SMART goals are awful, here is why.

Like OKRs, SMART is a way to formulate goals. 

SMART objectives were first introduced by George T. Doran in the November 1981 issue of Management Review. In that issue, he shared an article called "There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives" in which he advocated for a better way to set objectives.

SMART establishes 5 criteria that objectives should meet in order to be effective. These criteria are easy to remember because of the smart acronym:

• Specific: Clearly defined and unambiguous
• Measurable: Includes criteria to track progress and measure the outcome
• Achievable: Realistic and attainable
• Relevant: Aligned with broader goals
• Time-bound: Has a clear deadline

An example of a SMART objective would be: Increase organic website visitors by 30% in Q3.

While SMART goals have been a business staple for decades, most organizations now recognize its limitations and make the switch to OKRs. Like cassette tapes and fax machines (also from the eighties), SMART goals have become outdated in today's competitive, fast-paced business landscape.

Here’s the main disadvantage of SMART objectives, and why OKRs are demonstrably better for driving meaningful progress.

Conflating outcomes and outputs

The biggest problem with SMART objectives is their failure to distinguish between outputs and outcomes. This has profound implications for how organizations achieve success.

With OKRs, you differentiate between outcomes (Key Results) and outputs (Initiatives). OKR has a simple process for drafting goals:

• Where do we want to go? => Objective
• What are the results that we need to achieve to get there? => Key Results
• How will we achieve these results? => Initiatives

You could embed the How in your SMART objective. For example: Increase organic website visitors by 30% in Q3 through the publication of 24 blog posts."

This objective meets all SMART criteria but conflates:

• The What: Increasing website traffic by 30% (outcome)
• The How: Publishing 24 blog posts (output)

This conflation creates several problems:

1. Teams will focus on hitting the output metric (24 posts published) without sufficient attention to quality, relevance, or distribution — factors that actually drive the desired outcome of increased traffic.
2. Teams are locked into the How / Output. When they’ve published a number of blog posts but don’t see website traffic increasing, the SMART goal is telling them to continue publishing blog posts instead of trying something else.
3. It’s not clear what success looks like. This SMART objective doesn’t explain what is the outcome and what the output, so it’s not clear when this goal will be achieved. What does progress look like when 24 blog posts have been published but website traffic hasn’t increased at all?

OKRs address this fundamental limitation by explicitly separating the What / Outcome and the How / Output. 

Reframed as an OKR, our example might become something like (OKRs are always assigned to a specific timeframe, such as a quarter or year, so there’s no need to specify this in the objective):

Objective: Double-down on content marketing to grow our website

• Key Result: Increase website traffic by 30%
  
  • Initiative: Publish 24 blog posts
• Key Result: Generate 200 additional leads

This structure helps the team understand that publishing blog posts is merely a means to an end. It’s one possible output (among many) to achieve the desired outcome (Key Result).

Focus shifts from activity completion to value creation.

Tunnel vision

SMART objectives provide a clear but ultimately restricted view of success. A SMART goal can only contain one metric to Measure success. 

In contrast, an OKR can have multiple Key Results, allowing you to provide a more balanced view of what success looks like. This multi-dimensional approach allows organizations to pursue ambitious goals while measuring progress across several interconnected metrics simultaneously.

Rather than reducing success to a single measurement, OKRs encourage teams to balance various aspects of performance and avoid the tunnel vision that can come from optimizing for just one metric.

Motivational gap

SMART goals overemphasize measurability at the expense of meaningful context. SMART goals skew toward what's easily quantifiable, and the "why" behind goals almost always gets lost. Because they skew toward the Measurement, they’re also often technical. That’s why SMART objectives can feel administrative rather than meaningful, and fail to provide a sense of purpose.

OKRs bridge this gap by deliberately separating the Where (Objective), What (Key Results), and How (Initiatives). 

OKRs can bridge this gap through inspiring, qualitative objectives that connect metrics to mission, helping employees find meaning in measurement.

OKR prescribes that these are inspiring, qualitative statements that provide a clear direction. As such, they help explain the why and provide a sense of purpose.

Objectives must also be easy to understand. While Key Results can be technical, Objectives should avoid technical language and jargon. That way, everyone across the organization can understand what is meant — important requirements for transparency and alignment.

‍

Conclusion: Evolution, not revolution

SMART goals served an important purpose in their time, but businesses facing today's challenges need something more robust. OKRs represent the natural evolution of goal-setting methodologies, preserving what worked about SMART goals while addressing their fundamental limitations.

When organizations shift from SMART to OKRs, conversations change from "Did we complete our planned activities?" to "Are we making progress toward our desired outcomes?" This subtle shift creates space for experimentation, learning, and ultimately greater impact.

Ready to leave outdated methodologies behind and embrace a modern goal-setting framework built for today's business environment? Your competitors already are.

Get started with the #1 software for OKR & Strategy Execution