Long Story Short
Most OKR systems don’t die from bad metrics, they die from too much tinkering. Nicole Pollock has one rule she never breaks — don’t change OKRs mid-year — and it’s what makes everything else in her process loose enough to actually learn something. Check out her OKR Toolkit if you want to build a system that makes OKRs stick.
Jump to How!
I’m the OKR Lady. I have been the OKR Lady for years.
Ever since I read Measure What Matters by John Doerr, I’ve been an evangelist. At Whetstone, we implemented OKRs with real success — set Objectives annually, reset Key Results every 90 days, tracked progress throughout each quarter. Name a best practice, we did it. AND it worked. I even wrote the first OKR article for Helia, convinced they were the answer for every organization at every moment.
So here’s the embarrassing part: we completely struggled to implement OKRs at Helia.
Last November, I caught myself spending half my time updating and reformatting our OKR tracker. Not writing content. Not doing financial analysis. Not helping with our website migration. Just… moving text around in a spreadsheet. Every time something felt slightly off — a metric that didn’t quite fit, a goal that felt stale — I’d tweak. Adjust. Pivot. Then tweak again.
Three weeks before winter break, we scrapped it entirely. Made a simple priority list. Switched to weekly sprints with one question: What does success look like at the end of this week? It isn’t neat. But it’s working.
Here’s what I figured out in all of this: I thought my problem was my metrics. I thought if I could just get the tracking right, the system would work. What I was actually doing was redesigning the gym every single week instead of going to work out. The point of OKRs isn’t perfect measurement. It’s building the muscle of paying attention to your work — and you can’t build a muscle if you keep stopping to redesign the equipment.
When you keep changing what you’re tracking, you’re never actually tracking anything. You’re just managing a system that never quite solidifies.
The Person Who Taught Me What “Loose Structure” Actually Means
Nicole Pollock came into my life through a mutual connection in the social sector. I’ll be honest — when I first heard her resume, I made some assumptions. Harvard, MIT, Brown. Six Sigma black belt. Chief Innovation Officer of a capital city. Chief of Staff. I expected someone who’d show up with a flawless, complicated system.
What I got instead was someone who describes herself as “a little loose” on OKRs. Nicole has managed OKR processes for teams of 3,000 people and teams of 25. She’s led them through government agencies, nonprofits, and foundations.
Here’s the thing I didn’t understand until I talked to Nicole: being “loose” on OKRs isn’t the same as being casual. It means having just enough structure — a container, if you will — around your OKRs that you and your team can be fully present in the conversation about what they’re telling you.
To create that container, she has exactly one rule she never breaks: don’t change your OKRs mid-year. Everything else — the conversation, the curiosity, how she responds when someone’s not updating the tracker — all of that is flexible. Loose, even.
But that one rule? It’s what makes the looseness possible.
The Key Takeaway
When you keep changing what you’re tracking, you’re never actually tracking anything. You’re just managing a system that never quite solidifies. And the thing that’s supposed to help you pay attention to your work? That becomes the thing eating your attention instead.
Nicole’s iron rule about not changing OKRs mid-year isn’t about rigidity. It’s about protecting the space where the real learning happens. The stable container is what makes curiosity about the work possible. And that curiosity — not compliance, not perfect numbers, not a beautifully designed spreadsheet — is the whole point of OKRs.
Nicole’s Process for OKRs That Actually Stick
If you’re a “just give me the template, I’m ready to get started” kind of person (aka Helia’s COO, Libby), Nicole’s approach is below AND she shared her actual OKR template in our OKR Toolkit so you don’t have to start from a blank page. It’s shockingly simple — her words — and she’s used it for teams ranging from 25 to 3,000 people.
Here’s the arc of how Nicole builds a system that lasts:
- Start with conversation, not spreadsheets — get alignment on what success actually looks like before you track anything
- Pick objectives and key results you can track now — with the systems you already have, not aspirational ones
- Assign one owner per key result — not a team, one person who commits to keeping the data current
- Protect the container — keep OKRs stable mid-year so people don’t get paralyzed waiting for the “new” system
- Run monthly meetings focused on curiosity, not compliance — what’s this number telling us about how we’re operating?
