What Are SMART Goals?

The acronym appears in a two-page article that George T. Doran published in November 1981 in Management Review, in its AMA Forum section. Doran was then president of a consultancy, Management Assistance Programs, and had previously been director of corporate planning at Washington Water Power in Spokane. His starting point was practical. Doran wrote that most managers still did not know what objectives are and how they can be written, and he offered a rule that is easy to remember.

According to Doran, every corporate, department and section objective should ideally be: - Specific: it targets a specific area for improvement. - Measurable: it quantifies progress or at least suggests an indicator of it. - Assignable: it says who will do it. - Realistic: it states what results can realistically be achieved with the resources available. - Time-related: it says when the result can be achieved.

The versions in circulation today do not always match this list. Later versions replace "assignable" with "achievable" or "attainable" and "realistic" with "relevant". That changes the content. With "achievable", the question of who is responsible disappears, although it had its own letter in the original. With "relevant", a question enters that Doran's list did not ask: whether the goal matters to the business. Anyone using the acronym should say which version they mean, because two teams can both say "SMART" and check different things.

The article includes its own example: a new inventory system, built and running by 31 December, that cuts inventory costs by $1 million while using no more than 200 work hours and $15,000 of upfront spending. One sentence holds the area, the figure, the deadline and the resource limit. The person responsible is not in the sentence.

The method is a checklist. You start with an intention and go through the letters until the sentence passes all five questions. An invented marketing example:

- Intention: "improve the newsletter". - Specific: which part? The monthly newsletter to existing customers. - Measurable: with which number? Quote requests that come in through the newsletter, counted in web analytics. - Assignable: the email marketing team. - Realistic: your own historical data shows how much is possible with the same budget. - Time-related: by June 30.

Doran added two caveats that get lost when the acronym travels on its own. First, not every objective has to meet all five criteria. The closer it gets, the better, but the acronym is a guideline, not a condition. Second, quantification is not realistic everywhere, particularly in staff middle-management positions, and forcing a number can cost a more abstract objective that was worth more. For Doran, what mattered was the combination of the objective and its action plan, and management should focus on both.

The mistake the acronym does not catch is this one: a goal can meet all five letters and still measure the wrong thing. Another invented example: "Raise the newsletter open rate from 20% to 30% by June 30; owner: the email team." It is specific, measurable, assigned, realistic given past data and time-bound. But the company wanted more orders from the newsletter. The team can reach 30% with flashier subject lines without a single extra order, and the goal will be marked as met. The five letters check the form of the sentence. None of Doran's letters asks whether the chosen number represents the result you are after. "Relevant", in later versions, comes closer, but an open rate also looks relevant at first glance.

The fix starts one step earlier. First name the business result (orders that start in the newsletter), then choose the measure that captures it, and write the SMART goal around that measure. The open rate can stay in the report as a diagnostic figure, in the same way a KPI relies on context metrics.

A SMART goal can be reviewed. With a deadline, a number and an owner, the conversation at the end of the period is about what happened, not about what each person understood at the start. The "assignable" letter in the original also prevents the goal that belongs to everyone and therefore to no one.

Two neighbouring terms are worth keeping apart. A KPI is an indicator watched continuously, such as the conversion rate of a landing page. A SMART goal sets the value that indicator should reach, who answers for it and by when. The KPI entry applies the SMART criteria to how the indicator is defined; this entry deals with the goal. OKRs are another goal-setting method. Google's re:Work guide asks for ambitious objectives that feel somewhat uncomfortable, and puts the sweet spot for the final grade between 0.6 and 0.7: a team that always reaches 1.0 set its goals too low. Doran's "R" asks for the opposite, a statement of what can be achieved with the resources available. The two approaches pull in different directions, and a team that mixes them without saying so cannot tell whether 70% is a success or a failure.

In marketing, the choice of measure decides almost everything. A clicks goal can be met by buying cheaper clicks; an ROI goal forces you to look at revenue and cost together. Both can be SMART. Only one tells you whether the campaign pays off.

• Name the business result first, then the measure that captures it.
• Say which version of the acronym applies, Doran's or a later one.
• Record the starting value from your own data before setting the target.
• Name an owner, even if the version you use has no letter for it.
• Pair the goal with an action plan, as Doran asked.

• Picking the number because it is available, not because it represents the result.
• Treating the acronym as mandatory and forcing numbers where they make no sense.
• Writing a goal with no deadline, or with "as soon as possible".
• Mixing SMART logic (realistic) with OKR logic (ambitious) without saying so.
• Confusing the indicator (the KPI) with the goal that sets its value.