When I wrote my first book about agility and business transformation I wrote about the idea that in leading change, systems beat goals. It’s a principle that I keep coming back to, both in my transformation work with businesses and in a personal context with things that I’d like to achieve or change in my life. There’s a fundamental distinction at play here – systems are changes in behaviour, or the daily actions and processes that create continuous action and learning, whilst goals defer success to an imagined future state. And when you’re trying to change something, systems are way more powerful than goals.
There’s a number of reasons why I say this.
Gratification windows and the power of progress
Far off goals or targets can be problematic when it comes to motivation. In her book ‘The Progress Principle’ Professor Theresa Amabile from Harvard Business School demonstrated through her research (based on thousands of daily work diaries) that making consistent small wins on meaningful work is one of the most powerful motivators for catalysing employee engagement, creativity, and productivity:
‘Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run.’
In contrast, distant goals can often make us feel as though we are never getting any closer to an outcome and are in a perpetual state of ‘not yet succeeded’. Systems architecture deliberately creates frequent progress markers which sustain momentum whereas distant goals can create motivational valleys and discouragement. This kind of ‘progress loop’ helps explain why systems succeed where goals often don’t because they establish regular emotional payoffs rather than banking everything on distant, uncertain outcomes. Where systems generate motivational momentum through completed actions, sustained habits and daily validation, goals withhold gratification until the endpoint achievement, creating long motivation droughts.
There was an interesting angle on this from Blake Scholl, who worked on the Boom XB-1 project to build the world’s first civilian supersonic jet since Concorde. He wrote earlier this year about why everything we’ve been told about burnout is wrong. He described how everyone possesses a ‘gratification window’, or the timeframe needed for believable rewards to sustain motivation. When meaningful milestones fall outside this window, he wrote, even rested teams can burn out, but when tangible progress sits within it, people can work intensely but without exhaustion. This insight led to deconstructing the far-off flight goal in the XB-1 project into monthly ‘Mission Success Events’ which were concrete, achievable milestones that the entire company celebrated. This architectural approach to motivation proved more critical than managing workload.
The power of compounding through repetition
Systems leverage the mathematics of small, consistent actions. Like compound interest, marginal daily improvements accumulate into transformative change that isolated goal achievement struggles to match. The word ‘flywheel’ has become somewhat overused in this context but systems can create self-reinforcing momentum where each completed action strengthens the system itself. A way of thinking about this is that today’s habit makes tomorrow’s repetition easier, which makes next week’s practice automatic.
This compounding effect happens in many ways. Behaviourally, neural pathways strengthen through repetition, reducing friction and cognitive load. Psychologically, each small win validates the approach, building confidence and commitment. Environmentally, repeated actions reshape contexts (you organise your kitchen around your cooking habits, you structure your workspace around how you like to work, and so on).
A distant target provides no feedback loop until it’s reached, meaning that there can be no such accumulation. But systems compound. If you improve something by 1% every week for 52 weeks, by the end of the year you would have improved it by 68%, not 52% (1.01^52 = 1.68). The advantage of systemic change is that it builds energy and momentum as it goes, and so is far less likely to fail.
Adaptive capacity in uncertain environments
We can set a clear vision or direction but when this is articulated through a fixed and rigid goal this can become a liability in a volatile environment. When the world around us is changing very fast, an inflexible goal can easily encode assumptions about a future that no longer exists. In complex adaptive environments however, systems can be set up to optimise for learning velocity rather than predetermined outcomes.
When complexity theorists talk about ‘requisite variety’, they’re referring to the capacity to generate responses that match the environmental complexity. If we use the example of vocabulary, the more nuanced or complex our environment is the more words that we need to describe it. A chess player needs a repertoire of moves that can match their opponent’s possibilities. An organisation navigating uncertain markets needs sufficient response options to handle whatever emerges.
Put simply, in fast-changing environments systems preserve optionality and build resilience.
The vision-system relationship
It’s important here to distinguish vision (direction) from goals (destinations) and systems (vehicles). Vision provides purpose, systems provide method. Many organisations confuse targets with strategy, which can undermine actual change capability. I think we see this a lot in the public sector where targets can create perverse incentives by optimising isolated metrics while ignoring systemic realities (NHS A & E waiting time targets or mortality targets, or Police force arrest quotas).
Targets without system change leads to gaming. Goodhart’s law is of course the principle that once we have set a specific target people will have a tendency to optimise behaviour to that single goal, regardless of whether that is at the expense of other important objectives (‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’). Famous examples of Goodhart’s Law are the soviet factories that when given targets around numbers of nails manufactured many hundreds of thousands of tiny, useless nails, and when given targets on the basis of weight produced a few, very large nails. Or the French colonialists in 1902 Hanoi who, when faced with a potential outbreak of bubonic plague, offered payments to anyone that handed in rat’s tails. Only to find that whilst the total rat population failed to decline, the numbers of tailless rats in the city ballooned.
In his (excellent) book ‘Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly’, John Kay contrasts direct goals (like ‘maximize shareholder value’) with oblique ones (like ‘build great products’). In complex environments, he says (economies, ecosystems, organisations), cause and effect aren’t clear or stable, meaning that direct action can have unintended consequences. Adaptive learning and exploration outperform rigid goal-setting in such systems.
Identity-based change vs. outcome-based change
One other (quite profound) distinction between systems and goals is about identity. Goals ask ‘what do I want to achieve?’ whereas systems ask ‘who do I want to become?’. Outcome-based change creates temporary behaviour modification. You act differently until the goal is reached, then revert. Identity-based change restructures self-perception. You act consistently with who you now are.
This is especially powerful when you’re looking to change an aspect of your life (although I think there is also a corporate version of this idea). If you set yourself a goal to lose weight for example, it can difficult to motivate yourself in the long term. But developing a habit of eating better and exercising is more likely to be successful. A goal says ‘write a book’. A system says ‘become a writer’ (perhaps someone that writes everyday no matter who reads it). Not only is it easier to start, the identity shift makes the behaviour self-sustaining rather than instrumental. Systems shape who you become through repeated behaviour.
Change is a process, not an event
Corporate transformation fails when it is treated as milestone achievement rather than behavioural evolution. Organizations chase ‘go-live dates’ and ‘completion targets’ while underlying work patterns remain unchanged. Johan Cruyff’s Total Football demonstrated how a system could enable creativity precisely because it eliminated ambiguity about fundamentals. When players internalised core principles (spatial awareness, pressing triggers, passing patterns) they gained freedom to improvise within that structure. Alignment created the space for autonomy.
The paradox of systems is that they work precisely because they abandon the illusion of control that goals promise. They accept uncertainty, build capability through repetition, and generate momentum through progress rather than expecting it through targets. When transformation is needed (whether personal or organisational) the question shouldn’t be about what you want to achieve but rather what practices can reshape who you become. Systems beat goals.
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Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
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