- Use OKRs to celebrate, not just hold people accountable — the receipts for work that often goes unseen
If you’re a “tell me why this works” kind of person (aka our Founder, Jess), read on. This is where the good stuff lives.
Fun fact: Helia’s OKRs fell apart at “protect the container.” We were shifting our OKRs at least monthly — maybe because we’re an early-stage startup and things move fast, maybe because we hadn’t internalized why staying the course matters so much. Probably both???
How These Steps Make OKRs Stick
Step 1: Start with conversation, not spreadsheets
Nicole’s first move when working with any organization isn’t to open a tracking tool. It’s to hold a structured conversation with the governing body — board, executive team, key advisors — about what success actually looks like.
“Having alignment around the big vision doesn’t often exist,” Nicole told me, “and that creates big breakdowns later.”
She starts with two core questions:
- What is this organization’s mission — our unique place in the ecosystem and what do we tangibly deliver?
- What would it look like to achieve that mission in the next 12 months?
When she hears discrepancies between people’s answers — and she always does — she doesn’t smooth them over. She gets curious. Here’s her go-to script for these moments: “I’m hearing the executive director say this. I’m hearing the board say this. There seems to be some difference. Tell me more about why that’s your focus.”
It’s rare that everything gets figured out in one conversation. Sometimes you run out of meeting time, and sometimes the conversation goes in circles. In either case, Nicole summarizes what she hears and presents a next step to move the work forward: “I heard we’re aligned in these areas. Here are some areas where we’re a little less clear. Is it all right if I put these down and come back with some objectives that you can react to?”
She has the same conversation with direct reports and team leads. The goal isn’t perfect consensus — it’s surfacing where misalignment exists before you start tracking things. Because if people aren’t agreed on what matters, no amount of spreadsheet updates will fix it.
Sometimes a metric that feels wrong in July looks pretty useful by December. Giving it time to breathe is its own form of wisdom.
Step 2: Pick objectives and key results you can track NOW
Once Nicole has alignment on the big vision, she gets specific. She asks teams to name what “really audacious, amazing success” would look like at the end of the year — and then to state clearly what that success looks like in concrete terms.
An example: One of Nicole’s organizations landed on this objective: We will dominate thought leadership in this space by the end of the year. Then, to get to clear Key Results, Nicole prompted: We will have dominated thought leadership and we’ll know we’ve done it because of these things. The team landed on:
- Publish 6 flagship thought pieces that introduce original language or frameworks
- Receive 5 invitations to speak or collaborate with target audiences
- Grow subscriber audience by 10% month over month
The critical thing here: pick metrics you can track right now. Not aspirational ones that require building new systems. Not data you’ll start collecting in six months. Things you can measure today with the tools you already have.
“One of the biggest mistakes I have made is listening to everyone’s feedback and then asking teams to track things they don’t know how to track yet — in addition to actually learning how to use OKRs. People end up just not doing it.”
For that thought leadership example: publishing is self-tracked. Speaking invitations are already in someone’s inbox. Subscriber data is probably being pulled by the social media team already. No new systems required.
Two months of consistent data tells you something. Two months of four different metrics doesn’t tell you anything.
Step 3: Assign one owner per key result (and be clear about what “owner” means)
This is where Nicole gets the most pushback — especially for revenue or fundraising metrics.
“When I ask someone to own our fundraising metric, people are like, Oh, well, the fundraising team has a role in this and the communications team has a role in this and the COO has a role in this.“
The fear is real: people worry that being assigned as owner means being held accountable for outcomes they can’t fully control. So Nicole clarifies:
“I hear that you can’t be solely responsible for a certain revenue goal. What if the CEO or I bomb a meeting with a funder? That’s not your fault. This is an organization-wide goal. I just need you to be the single point of contact for updating this number.”
Owner means tracker, not sole accountability. That one reframe changes everything.
Step 4: Protect the container — don’t change OKRs mid-year
This is the iron rule. And it’s the one that makes everything else work.
