In the high-octane rhythm of modern work, goal setting has become a yearly ritual. Employees across industries log into their Human Experience Management platforms (HXM) and dutifully type into a box labeled “Goals.” Most fill it with what’s expected: something SMART—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

And then they move on.

But here’s the problem: for something that’s supposed to chart the course of our professional growth and performance, goal setting has become dangerously shallow. It often reduces aspirations to metrics and meaning to milestones. It’s no wonder that in many companies, goals feel more like paperwork than purpose.

That’s not a software problem. It’s a design problem. And more deeply, it’s a human problem or an opportunity—an opportunity to design a better, more meaningful experience through the lens of AI and reflective design. This isn’t just about making performance management faster. It’s about making it wiser.

What are we really asking when we ask for goals?

Done right, goals are the connective tissue between individual effort and collective ambition. They don’t just signal performance—they express what we value, who we’re becoming, and where we believe we can make the greatest contribution.

This is especially true in corporate environments where success hinges on alignment. A good enterprise goal should do more than fulfill a form—it should help an employee connect their own growth with the company’s direction. That alignment—between the personal and the organizational—is where real performance begins.

But the systems we use today were built for throughput, not thoughtfulness. In the name of efficiency, we’ve automated the administration of goals without elevating their meaning. As Charles Duhigg put it in Smarter Faster Better,

And when we treat goal setting like a task to complete rather than a decision to consider, we further erode what makes setting goals transformative.

Can AI help us ask better questions?

This got our design and research teams thinking: what if we could use AI not to automate alignment, but to spark deeper reflection? What if enterprise systems could prompt employees to consider not just what they want to achieve—but why? Could it prompt more meaningful thinking, not just more measurable outputs?

We put that question to the test—by prototyping an AI-powered assistant not designed to generate goals for you, but to help you generate better ones yourself. Instead of auto-generating SMART objectives or suggesting pre-filled statements, the system asked open-ended, coaching-style questions like:

• “What would make this year meaningful for your growth?”
• “What contributions would make you proud?”
• “What challenge would help you develop in a direction that matters to you—and to your team?”

The goal wasn’t to speed things up. It was to slow people down.

The pause that pays off

In an enterprise culture that prizes velocity—faster OKRs, quicker check-ins, shorter alignment cycles—this approach was counterintuitive. But the results were surprising.

Users engaged deeply. They spent more time with the tool. They reported greater clarity. And they didn’t just write better goals—they said they felt more connected to their work and more confident about where they were headed.

Reflection wasn’t a delay. It was the unlock.

As Andy Grove wrote in High Output Management, “The best managers don’t just get things done; they grow people.”

By designing systems that strengthen people's role in their own development, we put individuals and their relationships at the center of their growth story. If we reimagine AI not as a tool for automation, but as a partner for growth, that principle can scale.

Designing for Reflective Friction

This shift—from prompting answers to prompting thought—also reveals something fundamental about design. The best systems don’t remove all friction. They add the right kind.

We designed for what you might call "Reflective Friction": enough resistance to provoke deeper thinking, without overwhelming the user. What we saw reinforced three lessons for anyone designing AI systems in the enterprise:

• Reflection deepens engagement. When users paused to think, their goals became more personal, relevant, and motivating.
• Friction can be purposeful. Slowing down the experience didn’t reduce satisfaction—it enhanced it.
• AI can act as a thinking partner. When it asks the right questions, it supports rather than replaces human judgment.

This echoes the insight of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey in An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, where they argue that the most resilient organizations are “deliberately developmental.” In their words, “When a company commits to developing its people as part of the day-to-day work of the business, the business itself grows stronger.”

Goal setting is not just about productivity. It’s about purpose.

From Speed to Substance

The most successful enterprise tools of the next decade won’t be the ones that help us go faster. They’ll be the ones that help us go deeper. Tools that don’t just optimize workflows but elevate thinking. That don’t just streamline action, but support intention.

Because as Stephen Covey once warned:

Looking ahead: Designing reflective intelligence

The next generation of AI tools won’t be judged by how fast they can generate goals or sync with dashboards. They’ll be judged by how well they help people think—individually and together—about what actually matters.

That doesn’t mean slower software. It means intentional pauses.

The most valuable systems we design won’t just prompt action. They’ll prompt alignment and connection. Not just with business targets, but with a sense of direction. They’ll help us carve out a little space amid the noise of metrics and deadlines to ask better questions.

When people are given even a brief moment to reflect, their goals tend to shift. They become clearer. More grounded. More connected to the work and the purpose behind it.

Designing that kind of pause isn’t a delay. It’s a choice. And in a world where performance is measured in speed, it might just be the most strategic thing we can do. Because at the end of the day, good goals don’t start with a metric—They start with a moment of clarity.