Goals vs. Systems

With 2024 coming up, some folks see the new year as an opportunity to put the former behind and not look back. 

You may even agree with Hal Borland, famous American journalist, that “year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on…” - simply an extension of the present.  

Consistently, though, we tend to use the new year and our learnings from the past one as timing and motivation to paint a vision for the next. 

Here’s typically where the “resolutions” and “goals” come out. 

Suddenly, you say you’ll eat salads, train your dog to stop barking at the mail person, or hold yourself to a tight financial budget. 

Heck, maybe you’ll become an astronaut.  

The challenge we experience, in all seriousness, is actually holding ourselves accountable to the process of realizing our goals. 

So, where do we start? 

First, let’s clarify that the reason we achieve a resolution or goal, as James Clear, author of “Atomic Habits”, describes, is more so a function of the systems we have in place.

With the right systems, committing to the process of your endeavors is what makes the difference in achieving them. 

For example, Clear shares that if you’re a coach, your goal is to win a championship. But the system in doing so is how you recruit players, run practices and games, or set and manage the culture of the team. 

The recruiting system may be a list of characteristics or qualities they screen for in recruits and questions that uncover those, while also ensuring the right staff oversee scouting.  

The games and practices system may be the formations the team runs, the “x’s and o’s”, or drills in practice. 

The culture system could be the team’s core values. For instance, my NCAA Div. III soccer team back in the day used the S.M.A.R.T acronym to guide our behaviors and actions on and off the field:  

Selfless, Motivated, Aware, Resilient, and Thrive.  

The beauty of systems is they are built for making progress; getting better every day and generating repeatable inputs to produce consistent outcomes.  

Goals are great for building direction, but systems are what inevitably put points on the board.

Interestingly, long before James Clear discussed systems in the context of goal setting, Tony Dungy, legendary National Football League (NFL) coach, took system-building to an unexplored level in professional sports.  

Dungy’s system, as highlighted by Charles Duhigg in “The Power of Habit”, was rooted not just in achieving football excellence but his key to winning was changing his players’ habits.  

In short, he wanted his players to stop making so many decisions in the game and instead make them habitually. Dungy believed that champions don’t do extraordinary things, they “do ordinary things, but do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react.” 

Finally hired to lead the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 1996 (after four failed Head Coach interviews), Dungy went on to implement The Golden Rule of Habit Change as part of his system: 

“You can’t extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.” 

Notably, he didn’t coach his players to run complicated plays that misdirected the opposing team (like most teams did) - he just wanted the Bucs to be faster than everyone else.  

In understanding the importance of changing the “routine” in the habit loop, Dungy coached his Defensive Ends to not try and absorb all information at the line of scrimmage to inform their defensive attack, but instead focus on the cues of the one Offensive Tackle in front of them. 

For example, when recognizing foot placement or hand position cues in an offensive lineman’s three-point stance, the Bucs’ defensive linemen were able to read the play far more quickly. Dungy made his d-lineman practice this cue-reading until they had a new routine.  

Eventually, this new habit from Dungy’s system made his team milliseconds faster than the competition - which meant the difference between losing and winning games - the reward or outcome.  

Dungy would become the winningest coach in NFL history, making 10 consecutive playoff appearances and being the first African American coach to win a Super Bowl, and now one of the most respected professional sports figures - all because of the system he designed and implemented. 

While not all of us are Tony Dungy, we still have the power to focus on the systems that allow us to achieve the goals we set, be it personally or while leading a team.  

So, as you think toward your 2024 goals, pay closer attention to the systems you need in place more than the goals themselves.  

If you want to run a marathon, what are the systems you can implement to help get you to the finish line? 

If you’d like your work team to hit X% against a quota or metric, what systems do they team need in place so they can execute accordingly?  

In other words, build systems so you reduce the friction between the goal and actioning towards it. Identify habits that may need to change. Get feedback from those you trust and, most importantly, from your team.  

In truth, though, there are no silver bullet systems for anything we set out to do.

So, fall in love with creating systems and this process will lead you to the outcomes you want.