What if we have been setting goals wrong all along?
I spent years watching companies make the same kinds of decisions, over and over again. Decisions rooted in habit: we did it this way last year, we have always done it this way. Decisions driven by the numbers that told a good story, and silence around the ones that didn't. Decisions shaped by a culture of control where nobody could stop to ask whether it was still the right thing to do. Nobody felt safe enough to say: actually, I think there is a better way.
One of these companies was Claire's Accessories. To most people inside, nothing looked obviously wrong. Every QBR said things were broadly on track. Plans were made, targets were discussed, the language of progress filled every room. But if you knew where to look, you could read a different story between the lines. A price point that couldn't hold its own against the likes of Temu, who have no floor. Products wrapped in plastic, shipped in plastic, when some customers are slowly moving on from that. Strategy shaped by the past rather than a genuine effort to understand the present. A culture where staying silent had become the safest option.
No single moment of crisis. Just the slow, steady accumulation of questions nobody could ask.
I have come to believe one thing: most organisations are not failing because of bad people. They are failing because of an incomplete set of questions for deciding what to do and why.
And one of the most widely used frameworks for doing exactly that, setting goals, defining success, moving forward, is one most of us have never once questioned.
You probably know it as SMART. Specific. Measurable. Achievable. Relevant. Time-bound. It is clean. It is teachable. It fits on a slide. And for decades it has been handed down through organisations like received wisdom.
But SMART never once asks the questions that matter most. Why do we really want this? Does it have the genuine buy-in of the people involved? What will it cost the world around us? Is it still relevant to the reality we are in? And what will it give back to the people who made it possible?
That gap — between can we do this and should we do this — is where I have watched organisations lose their way. Not dramatically. Gradually. Decision by unquestioned decision.
What HARMONY actually is
HARMONY is not a philosophy. HARMONY is a framework: a practical, rigorous management methodology for setting goals, building strategies, evaluating initiatives and making better decisions in the real world, with real teams, under real pressure.
It is relevant to any department, any function, any organisation, whether you are leading a global business, managing a team, or setting your own personal goals for the year ahead. You can use it in a quarterly planning session. In a one-to-one. In a board meeting. At your desk on a Tuesday morning when you are trying to work out what to do next.
SMART was designed for a predictable world. That world never really existed. We are living through an era of acceleration, digitally, technologically, socially, where AI is reshaping industries faster than any strategy cycle can absorb, and where the human cost of getting decisions wrong is higher than it has ever been.
HARMONY was built for this world. Not to replace rigour, but to make it more honest. Seven letters. Seven questions. Targeting the blind spots that SMART leaves open.
H — Honest
Why do I really want this? What is the real driver?
This is the question most organisations are terrified of. Not because they are managed by dishonest people, but because honesty requires slowing down, and slowing down feels like weakness when everyone around you is moving fast. But self-deception is expensive. When the real motive behind a goal is ego, inertia, or fear, you can run a perfectly efficient SMART process toward entirely the wrong destination.
I remember a $1 million influencer campaign at Claire's Accessories. The influencers were American, moderately known in the US, and rolled out globally without question. In Europe, these names meant nothing. A fraction of that budget, spent differently, would have gone much further. But the question worth asking is not why nobody consulted the European teams. It is why the campaign was chosen at all. The Chief Marketing Officer leading it was talented, genuinely creative, and presented it compellingly. The real driver had more to do with creative ambition and the pressure to look innovative than with what was actually right for the business. That is not a moral failing. It is what happens when the H question goes unasked — when nobody in the room stops to ask: why, really, are we doing this?
This is where deep introspection matters most, and where the right thinking partner can make all the difference. Whether it is with AI, with a trusted colleague, or a coach. AI has a particular advantage here: it has no ego to protect, no hierarchy to navigate, no reason to tell you what you want to hear. It will sit with you through the kind of questioning that is almost impossible to sustain in a room full of people with competing interests and performance pressures. Not to judge the goal, but to help you understand it, to surface the real driver before the plan is built. H is where honest thinking begins. Having the right partner for that conversation makes it more likely to happen.
A — Aligned
Does this goal have genuine buy-in from the people who will deliver it? And have we created the conditions for everyone to say what they actually think?
Alignment is not about endless consultation. It is about making sure the people who will be asked to deliver a goal have genuinely been part of shaping it. Not just informed. Involved.
