Reminder to my tweeps: You don't have to stay here. Fedifinder will export your followers/followed list so you can find them on Mastodon.

What do you want to know?.

An elephant is as nimble in its context as a swallow is in theirs. "Square peg in a round hole" as as much about the hole as it is about the peg.

Thank you to all the tweeps with whom I conferenced, tweetchatted, tweetup'd, and just plain made meaningful connections. I look forward to connecting again. In one - or several - communities of interest. Cheers. @derekwwade.

Community is important. But we're seeing the problems with community as commodity.

I do hope we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the age of monolithic "social networks" controlled by corporations. I hope this opens the beginning of the age of distributed, hybrid online/offline communities.

Television had a rocky start before broadcast TV happened. Telephones didn't work out too well until the routing got better. Every 'social' technology has its fits and starts. Perhaps we're ending an era, but also beginning a new one.

It's been a while. I didn't like the looks of where things were going, so I came here less and less. I'll be around. You can likely find me at 'derekwwade' (note the middle 'w') wherever I leave a footprint.

(And yeah, you can call them SMIRC goals if you want.😉).

Leave the SMART goals for trivial things. Start making goals that incorporate scalable creation of value (spike/MVP/MLP etc) and Classes of Service (e.g. intangible/standard/fixed-date/expedite). You'll be more successful at creating value despite constraints.

When I see SMART goals in a business setting, I have about as much confidence in their contribution to creating value as I have in drive-time estimates that ignore the effects of traffic.

Teaching SMART goals is appropriate at, say, Kindergarten through 6th grade as a way to introduce the concepts of value, deadlines, and setting expectations. But they are wildly inappropriate in 21st century business.

(Hey look, it's even still pronounceable! I give you: SMIRC goals! 😉).

Modern goal-setting techniques throw away SMART's "Attainable" and "Time-Limited" and replace them with Incrementable (value can be scaled according to available capability) and Class of Service (relative prioritization along every constraint point).

Good planning, and therefore good goal-setting, MUST allow for management in the face of CONSTRAINTS CREATED BY THE EXECUTION OF OTHER GOALS. Ask any high-school student assigned “only an hour of homework a day” by each teacher of their eight classes.

(Ignoring constraints when planning was less of an issue in the early Industrial Age, when the most critical constraint was labor, because you could just add more laborers. There’s a socio-ethical issue there about value-for-work but that’s another topic).

When MULTIPLE valuable goals are Time-limited, now constraints are in play (effort, labor, money, space…) SMART goals explicitly exclude the effects of those constraints and then call it good planning.

SMART goals hearken back to the 1700’s Industrial Age mindset that decouples planning from execution. SMART goals sound so, well, “smart” when listed out that they obscure the fact that their format actually makes them HARDER to reach (except in the most trivial situations.).

But like so many thinking tools of the so-called modern age, SMART goals ignore their context. In systems thinking terms, their reductionist rather than systemic tools. This isn’t just a matter of philosophy, this is dangerous.