It's not totally insane to want bottom-up OKRs. One of the common failure modes of OKRs is that the top-down view of the management doesn't connect well to the reality of day-to-day operations. So you often end up with people engaged in Kabuki theater (making up a nice story about how the things they were going to do anyway really are the KRs for any particular stated objective).
Of course, having teams produce bottom-up OKRs has failure modes too -- it's not really strategic planning if the leaves of the org tree are setting the goals. So you need both.
A cycle of planning seems to work best -- a high-level goal is transmitted down, then each team engages in a local goal-setting process, then these goals go up, then there is coordination and refinement. But this takes forever and requires incredible discipline, so it's hard to do well.
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.
Management doesn't write the KRs for the individual teams or people. If they are, they're engaged in something, it's just not OKR planning. Objectives and key results necessarily become less precise as you move up the org structure.
> Management tends to "refine" what they were handed up by reframing it to sound like what their boss wants to hear.
Sure, that always happens...but there's no system of management that is perfect. Humans gonna human. The only thing a system can do is make us aware of the biases of the people within it.
Of course, having teams produce bottom-up OKRs has failure modes too -- it's not really strategic planning if the leaves of the org tree are setting the goals. So you need both.
A cycle of planning seems to work best -- a high-level goal is transmitted down, then each team engages in a local goal-setting process, then these goals go up, then there is coordination and refinement. But this takes forever and requires incredible discipline, so it's hard to do well.