SMART Goals — What They Get Right, What They Miss, and What to Do Instead

Ask most businesspeople what a SMART KPI is, and they’ll give you an answer. The problem is that SMART KPIs don’t exist — not as a meaningful concept, anyway. SMART was designed for goals, not for measures. Confusing the two is one of the most common reasons KPI systems produce reports but not insight.

This KPI Fundamentals Guide addresses that confusion directly, alongside the three limitations of SMART goals that most people have never heard articulated — and what to add to make your goals genuinely measure-worthy.

What are SMART goals — and where did they come from?

George T. Doran introduced the SMART framework in 1981, in a paper titled “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives”, published in Management Review. His purpose was straightforward: to give managers a practical checklist for writing clearer, more useful objectives.

Doran’s original definitions were:

• Specific — target a specific area for improvement
• Measurable — quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress
• Assignable — specify who will do it
• Realistic — state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources
• Time-related — specify when the result can be achieved

Notice that Doran’s original “A” was Assignable, not Achievable or Attainable — the two alternatives that have since become far more common. This is worth noting, because it points to something that would become a significant problem: SMART has been reinterpreted so many times that the acronym no longer means the same thing to everyone who uses it.

Despite that, the original intent was sound, and the framework’s popularity is well deserved. Before SMART, organisational goals were routinely vague, unmeasurable, and disconnected from any clear timeline. SMART gave people a practical way to write better goals — and better goals lead to better performance conversations, better alignment, and better results.

The problem isn’t SMART. The problem is that SMART has since been stretched well beyond what it was designed to do.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
SMART was designed as a checklist to help managers write clearer, more meaningful goals. It was not designed as a framework for creating KPIs, and it is not a complete framework for making goals meaningfully measurable.

SMART goals and KPIS — a critical confusion

One of the most persistent sources of confusion in performance measurement is the idea of “SMART KPIs.” It comes up in workshops, strategic planning sessions, and performance conversations everywhere — and it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what a KPI actually is.

A KPI — Key Performance Indicator — is a quantitative measure of the degree to which a performance result is happening over time. It answers the question: how much, how often, or to what extent is this result occurring — and is it improving?

A SMART goal, on the other hand, is a statement of intent. It describes a result we want to achieve, written in a way that is clear, realistic, and time-bound.

These are different things. And applying SMART criteria to a KPI doesn’t make sense, for a simple reason: a KPI can’t be “Achievable” in the way a goal can. It can’t be “Time-bound” in the same sense either — a good KPI is measured continuously over time, not set with a deadline and then retired. Applying SMART criteria to a measure conflates the goal with the evidence of whether the goal is being achieved.

This matters because when organisations try to write “SMART KPIs,” they typically end up with one of two problems. One is that they write what are really targets dressed up as measures — “achieve 95% on-time delivery by Q4”. The other is that they write activity milestones — “complete implementation of the new case management system by June” — neither of which tells you anything about whether performance actually improved.

As performance measurement specialist Bernard Marr has noted, there is no such thing as a SMART KPI. It is your goals that need to be SMART. Your KPIs are the evidence of whether those goals are being achieved. Your KPIs provide the ‘Measurable’ part of SMART.

The distinction is not merely semantic. It determines whether your performance measurement system gives you genuine insight or just a sense of busy compliance.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
There is no such thing as a SMART KPI. SMART is a framework for writing goals. KPIs are the evidence of whether those goals are being achieved. Conflating the two produces measures that look meaningful but don’t tell you whether performance is actually improving.

Three limitations of SMART goals that most people don’t discuss

SMART is certainly useful as a starting point for goal-writing. But it has three limitations that have become more significant as the framework has spread from its original management context into strategic planning, government performance frameworks, and organisation-wide goal-setting.

Understanding these limitations doesn’t mean abandoning SMART. It means knowing what it can and can’t do — and what to add when it isn’t enough.

Limitation 1: SMART has been reinterpreted so many times it no longer means the same thing to everyone

Since Doran’s original paper in 1981, the SMART acronym has been modified, expanded, and reinterpreted hundreds of times. The “A” alone has at least four common variants: Assignable, Achievable, Attainable, and Action-oriented. The “R” has been reinterpreted as Relevant, Realistic, Results-focused, and Resourced. Some versions add an “E” and “R” for SMARTER (Evaluated and Reviewed, or Ethical and Recorded, depending on who you ask).

The result is that several people in the same organisation can all say “our goals are SMART” and mean completely different things. This defeats the purpose of a shared framework, which is to create a common language for writing and evaluating goals. When the framework itself is ambiguous, clarity won’t be the product.

In practice, this means that SMART shouldn’t be used as a shared standard without first agreeing on exactly what each letter means in your organisation’s context.

Limitation 2: SMART is frequently applied to KPIs when it was designed for goals

This is the confusion addressed above — repeated here briefly because it’s important enough to name as a limitation in its own right. When SMART is applied to KPIs rather than goals, the result is measures that are really targets, milestones, or activity counts. None of these provide the evidence that performance is improving. This limitation has become more problematic as SMART has spread into frameworks, software tools, and performance management systems that conflate goals with measures.

Limitation 3: SMART doesn’t require goals to be result-oriented

This is the most significant limitation, and the one least often discussed.

A goal can satisfy every SMART criterion and still describe an action rather than a result. Consider this goal: “Deliver financial literacy workshops to all client groups by end of Q3.” It is Specific, Measurable (you can count whether workshops were delivered), Assignable (someone can clearly own it), Relevant, and Time-bound. And it tells you nothing about whether clients’ financial wellbeing actually improved.

