Are S.M.A.R.T. goals still smart enough?
I was born in 1981. The same year George Doran, a director of corporate planning, published a short paper called "There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives." Forty-some years later, we’re the same age, and people still argue about whether either of us has aged well.
Doran didn’t set out to invent a movement. He wrote a two-page piece for Management Review, trying to help managers stop writing goals nobody could act on. His original letters were Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-related. Somewhere along the way "Assignable" became "Achievable" and "Realistic" became "Relevant," and the acronym got copied into a thousand templates, drifting slightly from what Doran meant every time. There isn’t one official SMART anymore, there are dozens: some use Achievable, some Attainable, some Ambitious, some Actionable. In this piece I’ll use Actionable, closer to Doran’s original intent than most of the modern variants.
A way to write goals, not a way to run a strategy
Spend ten minutes online and you’ll find plenty of people pitting SMART against OKRs. Here’s where I want to be precise, because most of that debate is a category error. SMART was never a competitor to OKRs. It’s a checklist for writing one clear statement. OKRs are a system: cascading objectives, ownership, a weekly rhythm, a way to connect a team’s work to the company’s direction.
SMART doesn’t do any of that. What it does is give you the discipline to write a Key Result that actually means something. "Improve customer experience" is not a Key Result. "Reduce average response time from 4 hours to 1 hour by March 31st" is. That’s SMART, doing exactly what it was built for: turning an intention into a sentence someone can be held to.
Use SMART to write the Key Result well.
Use OKRs to decide which Key Results matter and who owns them.
What SMART doesn’t solve
Being clear about what SMART is for also means being honest about what it isn’t for.
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"Publish 24 blog posts" is SMART. It’s also busywork if nobody checks whether it moved anything. SMART will happily certify a goal that produces activity, not impact.
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If a goal has to be realistic to pass the checklist, teams learn to write goals they know they’ll hit. Over time, that trains the organization to underpromise, not to stretch.
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SMART tells you the goal is well-formed. It tells you nothing about whether anyone in the room actually cares about it. A perfectly specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, time-bound goal can still leave a team completely cold.
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A SMART goal can be flawless in isolation and still have zero relationship to company strategy. Specific and aligned are not the same thing.
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A large study on New Year’s resolutions found that people taught to use SMART goals actually reported less success than people using other approaches. Structure alone isn’t the whole answer.
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SMART earns its keep on quarterly and yearly goals, where clarity and a due date genuinely matter. Push it down to daily tasks or up to broad goals, and it starts to feel like overhead for something that didn’t need a five-point checklist in the first place.
None of this makes SMART wrong. It makes SMART a smaller tool than people ask it to be.
If not SMART, then what? A quick look at the alternatives
Every gap above has produced its own acronym, usually built to fix the one thing SMART leaves out.
FAST (Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific, Transparent).
Built directly against SMART’s blind spot on follow-through and ambition. Instead of checking whether a goal is well-formed once, FAST asks whether it stays alive in the room, reviewed often, visible to everyone, and deliberately stretched rather than safe.HARD (Heartfelt, Animated, Required, Difficult).
Aimed squarely at the emotional-load gap. Where SMART is silent on whether anyone cares, HARD starts there: does this goal connect to something people actually feel, can they picture what achieving it looks like, and is it hard enough to matter?Stretch goals.
Less a framework than a mindset: deliberately set a target you’re not sure you’ll hit, precisely to counter the "Achievable caps ambition" trap. Stretch goals are often paired with SMART rather than replacing it. SMART supplies the discipline to break the stretch into something you can actually act on.
None of these are a strict upgrade. Each one trades SMART’s simplicity for a sharper answer to one specific gap: ambition, emotion, alignment. Which trade is worth making depends on which of SMART’s blind spots is actually costing you something.
What SMART means today, letter by letter
SPECIFIC
Name the thing. Not the topic, the outcome.
Ask: which verb defines a clear endpoint? Vague management language, "launched," "implemented," "improved," almost always hides an unclear finish line.
Tip: replace the vague verb with something visible and checkable. Not "implemented onboarding," but "90% of new hires completed onboarding training" or "welcome communication sent to all employees."
MEASURABLE
Pick a number you’ll actually track, not one you’ll write down once and forget.
Ask: what does the dashboard look like on the day you check this? If you can’t picture it, the metric isn’t real yet.
Tip: prefer a number you already have the data for over one you’d need to build new reporting to get. A goal that requires inventing a metric often quietly dies with it.
ACTIONABLE
Use this one to test whether the goal is actually something a team can pick up, not just something you can measure.
Ask: can you break this down into a clear set of tasks someone could start on this week? If you can’t picture the first three steps, the goal isn’t actionable yet, it’s still an ambition.
Tip: if you can’t name the tasks, the goal is probably still too abstract. Push it down a level until it turns into something a team can put on a plan, not just something they can agree with.
RELEVANT
Ask why this goal exists before you ask how to hit it.
Ask: how does this goal link to the strategy? What’s the why behind the work that needs to happen? Who really benefits from this, and could they explain the result in ten seconds?
Tip: if you can’t answer the "who benefits" question in one sentence, the goal isn’t relevant yet, it’s just busy.
TIME-BOUND
A due date isn’t bureaucracy, it’s what turns a goal into something you can actually finish and celebrate. It sets the ambition speed, and it requires you to think through the constraints/barriers you need to solve.
Ask: what happens on the due date, do you review, close, or celebrate? A goal without that moment tends to just fade out instead of finishing.
Tip: avoid vague windows like "this quarter" or "ongoing." Put an actual date on it, even if it’s a working date you might adjust later.
Not every goal needs all five letters spelled out in full. Some goals are obviously time-bound the moment you write them down, some are self-evidently specific. Use whichever letters actually add clarity to this goal, and skip the ones that don’t. The point was never to fill out the acronym. It was to make the goal impossible to misread.
The bottom line
SMART is still valuable, because most goals people write still aren’t clear. That lack of clarity is a big part of the overwhelm we’re trying to solve when we talk about goal setting at all. A goal you can’t measure or finish isn’t a goal, it’s a wish with a due date attached.
But SMART was never built to carry your whole strategy, your ambition, or your alignment across teams. Use it for what it’s good at: writing the sentence well. Just don’t mistake a well-written sentence for a well-designed goal system.