Reflections from the 2025 OKR Mentors Gathering
At the end of May, we attended the 2025 OKR Mentors Annual Gathering, where over 25 strategy execution experts from across the globe came together—not for another round of theory, but to get under the skin of what it really takes to close the gap between intent and impact. The sunshine, paella and tapas didn’t hurt, but what made the gathering stand out was the honesty and curiosity in the room, the willingness to test ideas, and a collective drive to improve strategy execution.
When we attended the gathering in 2024, it was all about building a community and deep diving into OKR implementation strategies and challenges, whereas in 2025, it felt like we shifted up a gear. We moved from sharing ideas to contributing to building shared infrastructure – from thought leadership to hands-on enablement to elevate our strategy execution practice at McKenna Agile Consultants.
The timing of the gathering couldn’t be better considering that more than 60% of Fortune 500 companies are using OKRs, however, as per a widely cited Harvard Business Review study, two-thirds of strategies are still falling short in execution. The benefit of solving this challenge is clear – research from Bain & Company in 2024 shows that organisations who effectively align strategy and execution are three times more likely to outperform their peers.
How do we move beyond setting OKRs to using them well? What does it take to go from surface-level alignment to meaningful change on the ground?
Those were the questions that brought us together and the ones we’re taking back into our work. Here are some of our key takeaways and reflections.
Facing the Limits of Self-Assessment
One of the biggest talking points was around establishing OKR and strategy execution maturity. Many of the experts in the room have their own, practical diagnostic tools to help organisations understand how well they align, execute, improve, scale, and empower.
As we were discussing the merits of such tools, we wanted to raise some patterns that we’ve noticed when our clients use our strategy and OKR assessment tool: self-assessment has its blind spots.
We find that leaders often scored themselves higher on areas such as alignment, empowerment, and execution maturity than their teams did. It’s a classic case of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less you know about the system’s complexity, or further away from it you are, the more likely that it is that you will overestimate your ability in that area. We tend to see a big gap between the two when we run these assessments.
How do we then handle this in our assessments? We like to use our tool as a conversation starter and sit down with the leader or team undertaking the assessment to help them understand the context of the questions and also to find out more. When they may score themselves high (or low), we can follow it up with a simple “What made you answer the question in that way?” This can then unlock valuable strategic insight. In addition, someone at the gathering offered that the way a question is framed can unlock, or distort, the response. Asking “How aligned are we?” gets a different answer to “How often do team members make decisions using our OKRs?”
As the famous British statistician George Box once said “All models are wrong, but some are useful” – it is the conversation a self-assessment model unlocks, especially across levels and functions, that creates real strategic insight.
AI and OKRs: A Partnership, Not a Proxy
There was no shortage of AI talk in Barcelona—but refreshingly, most of it was grounded in practical, real life use cases as opposed to hypothetical Terminator 2-like scenarios.
Throughout agile and strategic execution, we are seeing how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is helping teams speed up content creation, tidy up messy retrospectives, and generate first drafts of strategy documents or OKRs. But the bigger message was this: AI doesn’t replace strategic thinking—it helps us get to it faster.
At its best, AI augments. It clears away the admin and gives teams more space to think. It helps reframe prompts, generate insights, or surface options. But it still relies on the clarity of the human asking the question.
Used well, AI accelerates good thinking. Used poorly, it just speeds up the wrong work.
We had working sessions to explore practical examples of using tools like ChatGPT and Claude to:
- Draft outcome-focused Key Results from long-winded goals
- Organise unstructured notes into strategic summaries
- Frame better reflection prompts for retrospectives
- Support product teams in defining value
But the key takeaway? Prompting isn’t about magic formulas. It’s about clarity of thought. And that’s still a human skill.
The Quiet Power of OKR Champions
If there was one group consistently named as difference-makers in any OKR implementation throughout the gathering, it was the OKR champions.
In too many organisations, OKRs start strong and then quietly fade. The champions prevent that fade. They keep OKRs alive in everyday conversations. They facilitate check-ins, coach their peers, and remind people not just what the priorities are—but why they matter.
At McKenna Agile Consultants, we’ve long seen the impact of strong internal champions, whether that is when setting up a Lean-Agile Centre of Excellence (LACE) in an agile transformation or building a community of OKR champions in an OKR roll out. This community of champions help to bridge the gap between vision and behaviours. They hold the cultural thread set on turning OKRs from “a quarterly ritual” into “this is how we work.”
The key message from the gathering? It’s time to invest even more in these roles—not just as facilitators of the process, but as internal coaches and capability builders.
A Community of Practice, Not Just a Network
The best ideas at the gathering didn’t come from presentations. They came from chats over coffee, late-night debates, during lunch, and impromptu tangents that we found ourselves on. One idea kept surfacing: this isn’t a marketplace of coaches competing. We are a strategic execution community of practice.
We’re not here to compete on frameworks. We’re here to build things together—shared tools, better training models, prompt libraries, maturity benchmarks, certification journeys. More importantly, we’re building trust.
The shift is clear. We’re moving from “what are you selling?” to “what can we make better, together?”
What We’re Bringing Back
As we head back to our clients and the day to day, we’re not just bringing back new tools. We’re bringing renewed clarity.
- A better understanding of how to assess execution maturity with humility and nuance
- Practical ways to integrate AI into OKR workflows without losing the human spark
- A deeper appreciation for the underestimated power of OKR champions
Barcelona reminded us of something simple but easy to forget: strategy execution isn’t a product. It’s a practice. And the best practices are built in community.
If you’re curious about anything we discussed, if you want to evolve your OKR practice, or are building your own community of champions – let’s talk. Or start with our free OKR assessment and see where you stand.
