Communicating goals is separate work from writing them, and almost nobody plans it

A presentation about goals looks like a formality, and that is why it fails. Writing goals is work the company plans: there are workshops, there are deadlines, there is someone responsible for the result. Telling people about them is something done in between other things, in the belief that since the substantive part is finished, the rest will take care of itself. It won't, because these are two different jobs and the second one has its own structure.

Let's start with the thing that changes everything else: a presentation is not the moment to settle anything. It is a summary of work that has already happened. If someone learns from a slide that they own a goal, or that they are joining a working group for the quarter, that is not a problem with the presentation. It is proof that the conversations underneath were missing. Agreements with the people who are to deliver those goals happen earlier. What should be left for the slide is the icing on the cake.

The second thing happens before the first slide. You need to answer two questions, in writing: who am I talking to, and what value is that person supposed to take away. It sounds like an exercise from a public speaking course, but it is the only filter that decides what stays in the presentation. Without it, you build the presentation from the other end, from how much we have to show. What comes out is a complete set of material and zero value for anyone in the room.

The audience changes more often than you might think, too. The same structure serves a CEO who is only about to sit down with the directors to write goals, teams with whom the goals have already been written, the whole company at the moment the start of work with OKRs is announced, and a new person during onboarding. The set of information is the same, but in each of these situations you show a different part of it, for a different purpose. A CEO before the workshop will show a piece of that structure and stop at the company context, because there are no goals yet. The same material, once the goals have been written with the teams, serves something else: showing the whole organisation what we are focusing on, who is working on what, and what follows from it for everyone else.

What belongs on the slides, and what is better left off

The order we suggest goes like this: what OKRs are, why we need OKRs in this organisation, the company context, annual goals, quarterly goals, other key initiatives, where to find what, and what this means for you. At the end, a Q&A session and a request for feedback. This is not a template to copy from the first slide to the last, but a list of information whose absence shows up later in the work. The first part should be short, and this is exactly where it is easiest to ruin everything. A reminder that OKRs are objectives measured by key results, and that a key result says how we will know the objective has been achieved, takes a minute. A two-hour lecture on methodology takes the whole meeting and leaves nothing behind, because people didn't come for methodology.

The second part is the one most often skipped, and for leaders it can be the most important: why we need OKRs in this organisation. Not why anyone needs them, but why we do. The implementation goals that come up most often in companies are three: for leaders to actually work on goals, for the board to know where the organisation is heading, and for parts of the company to stop working alongside each other in isolation. It is worth showing them like any other goal, with a metric and a way of counting. 90 per cent of leaders working on goals is a sentence you can check, and it immediately says what the company expects from this change. If you don't see the value in telling a particular group about this, don't, but cut that slide deliberately, not by forgetting.

The third part is the company context, and it is what separates a presentation about goals from a list of goals. Mission, vision, strategy, challenges, decisions, metrics and values as they stand today fit on one page, and that one page is what you talk them through from. Best of all as a story: this is where we are today, in these markets, with these products, this is what we find hardest, based on this data we made these decisions, and that is why we are heading this way. This is the place for the first longer stop for questions, because this is the moment when people either buy into the direction or don't, and everything that follows hangs on that one thing.

Only then the goals. And this is where presentations fall apart for the second time, because only the list is shown. Each goal should come with the hypothesis behind it, the metric, today's value, the owner, and an explanation of what that role actually means and what you can expect from that person. A goal without a hypothesis is an order. A goal with a hypothesis is a bet, and in a quarter you can say whether it was confirmed. If the company works on two levels, explain while you are at it how they differ: you don't build teams around annual goals, because they are an intermediate layer between strategy and the quarter, reviewed regularly with the board, and a team is organised only around a quarterly goal. Without that distinction the levels blur into one and nobody knows who is actually supposed to deliver what. Finally, two things nobody will ask about on their own: the metrics that must not deteriorate while you work on the goals, and initiatives outside OKRs, because goals are never the whole of a company's work.

When to say it, and in how many goes

The most common mistake isn't about content but about pace. A meeting lasting several hours at which everything is dumped on leaders at once, and they are then expected to start asking questions and discussing straight away, is convenient for the person running it and useless for the room. In a first implementation it is better to split the material into two or three meetings and send it to participants in advance. I say this to myself too: boards connect the dots quickly, as they talk, and quite honestly forget that most people need to read and think things over first.

Within a meeting the same mechanism works on a smaller scale. After each part we stop and ask directly what questions there are, instead of racing to the end in the hope that someone will speak up at the last slide. If there are more questions than fit in the planned hour, that is not a failure, it is a signal. Then we arrange a follow-up: a shortened repeat and a second Q&A session. The more clearly people understand it, the more smoothly the goals are delivered later.

It is worth thinking separately about who we are actually talking to, because in every company some people don't work on any quarterly goal and know it perfectly well. For them, the whole presentation comes down to one part: what these goals mean for them. Whether they should change anything in how they plan their work, which decisions to watch for, what to expect in the coming quarter. If you don't say this, each department stays with its own interpretation of the same strategy, which is exactly what the third implementation goal on the list above was meant to eliminate. This part is for them, not for us, and for people outside the working groups it is the most important part of the whole presentation.

I catch myself doing this during this episode. I put together a sample presentation in which this part comes at the very end, go through it step by step, and halfway through I say out loud that it belongs at the beginning. Because if you are talking to people who don't know why they have been brought together, the rest passes them by anyway. So the order of the blocks is not sacred. The only thing that doesn't change is that we start from the audience.

The presentation ends, the questions remain

This work also includes something that is formally outside the presentation: information architecture. Two places, one with the company context, meaning the OnePager, the other with goal tracking. It doesn't matter whether it is a spreadsheet or a dedicated tool. What matters is that everyone in the company has access, because that is what transparency means, and that after the meeting people are sent the links instead of you assuming they remember where everything is. This is a piece of the presentation that fits into three sentences and is most often missing altogether, and then it keeps coming back all quarter in questions about where the goals actually are.

The second cheap habit is recording such a presentation. The recording stays in the same place as everything else, you come back to it when onboarding a new person, and instead of telling each group everything from scratch, you can arrange just a Q&A session.

Finally, ask for feedback. Three questions are enough: how valuable was this meeting, what are you taking away from it, what could be improved. I like to show the answers straight away, live, because there is nothing to hide here, and the next presentation, at the next quarter or for the next line of business, should be better than this one. And that is the whole ambition of this work. It isn't about one successful talk, but about people knowing what the company is focusing on and being able to say what follows from it for them.