“It’s so tempting to change OKRs mid-year,” Nicole told me. “You’re going to hear feedback all the time like, ‘Nicole, we started measuring this four months ago but I think we’re missing something. I think instead let’s change to this.’“
She doesn’t. She keeps notes on all of it — she literally keeps a notebook of trends she hears in conversations — but she doesn’t change things mid-year.
“When I switch things up mid-year, it muddies the waters because you don’t have a throughline on what you’re tracking. You’re tracking one thing for six months and another thing for twelve months and another thing for eight months. It needs to be simple.”
And here’s the part I hadn’t thought about until she said it: when you keep changing what you’re tracking, people stop tracking altogether. They get paralyzed waiting for the “new” system. The tracker goes stale. The meetings stop happening. And six months later you’re starting from scratch.
When someone pushes back — ‘this metric isn’t meaningful anymore’ — Nicole’s response is: “That’s really helpful. Let’s keep tracking if that feels true throughout the rest of the year. When we get to the final quarter, let’s take that insight and have it influence what OKRs look like next year.”
She’s not dismissing the feedback. She’s giving it a future home — while keeping the current system intact. People feel heard AND the routine keeps running. The feedback becomes raw material for next year’s OKR revision.
(And honestly? Sometimes a metric that feels wrong in July looks pretty useful by December. Giving it time to breathe is its own form of wisdom.)
The one exception: a huge pivot. Not a leadership change, not a team departure, not a rough quarter — but a fundamental shift in what your organization actually delivers. If you completely change your business model, yes, update your OKRs. Short of that? Keep going.
In social impact work, so much of what we do goes unseen and uncelebrated.
Step 5: Run monthly meetings focused on curiosity, not compliance
This is the payoff. This is what the stable container makes possible.
Nicole runs a monthly OKR meeting with everyone who owns a key result. They focus on three to five Key Results per meeting — not all of them — and people come in having updated the tracker and having thought about three questions:
- What is good and helpful about tracking this OKR?
- What success story is this telling?
- What obstacles are you facing in achieving it?
Notice what’s not on that list: Why didn’t you hit your number?
“I try to have it be less about the number and more about getting curious about what the number is helping us understand about our operation — whether we’ve created a process bottleneck, or whatever is making it impossible for them to achieve the goal.”
She’s also listening for whether the goal itself is still meaningful. Is it meaningfully connected to what you’re trying to accomplish? The tracker is the backdrop. The conversation is the point.
And here’s the thing: you can only have this conversation well because you haven’t changed what you’re tracking. The stable container is what gives you something real to be curious about. Two months of consistent data tells you something. Two months of four different metrics doesn’t tell you anything.
For folks who chronically don’t update their OKRs? Nicole meets with them one-on-one and updates the tracker together, live, during the conversation. Not as a compliance check — as a side-by-side demonstration of what building the muscle actually looks like. “I use it as an opportunity to have a conversation about where we’re going — versus ‘Hey, you didn’t check the box.’ Usually that’s enough to get them to update it on their own going forward.”
Owner means tracker, not sole accountability. That one reframe changes everything.
Step 6: Use OKRs to celebrate, not just hold people accountable
Here’s the piece that shifted my thinking the most — and it only works because of everything that came before it.
“In social impact work, so much of what we do goes unseen and uncelebrated. You’re weaving together services, experiences, and products that maybe aren’t sexy or in the forefront of what’s cool — waste water systems, enrollment databases, stuff like that. It’s important when you’re trying to motivate a team to have ways to actually talk about what they’re doing and celebrate those things.”
Nicole uses OKRs in one-on-ones and cross-team meetings to highlight wins. ‘Did this make it into our OKRs? I’m really excited to share this with this funder who will care about this.’ That shifts people’s whole relationship to updating the tracker. It’s not just another compliance task. It’s the receipt for hard work that might otherwise disappear.
“I love being the cheerleader for doing good work. A lot of people don’t think of being the keeper of the OKRs as the Chief Cheerleader role. But I really choose to think of it in that way.”
You can only be the cheerleader if you have something consistent to cheer about. Which is, again, why the container matters.
