I love smart goals, they provide a road map, discipline, and a definition of what success looks like. Over the years they have proved to be very useful.
However, as I get wiser, I realise there is one vital element missing from Smart goals:
Compounding.
Compounding is, as Einstein noted, the most powerful force in the universe. To compound, you do little things that build on each other over time, becoming increasingly more powerful at a geometric rate.
The benefit of compounding is that you learn as you go, it is learning oriented, whereas SMART is by definition, goal oriented, it has an end point.
The obvious solution to this dilemma is to make every project a series of goal oriented components, that together and compounding, deliver the continuously improving outcomes. This sort of view forces to you to be ambidextrous in the way you look at performance.
On one hand, you are down in the weeds working with the detail, while on the other hand, there is the really important helicopter view that is able to make the compounding impact of all those tiny improvement obvious over time.
At its core, this is what lean thinking is all about, continuous improvement that delivers over time.
