goalsreadability

Goalsreadability is a proposed measure of how easily a stated goal can be understood by its intended audience. It assesses linguistic clarity, conciseness, specificity, and actionability, with the aim of reducing ambiguity that can hinder execution and alignment.

In practice, goalsreadability is used in project planning, product development, education, and personal goal setting to improve communication and performance. A high goalsreadability score suggests that stakeholders can quickly grasp the objective, the desired outcome, and who is responsible for delivering it.

Assessment typically combines traditional readability metrics with goal-specific criteria. Readability scores based on sentence length and vocabulary difficulty can be paired with checks for measurable criteria, defined deadlines, clear ownership, and an explicit result. Some approaches employ a scoring rubric that yields a readability level alongside a goal-quality rating, reflecting both linguistic clarity and goal precision.

Relation to existing frameworks: goalsreadability complements methods such as SMART and OKR by emphasizing how a goal is written, not only what it contains. It can be applied to user stories, requirements, and performance objectives to ensure that statements are understandable to diverse stakeholders.

Example: a poorly worded goal might be “Increase engagement.” A clearer version could be “Increase daily active users by 15% in Q4 by improving onboarding and content discovery, owned by Product, with weekly progress updates and a defined metric.” This reframing makes the objective, measures, ownership, and timeline explicit.

Limitations and considerations: as a language-based measure, goalsreadability can be affected by audience, domain jargon, and cultural factors. It does not substitute feasibility or quality assessment; readability formulas may misjudge specialized audiences, so interpretation should be contextual and supplemented by domain judgment.