants, equipping them with the skills to write meaningful key results, track progress with rigour, and engage in productive OKR check-in conversations.

Training was intentionally practical — squad members left each session with draft OKRs for their squad ready for refinement, rather than theory to apply later.

Phase 6: Change Management

Implementing a new operating framework across an organisation is as much a human challenge as a structural one. McKenna Agile Consultants embedded a change management workstream throughout the programme to address resistance, build psychological safety around OKR transparency, and ensure that the transition felt manageable rather than imposed.

This included communication support for leaders, guidance on how to introduce OKRs to their teams, and practical tools to help managers facilitate early OKR conversations. Particular care was given to helping the organisation understand that OKRs are not a performance management tool — a common misconception that, left unaddressed, creates fear rather than engagement.

Phase 7: Department & Team Strategy Workshops

To embed strategy thinking at every level, McKenna Agile Consultants facilitated strategy workshops with individual departments and teams. These sessions helped functional leaders articulate their own strategic priorities in the context of the enterprise OKRs — creating genuine vertical alignment rather than a top-down cascade that teams passively receive.

The outcome was a richer, more connected strategy picture: teams understood not just what their OKRs were, but why they mattered and how they contributed to what the organisation was trying to achieve.

Phase 8: Ongoing Coaching

McKenna Agile Consultants provided ongoing coaching throughout the programme and into the execution cycle — available to both SMT members navigating complex OKR decisions and squad leads managing the operational reality of cross-functional collaboration.

Coaching was responsive rather than scheduled — meeting leaders where they were, whether that was refining a difficult key result, navigating a squad conflict, or preparing for a quarterly review conversation. This embedded support helped the organisation avoid the common pitfall of OKR programmes that launch well and stall within two quarters.

Phase 9: Year-2 Assessment

Twelve months after the initial diagnostic, McKenna Agile Consultants administered the same AI-powered assessment with the now-expanded ELT of 17 participants. The results were striking.

Category	Year 1	Year 2	Change
Strategy Communication	60%	83%	+23pts
Strategy Execution	61%	70%	+9pts
Measurement of Outcomes	57%	76%	+19pts
OKR Health	47%	80%	+33pts
Overall	56%	77%	+21pts

Every single dimension improved. OKR Health — the area of greatest concern at the outset — rose 33 percentage points, from 47% to 80%. The organisation's overall score of 77% places it 14 percentage points above the global benchmark of 63% across 500+ organisations worldwide.

“You've no idea how beautiful that was – we can focus – it feels so different to last year – I didn't realise the difference we've made.”

ELT Member

Looking Ahead

While the results are genuinely impressive, the work is not finished. Strategy Execution at 70% remains below the 75% internal target — and McKenna Agile Consultants has identified specific, addressable gaps: blocker removal, corrective action cadences, and connecting key results more directly to outcomes rather than outputs.

The organisation is currently classified as a Strategic Visionary in McKenna Agile Consultants' maturity framework — a strong position, and one from which the step to Strategy Execution Leader is well within reach. With 2027 targets set at 90% for Communication and OKR Health and 85% for Execution and Measurement, the next phase of the partnership is focused on closing that final gap.

From a leadership team that once described strategy as something that happened ‘above’ them, to one that now uses OKRs as a genuine management tool — the culture has shifted. And that is the measure that matters most.

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