Why SMART goals suck at driving change
and why you should try BMW goals instead.
This week marks my first month at Oracle. If there's been one constant in the past weeks, it's been "driving change." Navigating this space reminded me of past experiences where I had to leverage different tactics to promote adoption. Today, we explore one such aspect—leveraging the right goals in an environment to drive change.
On the surface, a SMART goal makes a lot of sense: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. It seems to check all the boxes for a well-rounded goal. But does it? Upon closer inspection, SMART goals overlook something critical—the environment in which the goal will be executed. They assume the situation is conducive to the goal's success or leave it to the executor to figure out. When driving change, environmental factors are a key contributor to resistance. Ignoring them is like ignoring the elephant in the room.
One of my past teams at Amazon was drowning in operational load, unable to keep up with the influx of support tickets from teams requesting to onboard our service. At one point, it got so bad that the team was struggling to make progress with other projects. Escalations mounted as tickets went without action. We tried various SMART goals like, “We will reduce the number of open onboarding tickets from X to Y by the next quarter. We will achieve this by allocating more resources to address onboarding requests and automating the onboarding process.”
These goals were specific, measurable, ambitious but achievable, relevant, and time-bound. But we utterly failed. Why? Because these goals didn’t consider two critical environmental factors. First, our service was being used by practically every team at Amazon, and the number of teams was growing rapidly. Despite increasing resource allocation, we struggled to keep up. Second, the goal failed to consider that the team was already resource-constrained, so allocating more resources to onboarding tickets meant allocating less to automation.
The oil company BP faced a similar challenge of cutting down exploration costs in the '90s. To achieve the goal, they came up with a version of a SMART goal: "We will calculate the expected value of drilling a well and only drill those with big payoffs." The problem was that explorers relied on their gut feelings about drilling sites and tinkered with the payoff calculation to convince management. Their logic was that if 9 out of 10 wells were dry, the 1 well that hit the jackpot would offset the 9 failures.
In an effort to change this mindset, the head of exploration came up with a big, measurable and written goal—a BMW goal: "No More Dry Wells. None." Until then, the norm was that 4 out of 5 drills encountered dry holes. The explorers were jolted by the audacity of the goal. But once the dust settled, the focus shifted to eliminating dry holes. The explorers took a geological approach instead of gut-feel, looking at environmental factors like carbon-rich substrates and a hard base layer to contain the oil. They only drilled in regions where every aspect was conducive.
The goal empowered lower level engineers to push back on vague drilling demands and focussed attention on “No Dry Holes.” Soon, it transformed BP’s efficiency and cost of exploration, and the changes stood the test of time.
We took a similar approach with a BMW goal to solve the onboarding problem: “No onboarding request goes without action for more than 24 hours.” The engineers groaned at the goal. How could we possibly achieve 24-hour turnaround when we were already behind by days?! But during brainstorming, the goal brought the team to focus on environmental factors. How can we manage the seemingly endless flow of incoming tickets? And how do we cut down on the extent of back-and-forth with the requester? That’s when we struck gold—a weekly office hour for onboarding.
Teams could book 10-minute office-hour slots ahead of time and send a representative to the meeting to discuss their needs. It hit two birds with one stone—the requester was in the room, so back-and-forth clarifications happened faster, leading to quicker resolutions. And the team had to field only as many onboarding requests as the number of office-hour slots, which was 5–6 a week. A far more manageable number to address right during the office-hour session.
The newly reclaimed time that was otherwise spent working on onboarding tickets helped the team automate the onboarding process, so most requesting teams no longer had to wait for an office-hour slot, significantly scaling our operation.
So what can you take away from this? Should you drop your SMART goals in favor of BMW goals? It depends. SMART goals are effective in situations where you need to further refine something that’s already working. But if your intent is to drive big change, leave room in your goal to consider the environment. BMW goals—Big, Measurable, Written goals—help you consider the environmental factors involved in driving change.
