Goal-setting for groups: why SMART and OKR both miss the point (mostly)

SMART and OKRs were designed for individuals and companies. Neither fits a coaching, teaching, or mentoring group cleanly. Here is the hybrid model that consistently works inside Bitir — with examples from coaches, teachers, and team leads.

Why SMART is only partly useful

SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound — were designed for individual work planning in the 1980s. They are good at forcing the writer to be concrete, which is a useful exercise for any member writing their own individual outcome. They are not good at capturing how a group evolves, how a commitment changes week to week, or how an emotional goal differs from an operational one.

If you only use SMART goals in your group, you will end up with a set of perfectly specific individual targets that do not tell the group what it is collectively working toward, and do not survive contact with the first bad week.

Why OKRs are only partly useful

OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — came from Intel and Google and work well for company-scale planning where there is a clear outcome (the Objective) and several measurable drivers (the Key Results). The OKR model maps beautifully onto the "what is this whole group trying to do" layer. It does not map onto individual emotional work ("I want to feel less anxious at work") or onto recurring weekly habits ("I will check in every Monday").

If you only use OKRs, you will have a coherent group direction and no way to connect it to what each member is actually doing this week.

The three-layer model

The model we see working across coaching, therapy, teaching, and team management inside Bitir has three distinct layers. Each layer uses the framework that actually fits it.

Layer 1: The group outcome

One sentence, written by the manager, before the group starts. It describes why the group exists and what success looks like at the end.

Examples:

• "By the end of 12 weeks, every member will have an anxiety toolkit they can use without me in the room." (Dr. Richardson's anxiety group)
• "Every Year 6 pupil will leave Year 6 with a complete understanding of what will be on their SATs, and their parents will know how to support them." (Mr. Walsh's Year 6 parent group)
• "The U-15 squad will finish the season with better match-day commitment than last year and a shared understanding of our tactical identity." (Coach Özdemir's U-15 squad)

This is the OKR layer. It is set by the manager, it does not change during the programme, and it is the thing that every other decision in the group is ultimately measured against.

Layer 2: The individual outcome

Each member writes their own individual outcome in their own words, in week one. The manager may offer a SMART-style template ("by when, how will you know, how much") but the member owns the wording.

This is the SMART layer. Members who write their own goal in their own words commit to it at a much higher rate than members who are handed a pre-written target.

Individual outcomes should be reviewed at the programme's half-way point, not changed at whim. A member who wants to rewrite their goal in week three has almost certainly not yet understood what the original goal was about.

Layer 3: The weekly commitment

This is the layer that SMART and OKRs both miss entirely. A weekly commitment is a small, specific, achievable thing that the member will do in the next seven days. It is rewritten every week. It is the mechanism that connects the long-term goal to the short-term behaviour.

Examples of weekly commitments that actually get done:

• "I will do a five-minute breathing exercise on Tuesday and Thursday evenings."
• "I will submit one photo of a home-cooked meal on three days this week."
• "I will practise my B-flat major scale for ten minutes after school on three days."
• "I will post a single sentence in the group every day describing the hardest moment of my day."

A weekly commitment is a commitment to an action, not to an outcome. Members control actions. They do not control outcomes. Asking them to commit to an outcome weekly is setting them up to fail.

How the three layers reinforce each other

The test of whether your three layers are coherent is whether you can draw a clear line from today's weekly commitment up through this member's individual outcome to the group outcome.

Example:

1. Group outcome: "By the end of 12 weeks, every member will have an anxiety toolkit they can use without me in the room."
2. Individual outcome for one member: "By week 12 I will have three go-to techniques I actually use in a panic moment."
3. Weekly commitment this week: "I will try the 4-7-8 breathing technique twice when I feel my chest tighten."

This chain is obvious on paper. It is surprisingly rare in practice. Most coaching groups have a strong group outcome, strong individual outcomes, and nothing in between — which is why the week-to-week behaviour feels unconnected to the overall programme.

How Bitir's goal feature maps onto this

Bitir supports this model directly:

• Group goals — one per group, set by the manager. Layer 1.
• Per-member goals — one or more per member, owned by the member, reviewed by the manager. Layer 2.
• Weekly assignments — rewritten each week, linked to individual or group goals. Layer 3.

Keeping the three layers in three different Bitir features is not a cosmetic choice. It is how you keep members from mixing up "what I want in 12 weeks" with "what I will do this Tuesday".

What goes wrong when you collapse the layers

The two most common failure modes:

1. The member writes a weekly commitment that is actually a long-term outcome. ("This week I will lose 2kg.") This is a goal, not a commitment. It will not be met, the member will feel like a failure, and the next week's commitment will be ignored.
2. The member writes a 12-week outcome that is actually a daily action. ("My 12-week goal is to drink 2 litres of water a day.") This is a habit, not an outcome. It does not connect to anything larger, and by week six the member will have lost interest.

Both failures come from the same root cause: treating all goals the same. They are not the same. Three layers, three frameworks.

A real example

Dr. Amelia Richardson explicitly uses the three-layer model in her anxiety groups. Her drop-out rate across a 12-week programme fell from 31% to 14% after she adopted it. Read the full story: Dr. Amelia Richardson — anxiety support groups on Bitir.

Related reading: Northwind Analytics' engineering onboarding case study, and how FC Anadolu's U-15 coach cut match-day no-shows by 74%.