You Don't Have a SMART Goal. You Have a Wish in Business Clothes.

How the SMART Goal Framework turned into the SMART Wishful KPI that fired good employees, frustrated managers, while patting the wrong people on the back.

Article Summary

There will not be one. Why? Because you all need to read this and change your ways. Yes, and since change management is a regular thing these days, this will not be that hard to accommodate. Accomplish? Well, depends on how resistive your mindset will be to the truth. It’s time to dive in on knowing SMART Goals as they were intended, not as they have become…

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Let's talk about the moment someone in your last team meeting said, "Our goal is to increase revenue by 20% this quarter" and everyone nodded like that was a plan.

It wasn't a plan. It was a wish. A really confident-sounding wish in a nice slide deck, but a wish, nonetheless.

And here's the uncomfortable truth the marketing and business world doesn't want to say out loud: the SMART goal framework (the one you learned in training, the one plastered across every HR onboarding packet and productivity blog in existence) has been quietly broken for decades. Not the original version.

The shadow version. The one someone turned into a fill-in-the-blank template and called it strategic thinking.

I'm not here to bury SMART goals. I'm here to dig them back up and reveal to the world just what they were originally supposed to be and, retrain myself, along with you, to do them justice by doing them correctly.

A Framework With a Forgotten Soul

In 1981, a management consultant named George T. Doran published a two-page paper in Management Review titled "There's a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management's Goals and Objectives." He wasn't building a self-help brand. He was solving a real problem: managers kept writing objectives so vague that nobody could be held accountable for them, and nobody knew whose job it actually was to make them happen.

His original acronym? Specific. Measurable. Assignable. Realistic. Time-related.

Read that third word again. Assignable. Not Achievable. Not Attainable.

Assignable — meaning a specific human being with a name and a title is accountable for making this happen. Doran understood that a goal without an owner is just a group hope.

He also wrote something that has been quietly buried under forty years of template culture:

"The establishment of objectives and their respective action plans are the most critical steps in a company's management process." George Doran

The objective and the action plan were meant to be two halves of one thing. You don't get one without the other. The day trainers separated them — when the SMART statement became the deliverable and the action plan became a separate optional document for a different meeting — the SMART Goal framework lost its spine.

How a Number Became a "Goal"

When something isn’t broken, it doesn’t need fixing. Ironically, now it needs fixing – back to its original intent in order for your business to really see better outcomes and employees feel less anxious about Monday mornings or Friday wrap-up meetings.

Here's how the drift happened, and it matters because understanding the erosion is how you stop repeating it.

The 1980s and 1990s brought SMART into corporate training programs, but trainers hit a snag: "Assignable" didn't work if you were writing a personal goal. You can't assign a goal to yourself — you already own it. So the A became "Achievable."

It feels like a small swap. It wasn't. "Assignable" required naming a person responsible for doing something. "Achievable" just asks whether the number seems reasonable. One demands accountability.

The other demands optimism.

The 1990s and early 2000s sent SMART into the self-help and personal coaching world, a universe Doran never intended to reach. His paper was written for corporate officers, managers, and supervisors. Once it crossed over, the organizational context  (the action plan, the accountability structure, and the resource reality) evaporated.

By 2003, Paul Meyer's Attitude Is Everything had introduced yet another version of the acronym. At least six competing definitions now floated around in the wild, each slightly different, each a little softer than the one before.

The internet made it worse. SEO-driven content farms needed SMART explained in a listicle. Templates became the teacher. The fill-in-the-blank format: "Increase [metric] by [percentage] by [date]" — became the model, and completing the sentence became the goal.

The action plan? Moved to a different section. Mentioned briefly. Treated as optional.

The result is the world we live in now: "Increase conversions by 15% by Q3" gets nodded at in conference rooms as a complete, rigorous, strategic goal. It isn't. It's a scoreboard without a game plan.

Then institutional authority made it official. Salesforce, one of the most widely followed business platforms in the world, reaching millions of sales teams, managers, and business owners, published a guide titled "What Are SMART Goals?"

Under its Time-bound section, the article instructs readers directly: "Rather than saying you want to 'increase sales by 20%', say you want to 'increase sales by 20% in six months'." The guide then states: "Deadlines turn good intentions into real results by giving you a clear finish line to work towards."

Source: Salesforce, "What Are SMART Goals?" — salesforce.com/au/blog/smart-goals/

That is the error, published in plain language, by a platform with global reach and enterprise-level credibility. Adding a six-month window to a percentage increase does not transform a wish into a goal. It transforms an undated wish into a dated wish.

The who, the what, the specific actions, the mechanism — none of it is there. When a brand the size of Salesforce certifies this as the standard, millions of professionals have no reason to question it. It becomes what gets written in planning sessions, approved in performance reviews, and presented in strategy decks across every industry.

"That is what I am up against in reminding you that the original intent of a SMART goal is not a scoreboard mentality stuffed with KPIs that were established off of wishful thinking versus properly framed goals."

