Week 5 - SMART goals

In addition to the rapid ideation itself, we were tasked to dive into SMART goals this week. SMART goals are nothing new to me. During my board year at the Nanobiology study association everything was about SMART goals, both for myself, for the association, and for guiding students in setting their own SMART goals. My bachelor studies used SMART goals a lot as well, and at work they also pop up from time to time. To be completely honest with you, I'm not too much of a fan of SMART goals. I will explain why.

Goals are incredibly important, there is no denying that. Goal setting is seen as the underlying explanation for all major work motivation theories, like the VIE theory (Vroom, 1994), the motivation theories from Maslow or Herzberg (Maslow, 1954; Herzberg, 1968), or the operant behaviour system (Skinner, 1981), just to name a few. Goal setting can help generate the motivation to actually work towards those goals.

However, there are various ways of going about formulating goals, SMART goals being one of them. With SMART every goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. SMART goals were adopted widely in the early two-thousands by government institutes, industry and were also becoming increasingly popular in education (O’Neill, 2000).

SMART goals have also been criticized, for not providing the full picture to goal setting. Professor Rubin notes that the definition of the SMART acronym may need updating to reflect the importance of efficacy and feedback, for instance (Rubin, 2002). Some authors have expanded it to include these extra focus areas; SMARTER, for example, includes Evaluated and Reviewed.

An additional critique that is often voiced, is that SMART goals do not leave room for innovation (Prather, 2005), and I wholeheartedly agree with that critique. SMART goals are highly effective for everyday work to ensure that the goals set are good ones, and achievable. They are well suited for ensuring incremental change, which might be good for incremental innovation, but hinders breakthrough innovation. SMART goals require you to be specific, but innovation can only come about through exploration of the unknown. Do you think that Alexander Fleming who invented Pennicillin by accident, had a SMART goal for discovering penicillin? He couldn’t have!

Thirdly, SMART goals often fail because they do not allow a person to forge an emotional connection to the goal they set. Without this emotional connection it is very hard to be motivated for that goal. Part of the problem here is that SMART goals are very outcome oriented, and that they do not necessarily consider the progress itself. Minor setbacks, which realistically will occur in any progress, often hinder outcome-oriented goals considerably (Daudkhane, 2017).

As said, I am not a big fan of SMART goals and I am not the only one who finds them lacking, as indicated by the points I made earlier. I just find SMART goals to restrictive. They are great for ensuring baby steps, but baby steps do not motivate me. I always need a bigger long term goal that I am working towards, and the SMART goal paradigm does not allow for such goals. These baby steps work well if you have trouble getting started on working towards your bigger goal, so I can definitely see the added benefit of SMART goals. However, for me they do not bring much added benefit.

All personal feelings aside, I am tasked with setting up SMART goals, so I will. Here goes:

• Complete the full Brackeys RPG game tutorial before the end of this module to understand how an RPG game can be set up in Unity.

• Use the Git branching model from Vincent Driessen (Driessen, 2010) during both rapid ideation sessions to become more familiar with this branching model. This is useful for my current job and allows me to reap the benefits of proper version control during my projects.

List of References

Daudkhane, Y. (2017) “Why SMART Goals are not ‘Smart’ Enough? ,” Imperial Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, 3(6), pp. 137–143.

Driessen, V. (2010) A successful Git branching model. Available at: https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ (Accessed: August 21, 2021).

Herzberg, F. (1968) One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees? Harvard Business Review. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review.

Maslow, A. (1954) Motivation and Personality. 2nd edn. Harper & Brothers.

O’Neill, J. (2000) “SMART Goals, SMART Schools.,” Educational Leadership, 57(5), pp. 46–50.

Prather, C. (2005) “THE DUMB THING ABOUT SMART GOALS FOR INNOVATION,” Research Technology Management, 48(5), pp. 14–15.

Rubin, R. (2002) “Will the real SMART goals please stand up?,” 39.

Skinner, B. F. (1981) “The Shaping of a Behaviorist,” Behaviorism, 9(1).

Vroom, V. (1994) Work and Motivation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.