What is really going on with smart goals?

Where SMART came from and what it actually promises

George Doran formulated SMART in 1981 in an article for "Management Review" - together with Miller and Cunningham. He was writing about managerial goals: how to plan team work concretely, operationally, without philosophizing. Not about weight loss or "finding yourself."

And it works. In that context - it works really well.

The promise of SMART is simple: if a goal is well-formulated, you're more likely to actually start and not quit at the first obstacle. Measurability gives feedback. Deadlines force prioritization. Specificity eliminates vagueness.

But SMART is a framework, not a law of physics. GPS works great when you know where you're going. The problem starts when the GPS becomes more important than the journey.

And there's another trap, less often discussed: SMART assumes that at the moment you set a goal, you already know everything you need to know. That context won't change. That life will wait for you to check the box. Is that always true?

When SMART actually helps

No irony - there are areas where SMART is unbeatable. In each of these cases the goal is task-oriented rather than identity-oriented - you know exactly what needs to be delivered, by whom and when. That's the environment where measurability genuinely works in your favor.

• Project goals with a deadline. "We'll deploy the new CRM system by end of Q3, migrate 100% of client data, zero production downtime." Here SMART saves projects from drifting.
• Team KPIs. When I work with teams on OKRs, the question "how will you measure it?" makes the difference between a goal and a wish.
• Operational goals. Reducing support response time from 48 to 24 hours. Increasing landing page conversion by 15%. New hire onboarding completed by end of week two. Concrete, SMART-friendly.
• Short-term goals with a clear priority. When you have 3 weeks and one goal - SMART helps you stay focused.

One company I worked with had seven "priority strategic goals" running at once. All of them were SMARTly written. None were achieved. The problem wasn't the tool - it was the lack of hierarchy. But SMART at least gave us a starting point for the conversation.

Another story - a positive one this time. A dev team, deployment deadline, murky requirements. The first thing we did together: wrote a SMART goal. For an hour they argued about the word "complete" in the definition. And that was the best hour of the entire project. Because it turned out everyone had a different idea of what "complete" meant. SMART didn't give them the answer - it gave them the question. And that's its real value.

When SMART eats the intention

In 2025, a product manager set herself a SMART goal on LinkedIn: 104 posts in a year. Two a week. Exactly. Achievable. Time-bound. Beautiful.

She achieved the goal. She published 104 posts.

But something changed along the way. She started writing for the tick. For the checkbox. For the number, not the idea. Some posts - valuable. Some - just to be there. The framework ate the intention.

I know this from my own experience. Once I set a goal: run 20 coaching sessions per quarter. Measurable, specific, time-bound. And I ran them. But somewhere between session 15 and 19 I stopped asking whether those sessions were what my clients actually needed. I was accountable to the spreadsheet, not to them.

Three types of goals better left "fluffy":

• Relationship goals. "I want to be more present for my family." How do you measure that? Number of dinners without the phone? Maybe. But the goal of "being more present" has value without slicing it into KPIs.
• Creative and exploratory goals. "I want to write." Not "I'll publish 12 pieces." I want to write - and see what comes of it.
• Transformational goals. "I want to become a leader people trust." No metric captures the whole thing. You can measure proxies - but a proxy isn't the goal.

The third way: levels of goals

The framework isn't bad. Applying it one-size-fits-all is.

A quick working taxonomy:

A note on "fluffy": a healthy strategic goal is deliberately open-ended - because it describes a direction, not a deliverable. That's not an excuse for vagueness. The difference: "I want to build strong relationships with clients" is a direction. "I don't know what I want" is just noise. One is intentionally open. The other is simply unclear.

When a client brings me a SMART goal in a session and says "I don't know what the point of this is," it almost always turns out they jumped to the tactical level before establishing the strategic one. They had the GPS but didn't know what city they were driving to.

That's the moment I take a step back with the client. I don't ask: "how will you measure it?" I ask: "why does this matter?" And "what will change when you achieve it?" If there's no answer to those questions - SMART is the wrong starting point. The right starting point is a conversation about values, direction, what you actually want. Only then the framework.

SMART isn't the only answer at the tactical level. OKRs try to solve a similar problem with a different balance - between ambitious and measurable. FAST Goals, WOOP - different tools, different assumptions. But before you reach for any of them, the question stays the same: why?

Coaching Bullshit says: "Set yourself a SMART goal and you'll achieve everything."

Reality says: "SMART works great at the tactical level of planning. At the level of meaning - first answer what you actually want."

One question to close

Your goals for this year - where does the framework genuinely help... and where did it start driving you instead of the other way around?

* Spreadsheet closed doesn't mean goal abandoned. Sometimes it means the format was wrong, not the intention.