I remember sitting in an open forum with the President of Europe. Ten of us in the room, supposedly free to raise anything on our minds. I brought up customer service. For a multi-million pound business across Europe, we had the equivalent of two and a half people handling customer calls during very limited hours. No automated support. Just two and a half people, with nothing to absorb a fraction of the daily volume of contacts. I thought it was worth a conversation.
I had barely finished my sentence when the response landed. "You are ecom. You are barely bringing anything to this business. What have you got to say about customer service?" Just like that, the conversation was closed. The room went quiet. For the rest of the forum, nobody ventured further than a careful question. And yet, one by one, as we had left the room, every single person came to find me, stunned, apologetic, disbelieving.
That is what misalignment looks like in practice. Not a failure of ideas. A failure of the conditions that allow great ideas to surface. The forum existed. The invitation was there. But the safety was not.
R — Realistic
Do I have what this actually requires: the resources, the time, the honest capacity?
SMART got this right. Of all the questions it asked, the Realistic criterion was one of the most valuable. A goal that is not grounded in reality is not a goal. It is a wish dressed up in professional language.
For an organisation, it means asking honestly whether the budget allocated actually matches the ambition. Whether the team has the right skills, available at the right time, not stretched across three other priorities. Whether the infrastructure, the technology, the market conditions genuinely support what is being proposed. And whether the organisation has the bandwidth to run this alongside everything else already in motion.
I tracked one working week at Claire's Accessories. Every day, I received an average of 200 emails, attended a minimum of 6 meetings and read over 300 messages across Teams, Slack and other messaging platforms. That was a normal week. The expectation was not just to keep up, it was to perform at pace, because pace was what the culture demanded. Not efficient pace. Just pace.
And the pressure to be always available had become completely normalised, to the point where taking a laptop on holiday was not a suggestion, it was an assumption. That kind of environment does not just affect performance. It affects people. Their creative thinking, their ability to make good decisions and ultimately, their health.
Realistic is not a verdict. If the honest answer is that the resources, the skills or the time are not there yet, that is not a reason to abandon the goal. It is a reason to ask a different question: what do we need that we do not currently have? What would we need to invest in, develop or put in place before this becomes genuinely achievable? The gap between where we are and where we want to be is exactly the information we need to plan well.
Realism, in HARMONY, is not pessimism. It is not a ceiling on ambition. It is the foundation that makes ambition sustainable, and the honesty that makes it worth pursuing.
M — Measurable
What will be different when this is done? How will we know?
SMART got this right, and then it got lost. George Doran, who wrote the original SMART framework in 1981, was clear: measurable means "quantify, or at least suggest an indicator of progress." Not just numbers. Indicators. That distinction matters enormously, and it has been largely forgotten in how SMART has been taught and applied ever since.
M asks you to name what success looks like before you begin, and to be honest about how you will recognise it when it arrives. Quantitative measures matter: revenue, conversion, retention, satisfaction scores. But not everything that matters can be captured in a number, at least not immediately. Some of the most important shifts, in team confidence, in customer trust, in culture, show up qualitatively before they ever appear in a metric. Both count. Both deserve to be named at the outset.
HARMONY asks you to hold your measures as indicators of progress, not as the goal itself. When a measure becomes the goal, something goes wrong. Organisations start optimising for the number rather than the thing the number was meant to represent.
O — Oriented
Does this goal strengthen or weaken the systems around it? What does it cost the world, and are we willing to name that honestly?
This is a question SMART never asked. Not once. SMART looked inward: at whether the goal was relevant to the organisation's objectives, achievable within its resources, measurable against its targets. It never looked outward. It never asked what happens to the world while you pursue this.
HARMONY does.
Oriented asks you to look beyond the goal itself and see the system it sits within. Every goal exists in relationship with something larger: the people it affects, the resources it consumes, the communities it touches, the planet it operates on. Pulling hard in one direction always moves something else. The question is whether you are willing to look at what.
Claire's Accessories is a useful example, not because it is an outlier, but because it is so familiar. Products manufactured at low cost, largely in China, largely in plastic, largely designed to be worn a few times and replaced. The price point makes them accessible. It also makes them disposable. Most of it ends up in landfill. That is not a criticism. It is just what happens to cheap plastic jewellery.
Environmental debt. Human debt. Cultural debt. The costs that do not appear in the quarterly report but accumulate quietly until, one day, they do. The idea is not to feel guilty. The idea is not to change your business model overnight. The idea is to know what you are working with and to ask honestly: what can we do about it?
