Smarter than SMART: what’s the best framework for defining your business goals?

Every New Year, people are thinking about the year ahead and setting goals for themselves. The same happens in the business world. Companies are defining the business targets for the year, which affects the business initiatives they run and the people involved. Being able to help business understand needs and articulate them in a form of well defined goals is one of the key skills a business analyst should have.

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There has always been a difference between a good achievable goal that inspires the business to new accomplishments and a vague and weak goal that does not help business move forward (or even drags it back). A few attempts have been made to try and distil the features of a good goal, so the visionaries can use those as a quality checklist or a framework for better articulating their goals. Recently, one of these frameworks became the most popular — SMART. But is it the silver bullet that can be used all over the place? Probably not.

Frameworks for objectives

Even though often the terms “goal” and “objective” are used interchangeably, there is a difference in business and strategic context. A goal can be defined as a desired result one wants to achieve. It will typically be broad and long-term. The goals will inform strategies and guide the direction of your organisation. An objective, on the other hand, defines the specific, measurable targets the business must address to achieve the overall goal.

In most of the cases, when people talk about goals and objectives in the business context they would imply using SMART.. According to the BABOK guide, ensuring SMART principle is a common test for assessing objectives:

• Specific: describing something that has an observable outcome, • Measurable: tracking and measuring the outcome • Achievable: testing the feasibility of the effort, • Relevant: aligning with the enterprise’s vision, mission, and goals, and • Time-bounded: defining a time frame that is consistent with the need.

This works well when you can scope your target goal to the level when it can be controlled and measured in a SMART way. In other words, when you have actionable objectives. It does not work as well with broad and long term aspirations captured as your high level goals.

When working with different types of goals such as aspirations or personal goals, you will notice that SMART can not be applied with the same efficiency, nor should it be attempted to.

This is when many analysts struggle, as other approaches are strangely less advertised thus harder to pick up.

Motivational goals

Working on a strategic level one often needs to define and set very broad inspirational and motivational goals, that will help the organisation move forward. One of the frameworks that will help is the IDEA framework.

The acronym goes as following:

• Inspiring: only visionary, bold and eloquent objectives move people and your organization forward. • Difficult: aim high with stretch goals far from the status quo, even go up to the point where one might feel slightly uncomfortable. • Explicit: make your objective clear, concise and easy to understand from a first and brief glance, even for an outsider. • Achievable: only commit on goals that can be nearly or completely accomplished in the underlying goal period by the assigned team or individual.

This framework was introduced to complement SMART objectives as a part of OKR process. Read more here: https://www.eisenhower.me/okr/

This is not however the only usable framework. According to Mark Murphy, the author of “Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All and They’ll Give You Even More” (read here: https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Percenters-Challenge-Employees-Theyll/dp/0071825568/) the best goals are heartfelt, animated, required and difficult — HARD.

According to this approach, the goals need to have emotional attachment, they need to be desired (Heartfelt). It is best to visualise the goals, specifically designing and communicating the state of the world after the goal is achieved (Animated). The goals need to be relevant to the business (Required). And they need to challenge the employees to serve something bigger than themselves (Difficult). HARD goals are difficult enough to test everyone’s limits and drive personal achievement.

Uniting goals

Sometimes, you use your goals as a tool to unite a group of people under one umbrella. The aim is to help focus the team effort. CLEAR goals work really well in this context.

• Collaborative: Goals must build a social framework that will encourage employees to work together collaboratively and in teams • Limited: Goals should be limited in both scope and duration • Emotional: Goals should make an emotional connection to people, tapping into their energy and passion that you can feel • Appreciable: Large goals should be broken down into smaller goals so they can be accomplished more quickly and easily for long-term gain • Refinable: Set goals with a headstrong and steadfast objective, but as new situations or information arise, give yourself permission to refine and modify them

Read more: https://www.kreekspeak.com/clear-goal-setting/

So what do I do?

As you can see, there are many frameworks. And probably the reason there are so many is that neither one is perfect. Depending on the context, the team, the types of goals you deal with you may pick one or the other. I think one important idea is using at least some framework is always better than not using any. Improving on the framework after each attempt is always better that following the same steps again and again hoping this time it will work better.

So start with thinking big — what is the ultimate desire that you need to fulfill, the major accomplishment that the business is after? Understand it and break it down into smaller actionable pieces with quicker timeframes. For each piece, refine it using the framework that you find most appropriate at the time. Start achieving those goals, and as you go make notes of the what that worked well and not so well. Based on the notes, keep refining the remaining goals. This is how you will end up with the framework that works for you.