A Final Recommendation: Use Tools People Already Open
One of Nicole’s strongest opinions: keep your tracking tool simple and native to your workspace.
“I am a strong advocate, especially at the beginning, of keeping it simple and using tools that are already something that are native to your workspace. One of the hardest things to do is integrating OKRs into your routines. One of the ways to best do that is by using tools people are comfortable using — the ones they open on a regular basis.”
She’s used sophisticated OKR tracking systems. She always reverts back to Google Sheets.
“I find trying to use some other tool, it others the process. It becomes this other thing that’s not part of what you normally do.”
If your organization lives in Asana, maybe Asana Goals makes sense. But don’t introduce a brand new tool just for OKRs — it creates one more barrier between you and actually doing the work.
When to do this Yourself vs Bring Someone in
Everything Nicole shared is genuinely doable on your own — especially if you have the authority to hold the line on not changing things mid-year, a team that will give you honest feedback, and the bandwidth to run monthly conversations that go beyond the numbers.
You might want outside help if:
- Your board and executive team aren’t aligned on what success looks like — and you need someone outside the dynamic to surface it
- You’ve tried OKRs before and they died after two quarters — and you’re not sure why
- Your team sees OKRs as busywork and you need someone who isn’t in the middle of it to reset expectations
- You’re running the OKR system AND your regular job and you don’t have capacity to hold both
If You Want Help Making OKRs Actually Work
Nicole Pollock leads operations and programs for a national education nonprofit while taking on a limited number of consulting engagements each year with mission-driven organizations. Her focus: building systems that work, then leaving them alone long enough to learn something.
She’s a good fit if:
- You’ve implemented OKRs before and they didn’t stick
- You’re spending more time managing the system than doing the work it’s supposed to track
- Your board and leadership team aren’t aligned on what success looks like
- You want to build internal capacity — not just hire the work out
Connect with Nicole!
Try it Yourself
- Nicole’s OKR Template — the shockingly simple Google Sheet she’s used for teams of 3,000 and teams of 25
- Vision Alignment Question Guide — the structured conversation to have with your board and direct reports before you build anything
- OKR Implementation Checklist — step-by-step from setup through year-end
Recommended reading:
- Measure What Matters by John Doerr — the classic (just know you don’t have to follow it perfectly)
- Getting More by Stuart Diamond — Nicole’s favorite negotiation book, which she argues is more useful for OKRs than most OKR books
- International Coaching Federation frameworks — especially the levels of listening (listening to understand vs. listening to respond)
Questions to Sit With
- When’s the last time you changed your OKRs mid-year? Was it because something was materially different — or just uncomfortable?
- If you asked your board, your executive team, and your direct reports independently what success looks like this year, would they give you the same answer?
- Are your monthly OKR check-ins about the numbers — or about what the numbers are trying to tell you?
- Is there someone on your team who owns a key result but is afraid of what that ownership means? What conversation aren’t you having?
- When did you last use your OKRs to celebrate something — not just track it?
- If you’re honest: are you spending more time managing your OKR system than doing the work it’s supposed to track?
Not sure Nicole‘s the right fit? Talk to Helia directly!
This article comes from a coffee chat with Nicole in December 2025. These conversations form the heart of the Helia Library — because we’ve learned the most from doing and from talking with other doers willing to share their wisdom. We don’t need to start from blank pages or do everything alone.
As always, take what’s helpful, leave what’s not, and make it your own.
About Nicole
Nicole Pollock started her career as a cartographer — using data to tell stories about communities — then moved into public policy work, and eventually into the state agencies where she had to implement the laws she’d helped pass. That’s where she learned that even the best-written policy fails without systems behind it. She became a Lean Six Sigma black belt, served as Chief Innovation Officer and then Chief of Staff for a capital city, and now leads operations and programs for a national education nonprofit. She takes on 2-4 consulting engagements per year.
What I loved most about our conversation: her willingness to be unapologetically loose about the process — because she knows that when you get too obsessed with the spreadsheet, you stop having the conversations that actually matter.
