How to run an OKR workshop: my step by step agenda

A great OKR comes out of a great workshop. A weak workshop shows up months later, when the team is halfway through a quarter tracking work no one owns.

Here is the five-step shape I run. It works when I stick to it, and I have watched teams lose the plot when I don’t. The structure is simple. The facilitator is doing something specific at each step. That is the whole trick.

What is an OKR workshop actually for?

An OKR workshop is where the team decides what matters this quarter and how they will know they are winning. That is it. Everything else follows from those two answers.

The trap most teams fall into is confusing outputs with outcomes. Dale from Inteleos said it to me best when we were talking through their journey. They had been at OKR for a couple of years but kept sliding back into counting the tests they delivered instead of the lives changed by a properly certified clinician. The definition was never the hard part. The change management that shifts the culture was.

The workshop is the moment that change lands or slips. If you get it right, the team leaves owning the outcome. If you get it wrong, you leave with a task list dressed up as goals.

So the purpose of the workshop is narrow. Get the room to agree on one Objective, three-ish Key Results with baselines and targets, and the initiatives that stand a chance of moving them. Not five Objectives. Not vague inspiration. One outcome the team can rally behind for the quarter.

The five steps

Step 1: Prepare so the room can move fast

Every workshop I have walked out of feeling good about had the same thing in common. The people showed up thinking, not blank. That is the facilitator’s job to set up, not the participants’.

Send the pre-work a week out. Educate the team on what a good OKR looks like using the OKR Cheat Sheet. Find a quiet space with a whiteboard or a shared Miro board. Invite the people who will actually do the work, plus anyone whose collaboration you will need to deliver the OKR. Have your kit ready.

For company OKR workshops, your exec team needs to walk in with three things drafted:

• The two or three priorities they have bubbled up from their teams.
• A first-cut Objective, one sentence, answering “if we did nothing else this quarter except one thing, what would it be?”
• A target metric they think matters most for that Objective.

For team OKR workshops, the pre-work is different. The team needs to have read the company OKR, thought about how they contribute, and drafted their own answer to the same “if we did nothing else” question.

I keep a running OKR Setting Checklist next to me so nothing gets forgotten. Prep is the difference between a workshop that ships an OKR and one that ships a follow-up meeting.

The facilitation principles I run every session on

I have five that I hold myself to when I facilitate. They are worth stealing.

1. Prepare for success. Send the pre-work. Chase the people who did not do it.
2. Bring the energy. If you are flat, the room is flat. Your job is to lift.
3. Balance the power. Senior people talk more, junior people talk less. Break that pattern deliberately.
4. Equal share of voice. Ask powerful questions, pair up quieter people, capture their ideas.
5. Consensus without solving everything. Move fast, park the deep-dives, disagree and commit where you have to.

That last one I stole from Amazon, and it is the single most useful move for keeping a room out of a rabbit hole.

Step 2: The agenda

Two to three hours for a team OKR. Three to four for a company OKR. Two to three weeks before the quarter starts so you have room to socialise and refine.

Here is the shape I use:

1. Score the previous quarter and discuss what actually happened. 20 minutes.
2. Retro on what to keep, drop, and change. 20 minutes.
3. Break. 15 minutes. Do not skip it.
4. OKR setting for the next cycle. 2 to 3 hours.
   1. Discuss the strategic priorities. 30 minutes.
   2. Draft the Objective. 45 minutes.
   3. Identify the Key Results. 45 minutes.
   4. Identify the initiatives to deliver on the OKR. 30 minutes.
5. Communications plan. 20 minutes.
6. Close and retro on the workshop itself. 20 minutes.

That last retro matters more than people realise. Two or three tweaks per cycle and the workshop keeps getting sharper.

If you want the full kit with the Miro board, Google Slides and PowerPoint versions, plus the facilitator notes I work from, that is what the OKR Goal-Setting Workshop Kit is. Steal what you need.

Step 3: Run the session

This is the two hours that decide whether you leave with an OKR or a mess.

Draft the Objective

Ask the team to write, on a post-it or a Miro card, their answer to “if we did nothing else this quarter except one thing, what would it be?” That question is more powerful than “what is most important” because everything is important. This one forces a choice.

Group the cards into themes. This is affinity mapping, borrowed from design thinking. You are not looking for perfect language, you are looking for the shape of what the team thinks matters.

Give each person three votes. They can pile them on one theme or spread them. Do not overthink it. The votes surface intent, not a final answer.

