Add some FART goals to your SMART goals for 2021

Perhaps we should explain. Two of our SWOOP founders are Danish Australians. We want SWOOP to help and guide agile teams because being agile means you can switch directions quickly while moving at speed - something we’ve all needed to do during the global pandemic. We have also recently introduced goal setting onto the SWOOP dashboard to help you achieve your collaboration goals and we are preparing support resources for this feature. Here’s the connection to the title of this blog post – we want to help you set goals faster to become more agile, to be able to adapt during a fast-paced and changing business environment. In our conversations, it emerged that the Scandinavian word for speed is, wait for it, fart! 

SMART goals

Ever heard of SMART goals? If not, this clever acronym is staple food for students of business and stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time related. We are encouraged to form our goals according to these guiding principles. The goal setting on the SWOOP platform uses targets derived from our extensive benchmarking of communities and teams. As we prepare support materials for our clients on goal setting it would therefore not be surprising if SMART would at least rate a mention. 

I recently listened to a MIT Sloan School interview with Amit Mukherjee, Leadership Professor and author of a new book; “Leading in the Digital World: How to Foster Creativity, Collaboration and Inclusivity”, who provides some strong views on SMART goals. Watch the very last 43 seconds of his interview with MIT Sloan School Review Editor Paul Michelman:

Is Prof Mukherjee’s suggestion “if you have SMART goals you should get rid of them” simply a contrarian view aimed to shock and gain attention to his larger message? Well, it certainly got my attention! I will admit to having included SMART goals in business school lectures I’ve given in the past. And I’m not quite ready to roll over now to totally support Prof Mukherjee in abandoning SMART goals. But to be fair, to understand the full context of his views you should listen to the full interview, or even buy his book.  

In essence, Prof Mukherjee aligns SMART goals with the top-down scientific management methods that many of us have grown to despise. He likens SMART goals to techniques like time and motion studies, where every move we make is measured and analysed in minute detail, looking for human flaws that can be addressed and corrected by management. And he has a point. If we are religiously faithful to the SMART guiding principles we will likely end up with unambitious, short term goals that even if achieved may not actually move the organisation that far forward. At worse, personal SMART goals may be in conflict with those set by your colleagues, making effective collaboration impossible. 

In defence of SMART goals though, I still believe there is a place for them in the right context. Sometimes when we are just trying to get something started and off the ground, the focus provided by a set of aligned SMART goals can make a real difference. What we need is a portfolio of goals. Some will be, by necessity, short term and specific and something that can show measurable progress. But these goals also need to be balanced with goals that are more aspirational and challenging, longer term, not easily measured and therefore come with a reasonable chance of failure. The reward, however, should be commensurate with that risk of failure.  

Hence, we have come up with a set of FART goals to balance your SMART goals.

FART goals

Foresight, Ambitious, Real and Together goals are designed to bolster the leadership qualities of creativity, collaboration and inclusion that Prof. Mukherjee expounds. 

Foresight: Set a goal or two unlike any of your other goals, something that is future focused. Use foresight resources to help you frame the goal. Don’t let current resource availability constrain your thinking about what you should aim for. Think of it as a brainstorming result.

Ambitious: These are goals where risk/reward are high. Sometimes referred to as BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals), they are designed to address the big picture.

Real: This goal needs to be real and meaningful to yourself, and/or your team and organisation. If you or your team were able to pull off this goal what ‘real and meaningful’ difference will it make?

Together: Even if your goal is a personal one, aim to enlist the help of others in achieving it. You might find your personal goals are in conflict with some of your colleagues’ goals. In today’s fast-paced working environments there are few meaningful goals that can be achieved alone.

Unlike your SMART goals, FART goals are more future oriented, energise your creativity, can be generic enough to encourage mimicry from others and hence become a source of co-operation and collaboration in achieving them. They are unlikely to contain phrases like “increase sales by x%” or “reduce customer calls by y%”, but you may see their effects turn up on more strategic business measures like your Net Promoter Score or your Triple Bottom Line (Social, Environment, Economic) or Balanced Scorecards (Financial, Customer, Internal processes, Learning & Growth). 

SMART goals, FART goals and SWOOP 

The SWOOP dashboard measures are designed for enabling factors focused on improved collaboration. We use a number of maturity frameworks to position our measures. SMART goal enabling measures are more commonly found at the earlier stages of maturity. The FART goals are reflected at the more mature phases. They are not easy to attain, but the rewards are worth it. And they build on the start that SMART goals can give you. 

Here is the SWOOP Community Maturity Framework:

The early stages of building an online community are well suited to SMART goals. %Active members, for example, is a simple measure that directly measures the level of adoption for a given community. The FART goal of becoming a more innovative community is less tangible. The SWOOP measures of Curiosity, Multi-Group Participation (Diversity) and the Persona Distributions (Catalysts vs Responders) are measurable leading indicators of becoming more innovative, but by no means complete.  

At the team level we use the popular Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing framework to position our SWOOP measures:

As a digital team is being formed, there are some simple measures that SMART goals can be aligned with, like the % of your physical team that is active on your digital team. The more ambitious FART goal may be to have your team position itself at the centre of an organisation-wide “Team of Teams” network, where your team becomes central to your organisation’s transformation to an agile, team-centred structure. SWOOP provides some leading indicators, like the visual Team of teams map, Team Personas and Diversity Index, of progress made but by no means the complete picture, which likely will be largely qualitative. 

Now, hopefully we have not overloaded your digestive system with this post; or perhaps that’s a good thing. Bring forth the winds of creativity, collaboration and inclusivity!