SMART Goals is a widely used framework for designing objectives that are concrete enough to be planned, tracked, and evaluated. The acronym was introduced by George T. Doran in a November 1981 article in Management Review titled "There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives." Doran's original formulation stood for Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, and Time-related, though later variants — popularized in management and HR literature through the 1990s — commonly substitute Achievable for Assignable and Relevant for Realistic.
The five criteria typically mean:
- Specific — the goal targets a clearly defined outcome, not a vague aspiration.
- Measurable — progress and completion can be assessed against a concrete indicator.
- Achievable — the goal is within the reach of available resources, skills, and authority.
- Relevant — the goal aligns with broader organizational or personal priorities.
- Time-bound — there is a defined deadline or review point.
In professional and research contexts, SMART goals are used in performance reviews, project planning, donor reporting, and personal development plans. Think tanks, NGOs, and government agencies often require SMART-style objectives in logframes and theory-of-change documents because they make outcomes auditable. For junior researchers, framing tasks this way — e.g., "draft a 3,000-word literature review on EU carbon border adjustments by 15 March" rather than "study CBAM" — improves supervisor feedback loops and workload estimation.
The framework has limitations. Critics note that strict measurability can bias work toward easily quantified outputs at the expense of harder-to-measure outcomes, and that "achievable" criteria may discourage ambitious or exploratory goals. Variants such as SMARTER (adding Evaluated and Reviewed) and FAST goals (Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific, Transparent), proposed by Donald Sull and Charles Sull in MIT Sloan Management Review in 2018, attempt to address these gaps. Despite critiques, SMART remains a baseline literacy item in professional development across sectors.
Example
In a 2023 performance review, a junior analyst at Chatham House set a SMART goal to publish two co-authored commentary pieces on Sahel security by the end of Q4, measured by editor acceptance and word count.
Frequently asked questions
George T. Doran introduced it in a November 1981 article in Management Review. His original acronym used Assignable and Realistic rather than the now-common Achievable and Relevant.
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