SMART Recommendation Builder

Package a near-settled idea as a recommendation that a manager, a client or a board can say yes to: clear on what happens, who carries it, how anyone will know it worked and what it costs others.

SMART is practitioner convention (Doran, 1981) with a recent critique of the acronym itself (Swann et al., 2023); the goal-setting research underneath it is strong (Locke & Latham, 2002). Governance codes and directors' duties are standards, not research. Example numbers are illustrative.

Use it when:

• You have chosen a direction and now need someone with authority to approve it.
• A proposal keeps being deferred with "come back when it is clearer".
• You are about to hand an idea to a team and want it to be testable, not a wish.

Skip it when:

• You are still weighing options against criteria: start with 2.11 Options & Recommendations and come back with the winner.
• The recommendation goes to a board and needs the full paper: finish here, then use 8.16 Board Decision Prep Sheet.

Approval is a property of the ask, not only of the idea. Decision makers defer vague proposals because they cannot see what they would commit to, who carries it, or how anyone would know it worked. The SMART acronym is a drafting check for exactly that. It comes from a management magazine article that offered no data and originally said Assignable and Realistic (Doran, 1981); the research that supports clear goals is a separate body of work (Locke & Latham, 2002), and a critique finds the acronym itself weakly grounded (Swann et al., 2023). Use it to catch vagueness, not to certify quality.

The ethics and governance questions are different in kind: they are norms, not empirical models. Governance codes work on a comply-or-explain basis (Financial Reporting Council, 2024; Swedish Corporate Governance Board, 2024). Passing them does not predict success. It shows the people who must approve are allowed to say yes.

Issue or opportunity (what is true today, with one fact):

Draft recommendation (as you would first say it):

Strong answer: (illustrative) "Repair requests in our housing association wait a median of nine days for a first response; tenants complain every quarter." Not: "Our service needs improving."

Illustrative example: the organization and all numbers are invented.

A property manager at a Swedish housing association sees tenant complaints about slow repairs. Draft: "Improve repair service." The SMART pass changes it. Specific: first response to repair requests in all 14 buildings. Measurable: median first response from nine days to two working days, 90 percent of requests, from the ticket log. Achievable: needs a duty rota and a contractor framework; the risk is contractor capacity in winter. Relevant: tenant satisfaction is a board priority, and doing nothing means a third year of the same complaint. Time-bound: rota live by 1 February, target met by 31 March.

Owner: the head of maintenance, who controls the contractor budget. Ethics: contractors lose ad hoc work, so they get four weeks' notice. The 30-second version ends with the ask: "Approve a pilot budget of 120,000 SEK (illustrative) and release the head of maintenance one day a week until March."