Write the top-voted theme up as a draft Objective. Do not wordsmith it in the room. Pick a small crew to tighten the wording after the session. In the room, you want intent, not poetry.

I was in a room with Monica and the ELMO exec team a few years back, on the climb to the ASX 300. The vote came out split down the middle between two Objectives that looked completely different but were saying the same thing. I remember standing at the wall staring at the post-its when it hit me, these were the same idea, one just written as the outcome and one as the activity. Named it out loud, and we had the Objective five minutes later. Watch for that pattern. It is common.

Ideate the Key Results

Key Results are where most workshops go sideways. The short version:

• Every Key Result has a starting metric and a target. “From 45% to 70%” is what you want.
• They are stretchy but achievable. Aim for 70% average achievement across the quarter.
• They are leading where possible. Metrics you can actually move in-quarter, not lagging results you find out about in the retro.

Ask the team to write Key Result ideas onto cards. Ask for volume, not perfection. Capture the data source or the report where the metric lives. If the data does not exist yet, call that out. That becomes an initiative.

Vote the same way. Group them, vote them, review what survived. Ask “what did we miss?” one more time before you close it out. Group-think is real, especially in exec rooms.

The pub test

Take a moment to write the draft OKR up together. Objective plus Key Results, in one place.

Then run it through the pub test. If you were at the pub with a colleague, and you told them your OKR, would they get it? Would it sound like something worth doing? If not, you have more work. If it lands, you are done with the setting.

I have watched this test kill Objectives on the spot. A leader I was in a room with once read theirs out, and one of the people at the table said “I would nod politely and change the subject.” Room went quiet. Twenty minutes later they had something the whole table could say with a straight face.

Identify the initiatives

Last activity in the room. Capture the projects, experiments, and tasks the team believes will move the OKR. Not everything at once. Just what is real for this quarter.

Remember, the initiatives are the bets. If they are not moving the Key Results by mid-cycle, the bets need to change. The OKR is the outcome.

Step 4: Socialise, adjust, and commit

You do not walk out of the workshop with a finished OKR. You walk out with a draft that is 80% there.

Communicate it out to the wider team and to the other teams you will need. Ask for input. Adjust based on what you hear, especially around dependencies. Then commit.

Alan, who runs operations at NREMT, once told me what changed for his teams after this discipline settled in. Shared language. Cleaner decisions. People owning the outcome. Leaders staying at the right level instead of diving into the weeds. That is what Step 4 is for. Not a signed document. A team that owns the OKR.

Have your OKR in a relatively stable state by the end of week two of the cycle. It does not need to be perfect at the start. It needs to be something the team can act on.

Step 5: Track it weekly with a confidence score

This is the step teams skip and then wonder why the OKR did not land. Do not skip it.

Every week, each team member scores each Key Result on how confident they are that you will hit it. Three levels or a 0.0 to 1.0 scale, whichever your team finds easier to feel.

😊 Looking good.

🧐 Needs focus.

😣 Not looking good, we need help.

The point is not the score. It is the conversation the score forces. When someone marks a Key Result red, the team has to talk about why and what changes. That is where the value is.

For Dale and his team at Inteleos, the shift from counting outputs to owning outcomes did not happen in one workshop. It happened because they ran the workshop, then held themselves to the check-in every single week. Over quarters, that repetition rewired how they think. Dale told me plainly, if he could go back, he would have started sooner.

If you want the deeper mechanics of the check-in itself, I wrote the full guide over here: how to track your OKR.

What actually makes the difference

If I had to boil this whole thing down, it is this. The workshop is a moment. The operating rhythm is what makes the OKR real.

The pattern that works is boring. Prepare properly. Facilitate with energy. Agree on the outcome. Check in every single week. That is it.

Domino’s has embedded it across every market. Scalapay ran on it through the years they scaled to a billion. The ART Group team used it to win a government tender they had been chasing for years. Different companies, wildly different scale, same shape. The rhythm is what carries it, not the framework.

Grab the templates

If you want the exact tools I use, they are all free.

• OKR Cheat Sheet. The one-pager I keep on the wall so everyone in the room speaks the same language.
• OKR Setting Checklist. The prep and cadence list that keeps a workshop honest end to end.
• OKR Goal-Setting Workshop Kit. The Miro board, Google Slides and PowerPoint versions with facilitator notes.

If you want a hand running the workshop with your team, that is what I do. Book a free OKR strategy call and we can talk through where you are and the fastest path to something that works.