Knowing what your goal costs, and naming it clearly, is not pessimism. It is already doing something about it.
N — Nimble
Is this goal still adapted to the world we are in, or the one we were in when we set it?
This is the question that saves organisations from themselves most often, and the one they ask least. A goal set in January can be obsolete by March. A strategy built for last year's world can become actively harmful in this one. And yet most frameworks treat a goal, once set, as a fixed monument. HARMONY asks you to hold it differently. Loosely enough to revisit it, or let go of it, when the world requires it.
Nimble is permission to stop and check. To pause, look honestly at what has changed, and ask whether the goal in front of you still makes sense before you build more plan around it.
Doran himself observed in 1981 that managers resist writing objectives because they don't want to commit to situations they can't control. That resistance hasn't gone away. Nimble acknowledges it and creates the space to revisit, adjust and learn without fear of judgement. What it asks is not a different structure, but a different approach. One that is constructive rather than defensive. One where the question is not "why haven't you hit your target?" but "what have we learned and where do we go from here?" That shift in tone is where the most useful and creative thinking happens.
In a world where AI is reshaping industries faster than any planning cycle can absorb, being Nimble is not optional. It is the difference between a living strategy and a dated one.
Y — Yielding
What does this goal yield for the people and world that made it possible?
Most organisations are remarkably good at setting goals. They are considerably less good at asking what those goals give back to the people who deliver them.
Every goal extracts something: time, energy, focus, commitment. The people who show up and do the work are not just resources. They are the reason the goal is achievable at all. Yielding asks what we give back in return.
At Claire's Accessories, when COVID restrictions lifted, the message to staff was simple: come back to the office or face consequences. No conversation about what the business was hoping to build. No acknowledgement of what people had given over the previous year. Just a requirement, with a threat attached.
But culture is not something you can mandate. It is something you have to make worth being part of. That starts with being clear about what you are trying to build, and why. And then backing it up with something tangible: a bonus for those who come in more than three days a week, an extra day off at the end of the year, something that says: we see what you are giving, and we want to recognise it. The focus should be on rewarding those who come back, not punishing those who don't.
There is no single right answer. Every organisation will yield differently. But the question matters, because the gap between those who benefit from growth and those who simply enable it is widening. Yielding is a commitment to narrow it, in whatever way is honest and within your reach.
And sometimes, the simplest form of giving back costs nothing at all. A genuine, regular thank you. Not a "well done" from above, but a real acknowledgement that what someone is contributing matters — to the goal, to the team, to something shared. That their effort is not taken for granted. That they are not invisible in the work they make possible.
Recognising that success is not built alone, and should not be held alone.
What are we giving back, and to whom?
HARMONY in practice
Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, once made an observation that I have never forgotten. He said that "the world is full of smart people." Smart people are valuable. They are focused, they know what they want, they drive efficiently toward their goals, and they often succeed on their own terms. There is no shortage of them in any boardroom you walk into.
What we are lacking, he suggested, is wise people.
Wise people are different. They may not always know exactly what they want but they refuse to move fast at the expense of moving well. They are the ones who pause before committing. Who ask what the ripple effects might be. Who look around the room and notice whose voice is missing. Who consider not just what can be achieved, but what should be, and at what cost to everything around it.
SMART was built for smart people. It is efficient, logical, and goal-driven. But it was never designed to cultivate wisdom. It was never designed to ask the harder questions: Is this right? For whom? At what cost? And is now really the moment?
HARMONY is.
HARMONY can be used anywhere, by anyone. You do not need particular skills or qualifications. It is not there to judge you, your values or your intentions. It is simply there to help you see things for what they are. The outcome is not perfection. It is better decisions, more honest goals, and a clearer sense of what you are actually trying to achieve and why.
AI, in particular, has something useful to offer here. Used well, it does not make human judgement less necessary. It enhances it. It will ask you, without embarrassment or politics, why you actually want this. It will push back. It will sit with you through each criterion of HARMONY, giving each question the space it deserves. In that sense, AI might be one of the most powerful allies for honest thinking we have ever had.
What we need now is for humans to be even more human. More curious. More honest. More willing to sit with the harder questions before rushing toward the comfortable answers. HARMONY is a framework. But at its heart, it is an invitation to think well and to build goals, strategies, and organisations worthy of the people they serve.
