I’ve been spending some time looking carefully at my professional goals.

A few years ago, I open sourced the mission / vision / tactical worksheet I’d been using, which was inspired by high-level organizational strategy. First, it invites you to consider your “mission”:

This is your north star. For example, a possible mission statement is to work on technology that makes the world more equal. Another example of a mission statement is to work at startups building world-class products that change the world.

Then, your “vision”. For a company, the vision is the world you want to create through your mission and activities. For a person, that’s not far off:

This is where you want to see yourself in 5 or 10 years. One long-term goal is to be the founder of a generational tech company. Other long-term goals are to be a senior individual contributor engineer, or an engineering manager, or a product manager at a large tech giant.

And then the near-term steps:

What measurable, actionable steps bring you closer to your goal?

While I’ve found this to be a useful framework, it undeniably suffers from a lack of focus. For example, the definition of a “measurable, actionable step” could vary a great deal from person to person.

Recently, through professional development at The 19th, I was introduced to the Management Center’s SMARTIE goals:

SMARTIE stands for Strategic, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic, Time-bound, Inclusive, and Equitable. By incorporating an equity and inclusion component to your SMART goals, you can make sure your organization’s commitment to racial equity and inclusion is anchored by tangible and actionable steps.

The traditional definition of SMART goals is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. It’s a useful framework in itself, in the sense that at least it provides some structure and concreteness, but in its definitions it encourages you to diminish mission and values in your work. A goal that is Specific and Achievable is highly likely to just be iterative on what you’re already doing.

In contrast, SMARTIE encourages you to dream. By replacing Specific with Strategic, we’re encouraged to think longer-term. By replacing Achievable with Ambitious, we’re given permission to stretch for what we really want. Swapping Relevant for Realistic reminds us to keep our feet on the ground, but in paired this with Achievable we’re being asked to find a productive middle ground between our dreams and reality. And then reminding us that our goals must be Inclusive and Equitable ensures that we consider our impact on others, and on our communities and ecosystems.

I like it a lot.

Giving me permission to make my goals values-oriented is, in itself, a big deal. I’ve often had to smuggle my values into goals and trade them off with the goals of the organization. Here, I’m asked to put them front and center.

But the detail-oriented approach and demand for accountability has also made me reconsider my personal mission and vision.

For years now, my mission has read: To work on projects with the potential to make the world more equal and informed. In itself, it’s been fairly useful: I’ve been able to look at opportunities and ask, “well, does this have the potential to do those things?” And it’s been easy to say “no” to opportunities that don’t.

But it’s possible for an opportunity to have the potential to make the world more equal and informed but still not be a fit for what I want to do. It doesn’t communicate what I actually do, to myself or anyone else. For example, The 19th, my current employer, is clearly an organization with the potential to make the world more equal and informed - it’s a newsroom (check!) that particularly serves women, women of color and the LGBTQ+ community (check!) with the information, resources and community they need to be equal participants in our democracy (check!). So as an organization it’s aligned with my mission. But what does my mission say I should do there? Should I be an illustrator? I’d love that, but I don’t think they’d have me. A journalist? Again, I wish. No, based on my experience as an engineer, founder, and investor, I’m probably better off serving them on the technical side - and even then, by building, supporting, and advising on a particular kind of software.

So it’s more accurate and useful to say that my mission is to support organizations that have the potential to make the world more equal, open, and informed by building and supporting open web software and strategy.

It still needs workshopping. But we’re a lot closer: you still know I want to work to help make the world more equal and informed, but now you can more definitively say where I can be helpful and want to be working. It also emphasizes openness: there are plenty of allegedly equal worlds that are authoritarian or limited, and that’s not what I want to be a part of. And in specifying this greater detail, I can make more detailed choices.

So, onto vision. Perhaps the most famous vision statement in computing is Microsoft’s original wish to create a world with “a microcomputer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software”, which balanced an intent to markedly change the marketplace (and arguably the world) with making it obvious what Microsoft’s role in that transition would be.

If a person or organization’s mission is fairly hard and fast, their vision is likely to change more often. Microsoft’s vision statement is no longer the above (in no small part because they achieved it). So what is mine? The world I want to bring into existence, based on my ambitions and values as they stand right now?

Here’s my draft attempt: To build and lead a diverse and inclusive generational organization that produces open source software, advice, and advocacy in service of making the world more equal, open, and informed.

Breaking it down: a generational organization inherently says not a startup that’s designed to exit quickly; I want to build something that will last a long time. It also leaves the form of the organization open: it could be a private company, a non-profit, a co-operative, and so on. Diverse and inclusive specifies that it should be an organization with diverse leadership and inclusive practices. Produces open source softwareis self-explanatory, but advice and advocacy is an important clause to me: it says I’m not just building software but also helping people think about their own policies, strategies, and use. I don’t just want to be a personal expert in this arena; I want to build an organization that shares that expertise in service of my mission.

That doesn’t mean I want to do that right this second, or from scratch. I’m very happy at The 19th - and in many ways I am building this organization as a member of its Senior Leadership Team. (It’s a startup, so I think it’s also fair to say that everyone on the team is also building it.) But I don’t think I’d be so happy if I wasn’t learning so much about building a diverse organization, and about hitting that mission. The people I get to work with and the journalism and processes we produce are so good that I’m leveling up more and more the longer I stick around. And understanding that this is important to me helps me figure out what my more tactical goals need to be.

Those tactical goals are where that SMARTIE framework comes into play. Knowing what my underlying mission is, and what I want to have achieved in 5 or 10 years, what are my concrete next steps over the next six to twelve months?

The answer is a mix of the organization’s goals - I want to support it, remember? - and my own developmental tasks. I need to relearn how to center those values in my work, and communicate those values more clearly; I need to build more focused, structured reporting into my team’s policies and procedures; I need to hold us accountable to values as well as productivity. And I want, ambitiously, to lead the industry in doing all those things. There are more, of course, and there’s a lot of prioritization that needs to happen. But by reconsidering my personal mission and vision, and applying a different framework to the individual tactical goals I set out for myself and will be held accountable to, I’m much closer than I was.

Photo by Randy Tarampi on Unsplash