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GOVERNANCE & MINISTRY
by Dan Hotchkiss
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Why SMART Goals Are Sometimes Dumb
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Excerpt
Planning only matters if it makes a difference to your congregation’s work. If, after a weekend of planning, staff and volunteers wake up Monday morning and do what they did before, then all your planning was for naught. Grand statements of mission and vision have no value unless someone turns them into action steps. One good guide for writing action plans is to use SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. On Monday morning, when you’re wiping sleep out of your eyes, SMART goals tell you what to do and how to know you’ve done it. But SMART isn’t everything. For an institution, SMART goals are at the bottom of a multi-level set of planning statements. Action plans are where the rubber meets the road. But for a governing board writing a top-level plan, SMART goals are dumb. Boards have the duty and authority to set overall direction—to say what
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