A feasible number of concurrent ABA goals is the active set a team can assess, teach, measure, generalize, and review well while protecting the client's priorities, access, health, schedule, and broader life. No universal goal count fits every plan. Separate active acquisition, maintenance, monitoring, deferred, referred, declined, and completed goals, then test whether each active goal has real opportunities, qualified support, and decision-useful data.

Build the full candidate inventory

Record client, family, clinical, medical, educational, payer, safety, and other proposed goals with source identity and authority.

Keep each proposal in the words and timeframe of its source before translating it into a clinical target. A caregiver's morning concern, the client's wish to travel independently, and a payer's documentation request may relate but do not carry the same meaning or authority. Record the daily-life outcome, available evidence, unresolved questions, and whether another discipline needs to assess or decide part of it.

Define every disposition

Use active acquisition, generalization, maintenance, monitoring, deferred, referral, declined, completed, or another explicit state with entry and exit rules.

Attach a rationale, owner, start date, next review, and change trigger to every state. Maintenance should say what is sampled and how often, while deferral should name the dependency or reason and a route back to review. A referred or declined goal remains visible so the team can explain what happened instead of allowing an unmet request to disappear from the plan.

Estimate opportunity capacity

Identify how many valid opportunities, settings, partners, and review observations each active goal needs and whether they realistically exist.

Estimate from the person's actual schedule, not an idealized session. Distinguish naturally occurring opportunities from arranged practice and record when the response is unavailable, declined, or already completed before teaching begins. A goal that can arise twice a month needs a different measurement and review plan from one with several daily opportunities, even when both are important.

Check teaching and measurement capacity

Confirm qualified staff, supervision, materials, access, definition quality, data burden, analysis time, and response capacity.

Map each active goal to who prepares it, implements it, reviews the data, and responds when results or adverse effects require change. Include staff readiness, caregiver burden, interdisciplinary coordination, and technology or material dependencies. If the team can collect data but cannot analyze it promptly or act on the finding, the portfolio is still over capacity.

Protect client priorities and full life

Consider direct preference, communication, fatigue, health, school or work, other care, relationships, recreation, and unstructured time.

Ask what the person wants more of, less of, or kept unchanged, using accessible and private communication when possible. Active treatment should leave room for ordinary routines, rest, relationships, and chosen activities. A technically feasible goal set may still be inappropriate if it fills every available period, crowds out another service, or makes the person's week substantially harder without a justified benefit.

Set portfolio review triggers

Reopen the active set when goals stall, generalize, maintain, lose value, create burden, interact, face new risk, or receive a new client request.

Define triggers in observable terms and assign someone to notice them. Examples include a client changing a priority, a required context becoming available, repeated missed opportunities, worsening access, a goal reaching stable maintenance, or one target interfering with another. Review the whole portfolio after a trigger so adding one goal does not silently exceed the capacity that justified the original active set.

Build Kira's active-goal capacity matrix

Kira's versioned matrix should let a reviewer see the full portfolio and the practical capacity behind the active set. For every candidate, retain Kira's priority, each source and its authority, the goal definition, context, natural opportunities, disposition, rationale, risk, access, burden, staff competence, measurement plan, interactions, alternatives, decision owner, effective date, review date, and reopen trigger. The record should explain why a goal is active, maintained, deferred, referred, declined, completed, or otherwise held.

Work through Kira's example

Kira's review starts with 12 candidate goals. Five enter active teaching, three move to maintenance, two are deferred with recheck dates, one requires referral, and one is declined by Kira. The dispositions total 12. The matrix keeps all 12 candidates and their source-specific views visible beside the five active goals, including any unresolved evidence. This active set reflects Kira's actual opportunities and the team's review capacity; it is not a recommended maximum for another person. The fictional home and community example sets no universal goal count, priority order, prerequisite chain, teaching arrangement, clinical recommendation, or outcome guarantee.

Audit Kira's decision evidence

Kira's matrix lists all 12 candidate goals, source, client priority, disposition, rationale, opportunity need, staff competence, measurement, access, risk, burden, dependencies, review date, and reopen rule. Nothing disappears when it leaves active teaching. Reviewers check accessible client involvement, consent and assent when applicable, source identity, definitions, baseline, opportunity coverage, burden, risks, health and safety, interdisciplinary input, measurement quality, goal interactions, active-plan capacity, authority, communications, and follow-up. Missing evidence narrows or holds only the decision it affects.

Address Kira's main prioritization risk

A long plan can look comprehensive while producing thin exposure and late decisions. A short plan can omit valued outcomes. Kira's review tests capacity at the level of each goal and preserves the full priority inventory. A provider-selected target can be measurable and still miss the person's priority. A client-valued goal can also require medical, educational, communication, access, safety, or interdisciplinary support outside one clinician's scope. Keep value, technical feasibility, authority, and system capacity as separate questions.

Choose Kira's next action

The clinician reviews active-goal exposure and decision cadence after a defined period. Goals can move among active, maintenance, deferred, referral, declined, and completed states with Kira's accessible involvement. Record activate, maintain, defer, refer, decline, complete, retire, combine, separate, or revise with rationale, responsible role, client response, effective date, evidence required for closure, and next review. Software may manage state and reminders. Qualified professionals make case-specific clinical decisions within scope.

Protect Kira's access and choice

Keep Kira's AAC, interpreters, mobility, food, water, bathroom use, prescribed care, health support, movement, rest, relationships, recreation, and emergency help available. Offer accessible and private ways to express a priority, accept, decline, pause, correct, or change it. Caregiver and professional input can inform the plan without authoring Kira's personal experience or assent.

Apply current sources to Kira's review

Kira's sources support individualized planning, direct client involvement, and repeated social-validity review without supplying a universal goal count. The BACB ethics hub, current Ethics Code, CASP public summary, and BCBA Test Content Outline provide professional, client-involvement, evaluation, and training context within their stated scopes. An evidence-based ABA framework, contemporary social-validity analysis, research on measuring what matters, and a family-centered care framework support explicit attention to values, context, and repeated review. NICE personalized-plan guidance comes from the United Kingdom and offers coordination context. ASHA supports continuous AAC access.

Rehearse Kira's goal workflow

Test the active-goal capacity matrix with client and caregiver disagreement, a school request, medical concern, payer limit, unavailable context, prerequisite claim, missing baseline, weak opportunity capacity, goal interaction, AAC failure, deferred-review miss, new client request, staff shortage, and urgent safety issue. Confirm that source, authority, direct voice, states, reminders, escalation, and qualified decisions remain correct.

Close Kira's goal review

Review the active-goal capacity matrix with Kira, the responsible clinician, and the specialists named by the manifest. Preserve candidate goals, sources, direct client input, dispositions, evidence, access, burden, risks, alternatives, authority, decision, review schedule, and limits. Keep the page draft and noindex until clinical director, client or family, accessibility, and other required external reviews are complete.

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