Allan Kelly

Operationalising strategy has always been hard. In today's complex, post-covid, post-agile, politically volatile world of millennials and AI it is both more important and harder than before. It is no longer a case of telling people what to do, we want to harness their knowledge, ideas, creativity, diversity and use this to inform and deliver strategy. In such a complex, volatile, world action oriented plans are themselves uncertain. Goals offer leaders something more stable to organise around. This is where the OKR framework - objectives and key results - can help connect delivery to strategy. Used correctly OKRs contribute to agility, but used naively they can undo years of work. In this talk author Allan Kelly sets out how OKRs can be used to inform and deliver strategy through leadership and dialogue. Key take-aways - How goals are more stable than plans - How to nest goals for alignment - How to frame goal setting without re-introducing command-and-control - How to use key results as test first management - Why key results are not a glorified to-do list