The Scoreboard Is Not the Game Plan

This is the line I want every law firm partner, every SMB owner, and every marketing manager to internalize:

The percentage point is how you measure success. It is not how you achieve it.

Wanting a 20% revenue increase is the destination. It tells you where you want to end up. But a destination with no route is not a plan; it's a hope with a deadline attached.

Here's the test: after reading your goal statement, can someone tell you what they should do Monday morning? If the answer is no, you don't have a goal yet. You have a starting point.

A real SMART goal, restored to what Doran intended, looks like this:

"Sarah, as intake coordinator, will increase qualified consultation bookings by 20% over Q3 by implementing a same-day callback protocol for all web inquiries, reducing response time from 48 hours to under 4 hours, and following up on no-shows within 24 hours. Progress will be reviewed weekly. Target completion: September 30."

Notice what that version contains that "increase bookings by 20% by Q3" does not:

• A named owner (Sarah)

• Specific behaviors and actions (callback protocol, response time standard, follow-up process)

• A mechanism — the how — not just the what

• A timeline with built-in review checkpoints, not just a finish line

One of these is a goal. The other version you have bought into (not realizing) is a wish in business clothes.

Why Law Firms and SMBs Are Especially Vulnerable to This

Here's what makes this particularly costly for law firms and small-to-mid-sized businesses: you don't have the institutional cushion to absorb the difference between a real goal and an aspirational number.

A Fortune 500 company can survive a quarter of chasing a metric nobody had a real plan to hit. Law firms and SMBs cannot. When your marketing budget is lean, when your team is small, when every dollar and every hour has to pull weight — the difference between a wish and a structured commitment is the difference between growth and a Q4 review conversation nobody wants to have.

Law firms in particular operate in a world where referral pipelines have historically masked weak goal-setting. When cases came in through word of mouth and reputation, the absence of a real marketing plan was survivable.

That era is closing fast. The firms growing right now are the ones who have stopped setting marketing metrics and started building marketing systems with owners, actions, timelines, and accountability built in from the start.

The same is true for SMBs scaling past the founder-does-everything stage. The moment you delegate to even one other person, "increase sales by 15%" stops being enough.

Your team needs to know what they do! Specifically, behaviorally, on a Tuesday at 2pm — that moves that number.

If you haven't told them, you haven't set a goal. You've set an expectation.

The Original Five Letters, Restored

Here's what SMART was always supposed to mean and what it should mean for your firm or business starting today.

S — Specific (as in: actions, not just outcomes). Specific doesn't just mean "use a number instead of a vague phrase." It means naming the behavior, the activity, the approach that will produce the result. "Increase client retention" is not specific. "Assign a 90-day check-in call to every active client file, led by [name], beginning [date]" is specific.

M — Measurable. Yes, you need a number. This is the one letter the modern version got right. But the number is the measurement; it is not the goal. Keep it here, where it belongs: as the yardstick, not the strategy.

A — Assignable (not just Achievable). Put a name on it. One name, not a department. Not "the marketing team." One human being who, at the end of the quarter, can look at the result and say whether it happened and why. Accountability requires a person, not a committee.

R — Realistic (in context, not in comfort). Doran's use of "Realistic" was a resource and context check, not a permission slip to set small targets. The question isn't "is this number low enough to guarantee success?" The question is: "Do we have the people, the budget, the tools, and the time to execute the action plan we've outlined?" If yes, the goal is realistic. If not, change the action plan or the timeline, not the ambition.

T — Time-related (with checkpoints, not just a deadline). A deadline tells you when you've run out of time. Checkpoints tell you whether you're on track while you can still do something about it. Build both into the goal.

The Goal You Write This Week

Before your next planning session, whether you're a law firm preparing a Q3 marketing push or an SMB mapping out a growth quarter, run every goal through this filter:

1.      Is there a number that defines success? (Measurable)

2.      Is there a named person responsible? (Assignable)

3.      Are there specific actions — not intentions — that will produce that number? (Specific)

4.      Do we have the resources to actually execute those actions? (Realistic)

5.      Are there review checkpoints before the final deadline? (Time-related)

If any of these five answers is "no" or "I'm not sure," the goal isn't done yet.

Doran said it in 1981, and nothing has changed: the objective and the action plan are the most critical steps.

You need both. A number without a plan is a wish. A plan without a number is activity without accountability. Together, written with a name and a timeline and a set of real actions, they become the thing Doran was actually trying to build: a goal worth showing up for.

The best part for all of us in this modern technological era? We have AI to help us.

Give it a try. Be sure you input in the parameter for AI to use Doran’s original SMART goal model.

Your employees will thank you without really knowing what changed...unless, you teach them!

Julie Fisher is the Fractional CMO behind Fisher Marketing Services, working with law firms and SMBs who are ready to stop guessing and start building marketing that actually moves the needle. If your goals look like they're working but nothing is changing, let's talk.

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