Thinking from real workshops and engagements — on OKRs, value creation, and what actually makes strategy survive an ordinary week.
A priority score isn't a measure of importance. It's where a team's effort goes in this period, and because the strategy map is a system, the right place to push changes over time.
Most review meetings report on the past. Execution looks different: the same numbers used to ask what's likely to happen next, who needs what, and what we're deciding today.
AI doesn't just speed up existing work — it makes previously non-viable work viable. That's a bigger shift for strategy than acceleration, and it makes real prioritisation more valuable, not less.
A strategy map describes what's already true. An OKR is a claim about the future — and nothing in the writing process forces that claim to be honest.
AI is a genuine advantage for a small operation — but there's a real difference between an assistant working for you and a feature built into a platform whose revenue depends on you spending more.
The methodology isn't a body of industry knowledge — it's a structure for how a leadership team argues through priorities and builds a review habit together. That works the same whether the room is in Toronto or on a screen.
OKRs come with a review cadence built in — that's the real point of the framework, more than the objective-and-key-result syntax. Most teams just aim that cadence at the wrong altitude.
OKRs are the framework everyone talks about now. I still start every engagement with the Balanced Scorecard's four perspectives, because OKRs answer a different question than the one I need answered first.
A good OKR rollout tells you what's not working and breaks down the silos holding your best work back. What it can't do is choose between a hundred legitimate priorities — that's a different problem, and it needs a different layer.
AI can draft a well-formatted OKR in seconds. It can't tell you who actually owns it, whether it connects to a real strategic priority, or whether anyone in the room believes it.
Most strategies don't fail because the plan was wrong. They fail at the intersection of two things: whether people were ever really committed, and how quickly a team lets go once things get hard.
The operating blueprint a business — often PE-backed — uses to grow enterprise value over a defined period. What it actually contains, and why it only works if it's more than a document.
The exact rules Keel uses for writing OKRs — verb + outcome, no "and", 1-3 key results mixing leading and lagging measures — and why each one exists.
An honest, disclosed comparison of Tability, Cascade, Profit.co, and WorkBoard — and where a workshop-led approach fits differently.
OKRs aren't going away, but the smartest teams no longer treat them as the whole strategy. Here's how OKRs actually fit inside a Value Creation Plan.