What this trainer was apparently describing as "bottom-up OKRs" sounds like what you're describing as "Kabuki theater". As for the top-bottom-top planning cycl

What this trainer was apparently describing as "bottom-up OKRs" sounds like what you're describing as "Kabuki theater". As for the top-bottom-top planning cycle, my experience has been that the "coordination and refinement" phase tends to mangle the OKRs beyond recognition. Management tends to "refine" what they were handed up by reframing it to sound like what their boss wants to hear. The concrete and achievable goals written by (or at least with the direct input of) the team get rewritten to sound more ambitious, but also more abstract, because management doesn't understand the goals as well as the team. The more layers of management you have, the more severe this effect, but it really only takes two or three to turn a solid list of team goals into a meaningless heap of synergy goo.