SMART objectives have become the comfort blanket of corporate communications. They make bad plans look disciplined and help weak objectives hide in plain sight.
I have come to believe that SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) is a poor starting point for setting objectives. It distracts people from asking the most important question of all: why are we communicating in the first place?
A smarter starting point
There is only one reason for a communications function to exist in any organisation - because it can help deliver business goals.
Communications objectives should not sit in a separate comms plan, with their own internal logic. They should be derived from the enterprise strategy. If the business is trying to grow, reduce cost, secure consent, attract investment, retain talent, defend a licence to operate or enter a new market, the communications question is: where can we influence stakeholder behaviour to help achieve that goal?
The right sequence of questions for any communications leader when setting objectives is as follows:
What is the organisation trying to achieve?
Which business outcomes depend on the public or a stakeholder doing, believing, permitting, supporting or deciding something differently?
What is my theory of change? In other words, how do I think the act of communicating will change audience behaviour to deliver that outcome.
What evidence will show me whether communications is having the desired impact?
The right starting point is not: what can we measure that is SMART? It is: what change can communications help deliver for the business to succeed?
This is my problem with SMART. It is not that it is inherently wrong. It is that people are using it in the wrong way. It can be a useful discipline once the objective has been set. But it is a poor way to discover what the objective should be.
The problem is that it causes people to favour objectives that are easy to count, whereas communications’ value often lies in things that are hard to attribute, slow to emerge, or visible only because a risk did not materialise.
Developing good outcome-based metrics is difficult. Developing ones which are wholly attributable to communications activity can be next to impossible. A SMART puritan might tell you that your objective is only valid if it can fit the framework, so the danger is that people alter the objective to fit. That is how you end up with objectives like: “Post one piece of CEO content on LinkedIn each month for the next year.” It is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound…but it tells you next to nothing about whether communications is contributing to organisational outcomes.
The same habit appears when people use SMART for personal performance objectives. They choose objectives that can safely be achieved rather than something more ambitious that would make the biggest difference. That is why I would make one change to SMART right away: change the ‘A’ from ‘achievable’ to ‘ambitious’. I understand the thinking behind ‘achievable’. Shooting for the moon when you don’t have a rocket is just setting yourself up to fail. But “achievable” is driving the wrong behaviour - unambitious, easy-to-measure KPIs that are unrelated to business outcomes.
There is one further complication. Communications leaders do not create value only through campaigns. They create value through advice. A good communications function helps leaders understand the stakeholder environment in which business decisions will succeed or fail: what employees will accept, what customers will believe, what policymakers will support, what the media or wider public will punish.
But that does not make “giving advice” an objective in itself. Advice only matters if it improves the organisation’s ability to deliver a business goal. The objective should still be anchored in the outcome. The communications contribution may be to change stakeholder behaviour directly, or it may be to help the organisation make a better decision because it understands those stakeholders more clearly. Either way, the test is the same: what business outcome are we trying to support, and what needs to change for that outcome to be achieved?
A better approach to objective setting
The starting point for any objective should be: why? Why are you communicating or advising? Why does your role matter?
‘The Five Whys’ technique is a problem-solving method developed by Toyota that emphasises going beyond the superficial symptoms of a problem to discover the root cause. It is simple, yet it is effective and helps to drill down into the fundamental reason you are communicating and clarify what you are really trying to do.
It involves asking the question “why?” repeatedly, to uncover the fundamental purpose of your communication.
For example it can be used to turn an activity objective into a business-relevant objective. Let’s take that SMART objective from earlier:
What is your goal? To post one piece of CEO content on LinkedIn each month for the next year.
Why? Because we want people to have greater awareness of our CEO’s views
Why? To boost our reputation
Why? Because we want policymakers to think more positively about us
Why? Because we want to enter a new regulated market and policymakers don’t yet support this
Why? Because we operate in a sector which has been perceived to over-charge while delivering poor customer-service outcomes.
What is your goal? To build regulatory approval for the business’s expansion by changing policymaker perceptions of the company as a credible partner.
Having got to that point you might decide that a LinkedIn post is not the way to go. In fact, you might decide communications is not the best way to achieve the objective at all.
The Five Whys can also be used to sharpen audience- targeting and messaging. For example:
What is your goal? To run a campaign to increase Covid vaccine take-up
Why? Because not enough people have had their Covid vaccination.
Why? Because uptake in young people has been significantly lower this year.
Why? Because young people don’t think they are in danger from Covid.
Why? Because it’s true that their personal risk is lower, but they can still transmit Covid to more vulnerable people
Why? Because more young people carrying the virus will increase the infection rate and number of serious illnesses among vulnerable people and increase strain on the NHS.
What is your goal? To increase Covid vaccination take-up among young people to prevent serious illness in vulnerable people and avoid pressure on the NHS.
Using the Five Whys guards against superficial objectives that sound like the right answer but only touch the surface of what a campaign is really trying to achieve.
By asking why, you can start to isolate the business outcome, stakeholder behaviour and communications objective:
Business or policy outcome: reduce serious illness among vulnerable people and pressure on the NHS.
Stakeholder behaviour needed: more young people take up vaccination.
Communications objective: increase young people’s understanding that vaccination protects others, not just themselves, and reduce the belief that vaccination is irrelevant because their personal risk is low.
Conclusion
Good objectives require careful thought. They should:
Start with a business priority.
What is the organisation trying to achieve?Identify the audience that matters.
Whose behaviour affects that outcome?Define the barrier.
What are they thinking, feeling or doing now that creates a problem?Explain the theory of change.
How can communication help change that?Use evidence, not just activity.
What would show movement in outputs, outtakes and outcomes?
Once you can answer those questions, SMART can help sharpen the objective. Used too early, it does the opposite. It rewards what is measurable over what matters.
SMART can make a good objective sharper, but it cannot make a weak objective matter.
