09 Jul
There’s a famous axiom often attributed to W. Edwards Deming:
“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”
Read that again.
Your outcomes aren’t accidental. Whether it’s a business, a workflow, or a daily routine, whatever you’re experiencing is the exact byproduct of the processes, policies, and structures currently in place.
If your support team resolves tickets in 14 days, that’s what your system is designed to produce. If your production line makes 5 widgets an hour, that’s what your system is designed to produce. If you’re missing deadlines or losing customers, that’s also what your system is designed to produce.
Not on purpose. But by design.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
Once you change your goal or set your sights on different results, the system you have is wrong. By definition. Because that system, whether you built it intentionally or it evolved by default, is designed to yield the results you got yesterday. Not the results you want tomorrow.
This is not the fault of anyone who built the current system. It’s just the simple math of systems design.
But many people don’t see it that way.
They get defensive. They’re attached to what they’ve built. They don’t want to admit that the system they created isn’t working for where they’re trying to go.
So instead of reimagining the system, they try to tweak it.
A small adjustment here. A new tool there. A workaround. A patch.
And then they wonder why the results don’t meaningfully change.
Here’s the truth.
If you want to tweak your results, you can tweak the system. Small changes, small impact.
But if you want meaningful change, you cannot get there without reimagining the system. Tweaks won’t do it. You have to be willing to look at what you’ve built and say: this was perfect for what we needed before. It’s not perfect for where we’re going.
That’s hard. As humans, we get attached to what we’ve built. Letting go feels like failure.
But it’s not failure. It’s just math. The system you have is designed for the outcomes you’re getting. If you want something different, you have to build something different.
The companies that actually change their results are the ones willing to accept this.
They stop protecting the old system. They stop making excuses for why it should still work. They reimagine it for the outcomes they actually want.
And then their results change. Because the system changed.
What results are you getting that your current system is perfectly designed to produce?