Article summary
SMART goals have dominated the workplace for decades, but MIT research shows they may be pushing teams toward the wrong targets. FAST goals offer a better alternative.
Goals should move fast
Every January, your team writes down a fresh set of goals. By February, they’re buried in a shared folder nobody opens. They resurface once a year at review time, when someone scrambles to remember what the team agreed on twelve months ago. Those goals were SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) and stripped of anything hard enough to matter.
This is the trap built into the most popular goal-setting framework on the planet. And it took MIT researchers to name it.
In 2018, Donald Sull and Charles Sull published their findings in MIT Sloan Management Review, arguing that SMART goals can actively undermine the alignment, coordination and agility companies need to execute their strategy. Their alternative is FAST goals — Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific, and Transparent. Because goals should move fast, and not sit still.
The logic of SMART goals collapses at the “achievable” step. On paper, this sounds wise, but in practice, when bonuses and promotions hinge on hitting every goal, people aim for targets they are nearly certain to reach. The result is a systematic lowering of ambition dressed up as responsible planning.
This is incentive design. When the risk of missing is high and the reward for exceeding is marginal, the rational move is to set the bar low. Managers, teams and individuals do it all the time.
The Sulls’ research found this problem repeating across organizations of different sizes and industries. In 95% of organizations, according to a Mercer Global survey of 1,056 companies, employees set goals for themselves or their teams yet most organizations still struggle to connect individual goals to strategic priorities. Goals exist, but they don’t drive decisions.
What are FAST goals?
FAST is a replacement for the specific ways SMART goes wrong.
Why “frequently discussed”?
Annual goal reviews have a structural problem. By the time December arrives, the goal set in January belongs to a different version of the business. Markets shifted. A key hire left. A competitor launched.
Frequent conversations break this lock. They treat goals as live objects rather than sealed contracts. When a quarterly review finds a target no longer fits the strategy, the needed changes are done then and there.
The Sulls describe this as treating goals as statements to prove or disprove, adjustable based on what the evidence shows. The practice borrows directly from OKR methodology, where Intel CEO Andy Grove built a system around quarterly objectives reviewed monthly and adjusted when the evidence warranted.
This rhythm also changes how goals feel day-to-day. A goal mentioned in last week’s team meeting is present. A goal set eleven months ago is archaeology.
Why “achievable” is the ceiling, not the floor
The word “achievable” in SMART goals was probably well-intentioned. No one wants a team crushed by impossible targets. But in practice, achievable works as a ceiling rather than a floor when compensation is attached to results. The safer the target, the lower the risk.
FAST goals flip this by explicitly valuing ambitious targets. The framework draws on the same logic behind OKRs at Google. At the end of a quarter, a score of 60–70% is considered a success. Consistent 100% scores signal that targets were not ambitious enough.
This is not an invitation to set impossible goals. Locke and Latham’s research also found that the link between goal difficulty and performance breaks when people stop believing the goal is achievable. The word in FAST is “ambitious,” not “impossible.”
An ambitious FAST goal for a content team might be to triple organic traffic in twelve months. A SMART goal for the same team might be to increase organic traffic by 15%. Both goals are specific and measurable, but only one forces new thinking about strategy.
Transparency as coordination tool
In most organizations, goals are private. A manager knows their own targets; a team knows their collective ones; leadership knows the company’s. But the connections between levels are unclear, and so are the connections between teams working in parallel on overlapping problems.
The Sulls argue that transparent goals solve three coordination problems at once:
Companies like Burger King, Kraft Heinz, and Anheuser-Busch InBev have adopted transparent goal frameworks linked to their broader strategy execution efforts. The pattern across these organizations is consistent: transparency reduces misalignment not by adding meetings, but by making goals visible enough that misalignment becomes obvious before it becomes expensive.
How to move your goals from SMART to FAST
The shift doesn’t require scrapping every current goal. It requires changing how goals are used, not just how they are written.
Start with frequency. Pick one recurring meeting, a weekly team sync or a monthly leadership review, and put active goals on the agenda. Not to check boxes, but to ask:
“Is this goal still the right goal? What has the last week of work taught us about whether the target is correctly set?
On ambition, separate the goal-setting conversation from the compensation conversation. When people know that missing a target will cost them a bonus, they will set achievable targets. When targets are decoupled from direct punishment, people can aim higher.
On specificity, add milestones. A goal without intermediate markers is a destination without directions. Break every ambitious target into three to five concrete steps with measurable outputs, so progress is visible before the finish line.
On transparency, start narrow. If full company-wide visibility feels too large a shift, make goals visible within a single team first. Watch what happens to coordination. The case for broader transparency will build itself from the results.
The bottom line
SMART goals were built for a slower world where January’s plan could reasonably predict December’s reality. That world is gone. The FAST framework takes goal-setting seriously enough to treat goals as tools that require maintenance. The companies that have adopted it are doing so because their old approach kept producing the same result. Clinging to rigid, set-and-forget frameworks only guarantees stagnation. Transitioning to the FAST methodology ensures your teams remain aligned and agile, turning ambition into measurable progress all year long. Ultimately, it shifts your goals from a static document into a living engine for growth.
Frequently asked questions
FAST stands for Frequently discussed, Ambitious, Specific, and Transparent. The framework was developed by Donald Sull and Charles Sull of the MIT Sloan School of Management and published in MIT Sloan Management Review in June 2018. Each element addresses a specific failure mode in traditional goal-setting practice.
SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) focus on making goals well-formed at the point of setting. FAST goals focus on how goals are used after they are set. The main structural difference is that SMART encourages “achievable” targets while FAST encourages ambitious ones, and SMART typically assumes private goals reviewed annually while FAST requires transparent goals discussed frequently.
FAST goals work at both levels, though the transparency and frequent-discussion elements produce the largest gains at the team and organization level. For individuals, the ambition and specificity elements offer the clearest lift, replacing cautious targets with stretch targets and vague intentions with concrete milestones. The full framework is most powerful when goals are visible across a team, because that is where coordination benefits appear.
The Sulls recommend integrating goal discussions into regular rhythms. Weekly or bi-weekly team meetings at minimum, with monthly or quarterly reviews for larger strategic goals. The key is that discussion is continuous, not annual. Think of goals as a standing agenda item rather than a once-a-year calendar event.
They are closely related but distinct. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) developed at Intel under Andy Grove and popularized by John Doerr share most of FAST’s principles: ambitious targets, specific key results, and full transparency. The FAST framework can be understood as a set of design criteria that OKRs, when well implemented, naturally satisfy. Organizations that use OKRs are effectively using FAST goals, often without calling them that.
FAST goals are better suited to team and organizational contexts where strategy execution and alignment are the primary challenges. SMART goals still work well for bounded, individual tasks with clear completion criteria, a project with a fixed deadline and a defined deliverable, for instance. The strongest approach pairs FAST goals at the team level (to drive ambition, alignment, and accountability) with SMART-style rigor at the task level (to keep execution tight).
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