Most companies walk out of planning with good objectives, and a month later every department is back to working on its own list. This guide walks you through three processes that fix that: monthly priorities inside every team, OKRs with the meetings that keep them alive all quarter, and a monthly business review that catches what's stuck. Start with one, or run all three together.
Everyone leaves the planning session excited and clear on what matters this quarter.
Each department is deep in its own priorities, and the company objectives stopped coming up in conversation.
Someone opens the OKR doc before the next planning session and realises half of it was never touched.
What keeps goals alive is a handful of habits, each with one job, that pull people back to what they agreed on at the right moments. Here are the three that matter most, who they're for, and when each one helps.
Each manager and their team agree on what comes first this month, and where anything new goes.
Start here if new requests keep landing and teams aren't sure what to finish first.
Process 2 · Every quarterLeadership sets the quarter's objectives (or Rocks), shares them with everyone, and keeps them alive with a few recurring meetings.
Start here if departments drift away from company goals within a few weeks.
Process 3 · Every monthDepartment leads share a short pre-read, see every status on one screen and spend the meeting unblocking what's at risk.
Start here if you want one meeting that surfaces what's stuck, with or without OKRs.
They work on their own and they work better together. OKRs set the company goals, monthly priorities turn them into each team's focus, and the business review catches what's stuck before the quarter is gone.
Most teams track tasks and still don't know what matters most. This process teaches managers to lead with a short, ranked list of priorities and to talk about it openly with their team.
Company goals only move when each team knows what to work on first. Once a month, every manager sits down with their team and agrees on the month's priorities. This isn't task tracking. It's how managers learn to lead with priorities and talk about them openly with their team.
Nothing shares a number.
There is one number one, one number two, and so on down to five. When something new comes in, it doesn't get added on top. You go back to the list, decide together where it goes, and everything below it moves down.
The order isn't a schedule. Your team won't spend week one only on number one. It means number one gets fully finished before number two, and if the month goes sideways, number one is the thing that's done.
During the look-back, watch for patterns. Maybe priorities change too often, nobody is clear on what matters, or leadership isn't committing to its own priorities. None of this is a mistake to punish. It's what every company goes through while it finds the right rhythm. If nobody looks, the team lives in constant change and never notices that this is why it isn't moving forward.
When something new lands mid-month, AI can help you place it in the list instead of quietly stacking it on top.
The new request didn't go on top. The team placed it at three, and everything below moved down.
September's seven reshuffles are the conversation to have. They usually point to a leadership decision, not to the team.
Setting objectives takes a day. Keeping them alive takes a rhythm. This process covers both: how to choose the quarter's objectives, and the meetings that keep bringing them back into the room until the quarter is done.
If even one person in the room has never written an OKR, your planning session turns into an argument about definitions instead of priorities. Thirty minutes upfront saves you two hours later, so make sure everyone uses the same words before you start.
Generic examples don't stick. Ask AI to teach OKRs using your own business, so the training feels like planning practice.
This is where the leadership team decides what the whole company focuses on for the next 90 days. Ask every leader to bring up to three candidate objectives for the company, not for their own department, along with what they think is getting in the way.
That last part matters more than it looks. A written "not this quarter" list settles more arguments next month than the OKRs themselves.
Bring AI into the discussion as one more voice in the room, especially the one willing to disagree with the most senior person.
Nine candidates go in, three objectives come out, and each one leaves the room with a single owner.
Rocks are the handful of priorities that, if you hit them, make the quarter a win. They work best when your company keeps starting new things, when priorities are shared but nobody is sure which department owns what, or when each department has its own list and nobody has worked out how they need to support each other.
The discipline is subtraction. The power comes from what you leave off the board, because if everything is a priority, the team ends up treating nothing like one.
The owner usually starts the work and carries most of it, but almost no rock lives inside one department. Marketing needs something from product, product owns a piece of the process, and finance has to sign off. When that isn't agreed at the start, the help feels like a favour, and a team discovers in week five that it has two weeks of work on top of its own priorities. Put every department's part on the board while everyone is in the room and can say yes or no to it.
Map it with the Function Engine template →AI is good at spotting the handoffs nobody mentioned and the department that quietly ends up carrying three rocks.
This meeting has no fixed date. You open it when a signal tells you something needs a decision from more than one leader, which keeps it short, rare and worth everyone's time.
AI can watch for signals so you don't have to: key results falling behind their expected pace, and blockers people keep mentioning in their updates.
The gap between expected and actual pace is what turns a worry into a meeting.
Once a month, department leads share a short pre-read, mark every objective or rock as done, on track, at risk or off track, and spend most of the meeting unblocking whatever is at risk. It's important enough to have its own process, so the full how-to is in Process 3.
How to run the monthly business review →Leaders see the numbers, but the team sees what's actually in the way. Open the retro to people beyond the leadership team, so the problems that never make it onto a dashboard still make it to you.
Thirty honest answers are hard to read in one sitting. Ask AI to group them and connect them to what you're trying to achieve.
At the end of the quarter, put your commitments next to your results. You're not grading people. You're learning what to do differently with the next 90 days.
Then you go back to step 2. The loop starts again, this time with a full quarter of evidence behind every choice.
