A few weeks ago, I opened a newsletter from Marin Lazic, an incredible fitness trainer, that started with:
Most people are chasing outcomes. Very few are building systems.
Outcomes feel good. Systems actually work.
A program isn’t just a pile of workouts. It’s the difference between a plan and a playlist. One builds capacity, the other just leaves you tired with sore muscles.
Training becomes clearer. Recovery becomes deliberate. Progress becomes predictable.
The same logic applies everywhere.
When something goes wrong at work, we tend to blame people. When markets crash, we tend to blame leaders. When ecosystems collapse, we tend to blame industries.
But as Russell Ackoff, one of the sharpest minds in operations theory, put it:
“Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Managers do not solve problems; they manage messes.”
The idea is that the system, to a large extent, causes its own behaviour.
It is easier to blame a person, but instead, try to see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage to restructure it.
So what is a system, exactly?
At its core, a system is an interconnected set of elements, coherently organised to achieve something. Three things make it work: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.
But here’s what most people miss: *the behaviour of a system cannot be known just by knowing its parts. *A system is more than the sum of its elements. It can be adaptive, goal-seeking, self-preserving — even evolutionary. Systems self-organise. They self-repair. And out of one system, entirely new systems can emerge that no one anticipated.
This is why you can’t understand a city by studying one building. You can’t understand a team by reading individual CVs. You can’t fix a company by replacing one leader.
The shift that changes everything
Once you start to see the events of the day as parts of trends, and those trends as symptoms of underlying structure, you begin to ask different questions.
Not “who caused this?” but “what structure produced this?”
Not “how do we fix this outcome?” but “how do we redesign this system?”
Systems thinkers call these common structures *archetypes, *recurring patterns that produce characteristic behaviours across wildly different contexts. A company, a family, an economy, an ecosystem.
Why this matters right now
Growth for growth’s sake is one of the oldest system archetypes there is. Continual growth in population, consumption, and economic output could, and already does, damage the ecosystems and social structures that make life sustainable.
When you understand how reinforcing loops accelerate, how balancing loops resist change, and how delays distort feedback, you stop being surprised by crises. You start anticipating them. Designing around them. Sometimes, preventing them entirely.
Most organisations are run by outcome-chasers. What the world needs more of are systems builders, people who can look beyond the headlines, beyond the quarterly numbers, beyond the blame games, and ask:
What structure is producing this? And what would it take to change it?
This question is harder. It is slower. It requires sitting with complexity instead of reaching for a quick fix. But it’s the only question that actually changes anything.
What system in your life or work are you ready to look at differently?