A systems over goals approach is healthy for startup projects because it has a better chance to deal … [+]
The “systems over goals” notion originates from James Clear’s highly influential Atomic Habits book.
Atomic Habits is in its essence a self-help book, and because of this, it focuses on the personal level. Goals are fleeting and not particularly good at driving long-lasting happiness and fulfillment. So, James Clear suggests substituting goals with systems.
For example, instead of placing a goal of “save $10 000”, substitute it with “invest $500 each month”. Instead of setting a “lose 25 pounds of weight” goal, set a “no junk food unless it’s a cheat day” system.
This way you are winning a little bit every day, and you don’t face the “now what?” problem after achieving a goal and you don’t risk slipping back into bad habits. Most importantly of all, instead of focusing on the short term, the systems approach has a chance to change your life positively in the long run.
The “systems over goals” idea holds in the field of startups as well for a different reason – in a complex, uncertain, and volatile environment, goals are an extremely unreliable tool. For example, “get 100k visitors in a month on my website” is a goal, but how do you know if it is realistic, or more importantly – if it is a useful goal to have?
Startups are more often than not all or nothing businesses, so you would usually either destroy your goals (reap huge success), or you’ll struggle to even nudge the needle.
If you rely solely on goals, it is too easy to become discouraged if you’re not reaching your goals repeatedly (even though you might be making progress in other ways), or to believe your own hype if you’re overkilling a certain not-well-chosen goal.
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Of course, having a quantitative metric to let you know if you’re wasting your time or not as a founder is incredibly useful. However, instead of using a set goal to serve this purpose, it helps to carefully choose a KPI (usually a usage metric in order to indicate that customers are finding your offering valuable) and to build a system that inspires activities that have a chance to reflect positively on this KPI.
This way instead of chasing a set number, you can evaluate your progress each week (or each sprint, however long you want to make it). You’ll have a clear indication if what you did had a positive reflection on the KPI or not, and of the strength of the effect.
To return to the previous example, if your goal is growing your website visitors, you can set a system in which each week you experiment with one new type of content and one new marketing tactic. This way you can carefully filter the ones that work well until you have a repeatable system of empirically tested tactics that you and your teammates can implement as a strategy to scale your business.
Equally importantly, by focusing on the system rather than the goal, you can think more clearly about how your current efforts integrate into your overall goal of building a successful startup. Not meeting a pre-set goal is not an excuse to quit, instead, it’s an important part of the system – a chance to let you reevaluate your current approach to solving the puzzle.
In summary, a systems over goals approach is healthy for startup projects because it has a better chance to get you to a positive outcome in the long run. Instead of having a do-or-die attitude towards an arbitrary metric, you can craft a repeatable system that helps you move in the right direction no matter your short-term results. Your failures are just as useful indicators of direction as your successes.