Action-oriented goals are plans. They describe what we intend to do. Result-oriented goals describe what we want to change in the world. The difference matters enormously for measurement — because you can only monitor a result over time, and only the improvement of a result constitutes genuine performance.

SMART doesn’t ask whether a goal describes a result or an action. It doesn’t ask: what would be different in the world if this goal were achieved? That omission means SMART-compliant goals can still be systematically unmeasurable — not because they lack specificity or a timeline, but because they describe activity rather than impact.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
A goal that passes the SMART test is not necessarily a goal that can be meaningfully measured. The missing criterion is result-orientation: does the goal describe a change in the world, or just something to do?

What makes a goal genuinely measure-worthy?

If SMART isn’t enough to guarantee a goal can be meaningfully measured, what is?

The five questions below build on SMART’s foundations while addressing its limitations — particularly the result-orientation gap. They don’t replace SMART so much as complete it. A goal that can answer yes to all five is a goal that is genuinely measure-worthy.

1. Is the goal result-oriented? Does the goal describe a change in the world — something that would be different if the goal were achieved — or does it describe something to do? If it’s the latter, ask why you are doing it, and rewrite the goal as the answer to that question.
2. Is the goal unambiguous? Could seven different people read this goal and arrive at the same understanding of what it means? If not, the language is too vague. Aim for words that a ten-year-old could understand — not to simplify the thinking, but to make the goal say exactly what it means. Vague goals produce vague measures.
3. Is the goal observable? Can you describe what you would see, hear, or otherwise observe in the real world if this goal were being achieved? If you can’t picture what the evidence would look like, you can’t design a KPI for it. Observability is the bridge between a goal and a measure.
4. Is the goal important enough to measure? Measurement takes time and effort. Every goal you choose to measure means something else you aren’t measuring. Is this goal genuinely among the most important results your organisation needs to improve — or is it on the list because it seemed reasonable? Goals that are truly important to measure are the ones where the cost of not knowing whether you’re improving is high.
5. Is the goal influenceable? To make performance better, influence is often all we have, and it’s often enough. The goals that matter most are often the goals we cannot have 100% control over. And those we do have 100% control over are probably too trivial to worry about.

These five questions are explored in full in the article Are Your Goals Measure-Worthy If They Are SMART? — with examples and practical guidance for applying them to your own goals.

Here is a simple comparison showing SMART goals before and after the measure-worthy test:

Original SMART goal	Problem	Rewritten as measure-worthy
Deliver cultural awareness training to all staff by June	Action-oriented — describes what to do, not what to change	All staff feel included and respected, regardless of cultural background
Increase stakeholder communication by Q4	Vague and action-oriented — communication is an activity	Stakeholders report feeling informed and consulted on decisions that affect them
Implement a new case management system by March	Action-oriented milestone	Case managers spend less time on administration and more time with clients
Improve employee engagement	Vague — no observable definition of what engagement means	Employees report feeling motivated, valued, and clear on how their work contributes to organisational goals

In each case, the rewritten goal is the one that can generate a meaningful KPI — because it describes a result that can be observed, quantified, and monitored over time.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
Before designing a KPI, check that the goal it is meant to measure is genuinely result-oriented, unambiguous, and observable. A well-written goal makes KPI design significantly easier — and a poorly written goal makes it nearly impossible.

SMART goals in practice — how they interact with your broader performance framework

Understanding the limitations of SMART goals matters most in the contexts where goal-writing has the highest stakes — and where the gap between a SMART goal and a truly measurable one causes the most downstream damage.

SMART goals and OKRs

The OKR framework — Objectives and Key Results — has become a popular alternative or complement to SMART goals, particularly in technology and corporate sectors. But OKRs suffer from the same result-orientation problem as SMART goals, and often more acutely.

Objectives in OKRs are frequently written as actions or projects, and their Key Results end up as milestones or activity counts:

This is not a SMART OKR. But it can transform into one:

If your organisation uses OKRs, the underlying measurement challenge is still there.

Further reading: KPIs vs OKRs

SMART goals and cascading strategy

One of the most consequential places where poorly articulated goals cause damage is in strategy cascading (or alignment) — when corporate goals are passed down through business units and teams.

If the goals at the top of the cascade are action-oriented or too vague or broad, every level below will try to align to actions rather than results. Each team writes its own action-oriented goals, and the organisation ends up with a strategy that describes a great deal of activity and very little that can be measured as improvement.

When corporate goals are result-oriented — when they describe the actual changes the organisation exists to create — cascading works differently. Each team can ask how does our work contribute to those results? and write goals that are genuinely linked by cause and effect rather than by administrative alignment.

This is why writing SMART and result-oriented goals isn’t just a measurement technique. It’s a prerequisite for coherent strategy execution.

SMART goals and KPI design

The connection between goal quality and KPI quality is direct and practical: the better the goal, the easier the KPI design.

When a goal is result-oriented, unambiguous, and observable, the process of finding meaningful KPIs for it is relatively straightforward. The evidence that the result is happening is often visible once the goal is clearly written. When a goal is action-oriented or vague, no KPI design technique will produce a measure that genuinely tells you whether performance is improving — because the goal itself doesn’t describe a performance result.

This is why PuMP’s performance measurement methodology begins not with KPI selection or design, but with making goals measurable. The step of translating strategic goals into clear, result-oriented statements is the foundation on which every other step depends.

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT:
Wherever goals are important to measure and achieve, SMART can offer a starting point for articulating those goals more clearly. Just don’t forget the importance of making those goals result-oriented first.