[This is part 2 in my goal-setting series. Here’s part 1.]

Last year I set a goal to build a simplified KPI dashboard for marcomms.

I was finally going to slay the data beast!  Streamline it to just the good signal and ditch all the damn noise.

It was a good goal with methodical completion milestones and a clear outcome. Dare I say, I was pretty stoked about it.

Except I missed one thing. The dashboard depended largely on the successful roll-out of our brand-new CRM. When the rollout was delayed due to unexpected staffing shortages in another department, I wasn’t immediately worried. I just paused my goal until after launch. But then we never launched the CRM.

And I never got my cool new dashboard.

Turns out my beautiful goal had a single point of failure built into it, and I was blind as a bat to even see it, let alone do anything about it.

I wasn’t the only one who needed glasses. My team had also made similar critical errors overlooking constraints of their own. We each workshopped our goals and everyone felt like we had really committed to real change last year. Hell, I even signed off on them. But much of that change hinged on a handful of key drivers outside our control.

Blind as bats.

And while we ultimately didn’t accomplish some of our cool goals, I don’t count it as a failure. Quite the contrary, we found exactly what was missing, and that’s not failure, that’s the lesson year three needed.

Two years, two different failure points

In an effort to stay nimble and keep my team (ok, me) in growth mode, I committed to intentional goal-setting a few years ago. Suffice to say that growth mode is a kind way of describing our journey.

Year one, we set goals with no plan and no structure behind them. We talked about them – a little. I created a spreadsheet and typed a bunch of stuff in cells. Adoption was minimal. Discipline was minimal. Completion was minimal. Including me. I don’t know if it was anybody’s fault. There was no real durable structure organizing our effort.

Year two, I built my SMART Goal Builder GPT. It walked us each through what we wanted to accomplish. It challenged weak goals, dialed back aggressive ones. It helped create milestones and accountability measures – all the stuff that caused us to fail the year before. Fixed.

Adoption jumped. Discipline jumped. Completion jumped. The tool did exactly what it was built to do: turn vague intentions into structured goals people actually followed through on.

But like I said, several of those well-structured goals still stalled. I hadn’t yet learned that a goal doesn’t live in a vacuum. You have to consider external factors. Constraints. Leverage. And the driver behind why we were optimizing the way we were.

Structure fixed the discipline problem. It didn’t fix the blindness problem. A goal can be perfectly SMART but will always be dependent on a constraint you never named.

Two years of lived experience told me exactly where the tool needed to go next. For year three, I rolled those hard-learned lessons into my Growth Architect-O-Matic GPT specifically to close that gap. It guides the user through an optimization assessment, a constraints audit, and an opportunity scan, all before writing a single goal.

Ambition is rarely the problem

Most goal-setting advice starts with what you want to achieve. A new skill. A weakness. A strategic objective.

That’s backwards. It skips the one question that actually determines whether a goal survives contact with the year: what’s in your way.

A goal that depends on removing a constraint you don’t control isn’t a goal. It’s a wish. My dashboard goal was a wish dressed up as a plan. Well-structured? Sure. But still a wish? Absolutely. No matter how hard I wanted it, success depended on the implementation of our CRM.

No CRM. No dashboard. No deal.

Third time’s the charm

I ran the Growth Architect-O-Matic GPT last month. It coached me through scenarios, asked pointed questions, and helped me ID stuff that would have taken me another year to figure out. I learned what I value in my work and career and how that influences my goals. I rolled my growth plan into my SMART goal builder and emerged with an ambitious – but vetted – plan of work for the year.

My team architected their goals this week for another round of stress-testing. It passed.

Here’s the four-part framework we now use to organize goals instead of adding more of them: personal growth, professional skill development, team contribution, AI adoption.

I learned last year that good goals don’t create extra work. They organize the work you’re already doing – but you have to remember to build them against what you can actually control.

This is the constraint half of the equation. I wrote about the driver half, what you’re actually optimizing for and why that matters just as much, too. Find that post, along with my Optimization Driver Assessment Worksheet, here.

So what did three years of goal-setting teach me? Good goals are the product of a lot of focused reflection and a durable framework to give it shape.

Five things to remember when you set your goals

1. A stalled goal may not be a discipline problem. It could be a design problem.
If a goal depended on effort and you gave the effort, the goal failed for a different reason. Find that reason before you spin your wheels on the next one.

2. Structure fixes follow-through. It doesn’t fix blindness.
A well-structured goal can still fail if it depends on something you don’t control. SMART doesn’t mean safe.

3. Name the single point of failure before you commit to the goal.
If your goal only works because someone else’s project has to stick the landing first, that’s not a risk. That’s an actual constraint.

4. Ambition isn’t the enemy. An unnamed constraint is.
You don’t have to shrink the goal. But you do have to find what’s actually in the way. Then build the goal around it instead of hoping around it.

5. This isn’t a snap exercise. Treat it like one.
Good goals take time to think through, not five minutes between meetings. Two to three hours of real planning how you’ll make the most of 250-plus workdays the year ahead is a small investment for a return that compounds all year. Rushed goals are the ones that stall.

We learned this over three years. Year one, no structure, nothing landed. Year two, real structure, real adoption, and goals still stalled on constraints nobody named. Year three, we built the audit in before the goal gets written.

Try it yourself

I built a worksheet for this. What’s taking too much of your time, what’s getting too little, where you’re under-investing. Three different things, that’s the whole exercise. Do it 20 minutes before your next goal-setting session, not after.

I’ve still got that dashboard on my goals list but what it will look like and how I plan to get three looks very different. I can’t wait till next year when you tune in to read a really cool article about this kick-ass dashboard I built.