Memory is a bad source for a quarter review. Let AI pull together every decision, owner and result from the quarter's meetings so you start from what happened.
| Commitment | What happened | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first value 14 → 5 days | Reached 6 days | Hit |
| Expansion revenue +20% | +11%, pricing landed late | Partly |
| Projects closed on time 80% | Stayed at 52% | Missed |
| Decide pricing exceptions owner | Finance owns it from Nov 1 | Hit |
The meeting that keeps the quarter honest. It's part of the OKR cadence, and it works just as well on its own if your company isn't ready for OKRs or Rocks yet.
This is the meeting that keeps the quarter honest. Once a month every department lead sits down with one goal, which is to find what's stuck and get it moving. Updates happen in writing before the meeting, so the time together goes to solving problems.
Ask AI to summarise every pre-read in one place, so nobody has to open document after document. It can also draft each team's pre-read from the latest numbers, and after the meeting it captures the agreed actions and reminds owners before each date.
Activation hit 71%, above the 70% target, mostly thanks to the new setup checklist. Kickoff calls are slipping because booking is still manual, and we expect to stay at about 75% unless that changes.
People skip meetings they don't understand and miss deadlines nobody wrote down. Before the first quarter starts, make three things obvious to everyone involved.
Everyone knows when each meeting happens, what to bring and what should come out of it.
Each objective has one owner and each meeting has one person running it. Write down who decides, who gives input and who just needs to know.
Spell out the small things: pre-reads land 48 hours early, "at risk" means more than 10% behind expected pace, and action items get a reply within two working days.
| Process | Meeting | When | Who | Bring | Leave with |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Priorities | Team priorities | Start of each month | Each manager and their team | Last month's list and a draft for this month | Priorities ranked 1–5, nothing tied, each owned |
| OKRs & cadence | OKR training | Before the OKR session | Anyone new to OKRs | Questions | The same language for everyone |
| OKRs & cadence | OKR session | Start of each quarter | Leadership team | Up to 3 candidate objectives | 3–5 objectives, key results, owners, a "not now" list |
| OKRs & cadence | Rocks session (alternative) | Start of each quarter | Leadership team | A candidate critical number and rocks | One number, a theme, 3–5 owned rocks and a collaboration map |
| OKRs & cadence | One-pager | Within 48 hours | Whole company | The session's decisions | Everyone knows the plan and their part in it |
| OKRs & cadence | Leadership sync | When a signal appears | Only the leaders involved | The signal and the decision needed | A decision, an owner and a date |
| OKRs & cadence | Team retro | Monthly or every other month | The wider team | Honest answers to 3 questions | Themes, and what will change |
| OKRs & cadence | Quarter review | End of each quarter | Leadership team | Commitments and results | What to keep, change and carry over |
| Business review | Monthly business review | Every month | All department leads | A short pre-read (a paragraph and a few points), 48h early | Agreed actions, each with an owner and a date |
Agree on these once, out loud, and put them at the top of every meeting agenda for the first quarter.
If your one-pager isn't in 48 hours early, your department doesn't get agenda time this month.
Good news can wait. Spend the first minutes on what's at risk or off track.
Every issue leaves the room with a single name next to it and a day it's due.
Before anyone leaves, someone reads the decisions back. If it isn't written, it wasn't decided.
Say it in the meeting. Once you leave, everyone backs the decision, including the people who argued against it.
If a meeting has nothing to decide this month, cancel it and tell people why.
Every process in this guide has steps someone has to do: drafting the pre-read, summarising five departments, turning a whiteboard into a one-pager, chasing an owner before a deadline. Today those steps land on some of your busiest, most expensive people. They can land on AI instead, and that's how a team grows its capacity without growing its payroll.
Most companies try AI as a chat window on the side. Someone copies in context, gets an answer and pastes it somewhere else. That saves one person a few minutes, but the team's work doesn't move any faster, because the AI has no idea what was decided last week, how the team works together or who is waiting on what.
AI starts adding real capacity when it lives inside the process your team already follows, connected to the same decisions, meetings and handoffs as everyone else. It knows what earlier steps concluded and who comes next, so you can assign it a step exactly the way you'd assign a person, and it can take over some of the back-and-forth that happens inside teams today: collecting updates, asking for a missing number, drafting the first version for feedback.
A task is something one person does and ticks off. A step is part of how the team works together: it gets what it needs from the step before, has an owner, and hands something to the next person. When AI owns a step, it moves the whole process forward instead of answering one-off questions.
Same meeting, same people. AI takes three of the five steps, so the leaders only spend time where a decision is needed.
An AI step doesn't wait for a free slot in someone's calendar, so the work keeps moving from one person to the next.
AI takes whole steps of the process, so the team can take on more without opening a new role.
Summaries, write-ups and follow-ups stop eating your leaders' hours, and their time goes back to the calls only they can make.
This only works when the process, the team's decisions and the AI live in the same place. That's the idea behind Nova: operations are set up there for collaboration, and AI has a seat at the table, so you can assign it steps in the same process your team follows. The templates below come with these AI steps already set up.
Each template comes with the steps, the questions and the timing built in. Adapt it to your team, connect it to your calendar so recurrences and reminders run on their own, and bring AI into any step.
Each manager and their team agree on what comes first this month, and where new requests go when they land.
Your whole quarter set up in one place, from OKR training to the quarter review.
Short pre-reads, every status on one screen and a deep dive on what's at risk or off track.
Use these alongside the three processes, or on their own when you need them.
Agree on one critical number, a theme and the three to five rocks that make the quarter a win.
Define the minimum collaboration and responsibility each department owes to reach a shared goal.
Each department's key numbers in one place, so the status in your business review comes from data.
Capture what happened, what it affected and what changes so it doesn't happen again.
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