ARRIVE - the quality gate

A 6-letter check, Aligned, Reconciled, Reality-readable, Inside bounds, Viable, Evolvable, that decides whether the destination is good enough to act on.

You've spent an hour crafting a goal for the coming year, and it reads beautifully. That's precisely the danger. Well-phrased destinations fail constantly, through gamed metrics, ignored stakeholders, targets nobody could influence, or plans that can't bend when life changes. What you need before acting is a systematic way to ask: is this destination actually good enough to steer by?

ARRIVE is that check, a six-letter quality gate run on any finished goal. Aligned: does the outcome trace to something you actually value, not an activity or inherited scoreboard? Reconciled: do stakeholder and value conflicts have a legitimate rule, or open escalation? Reality-readable: can you measure progress through a small mixed bundle of signals, with an audit for gaming? Inside bounds: are red lines, floors, ceilings, budgets, and spillover effects explicit? Viable: can you actually influence this, and does the target's form fit the situation? Evolvable: are review triggers, revision authority, and rollback conditions precommitted? Walk your goal down the list; failures point to exactly what to repair. Stop when the gate passes to the rigor the stakes warrant and the next move is clear. Don't run full rigor on trivial goals, and never stop merely because the sentence sounds elegant.